Spider-Man 3
May 4 2007: The Final year of Cinema Week 18
It’s impossible not to study history and not see patterns. You see the combination of obstinance and stupidity exhibited by King Charles I and see where it got him, and then you start seeing the reign of Nicholas II of Russia and think “I’ve read this story before”. You learn about Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in June 1812 and learn how that went, and then when you find out about Hitler’s invasion of Russia in June of 1941 and wonder why he didn’t bother to read his history. You might hear about the Roman Republic and how it was established with the novel idea of living in a society without a king, and how it started establishing influence over territory until it was the dominant power in the known world before it collapsed into despotism, and then you take a hard look around the nation where you live. Me, I care about the history of arts and culture, and today I’m pondering Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy. I’m thinking how it started with an incredible amount of promise, with Raimi being one of the first (if not the first) directors to capture the magic of superhero comics on the silver screen; I’m thinking about how he expanded that vision in a subsequent film, and captured not only a zeitgeist defining moment but made gobs of cash doing so, and of course I’m thinking about how he was made by development executives to overstuff his final film with pandering details, characters he did not want to use, and created a holy mess doing so. Then I look at the current state of the MCU, and how its last great success story is a movie that was more overstuffed references than story, and once again I think about history rhyming.
This is the part where I’d describe the plot of Spider-Man 3. I will be saving that part for later. Suffice to say this is the one where Spider-Man (Tobey Maguire) gets the black alien spidey suit, has a kind of love-triangle story with Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst) and Gwen Stacy (Bryce Dallas Howard), and fights Sandman (Thomas Haden Church), the new Green Goblin (James Franco) and Venom (Topher Grace).
I wish to make something clear at the start: I do not dislike superhero movies. In fact, I rather like a good number of them. I have revisited the Raimi Spider-Mans many times; I greatly enjoyed both Christopher Nolan’s and Tim Burton’s takes on Batman; I loved the first few entries in the MCU and its original Avengers saga, and even have enjoyed a couple of the entries in the largely fumbled Zack Snyder-helmed DCU megafranchise. The problem isn’t that I hate superheroes. I love superheroes. The problem is that I love good storytelling more.
I read a lot of comics as a young teen, and loved the larger-than-life stories, the weird little rules around how superpowers worked, and of course the interpersonal dramas. What made me stop reading them largely as an adult was a realization of a reality of the comic book business model: the story needs to keep going even if the writers have nothing to say. Every story ended with a little bit of a cliffhanger, even as massive story arcs were wrapping up. Every issue needed to keep you on the hook for the next issue. As a result there was never any sense of resolution or completion. As I matured as a reader and consumer of stories the thing I realized was how important sticking the landing is, which is why I drifted away from comics. When as a young man the Raimi Spidermans and Nolan Batmans came out they felt like a revelation. At long last, here were people who knew how to tell a superhero story. They could capture the magic of reading comics and eating pizza in your buddy’s rec room but they also concluded their stories in a satisfying manner. They told stories with coherent beginnings, middles, and ends. At least the first two entries in each franchise did.
To say that Spider-Man 3 has an incoherent story with an unsatisfying ending is to praise it with faint damnation. Here is where I’m going to try and perform a coherent synopsis of Spider-Man 3’s plot, and I dare anyone who isn’t Jamelle Bouie1 to follow along and say “yes, tightly structured and coherent”. Any sane person will skip this paragraph.
Spider-Man 3 opens with Peter Parker in a monologue reflecting on how he’s finally got his life together. People love Spider-Man, his relationship with Mary Jane is going well, and he’s successfully juggling his job, his studies, and his super-heroics. While on a date with MJ, some sludge from an asteroid attaches itself to his Vespa as they ride away from the park. After talking with Aunt May about how he’s thinking of proposing marriage, he’s attacked by his former bestie Norman Osborne who has assumed the Green Goblin mantle and wants revenge on Peter for killing his father in the first movie. After a scuffle, Norman bonks his head and develops memory loss, forgetting the events of the last two movies. Then an inmate at Rikers Island named Flint Marko escapes and is chased onto the grounds of a very intense looking science experiment where he gets zapped by energy beams and turns into a pile of sentient sand aka Sandman. Then Spider-Man saves his lab partner Gwen Stacy from being killed by an out-of-control crane while a douchebag photographer named Eddie Brock takes photos. Then Gwen’s Father — the chief of the NYPD — tells Peter and Aunt May that it actually turns out that Flint Marko killed Peter’s uncle Ben and he’s on the loose. Then MJ bombs on Broadway and is sad about it. Then Spider-Man is given the key to the city and does a replica of Spider-Man 1’s upside-down kiss sequence but with Gwen Stacy this time. The space goo (remember that?) then bonds with Spider-Man and gives him extra spidey-powers and a whole lot of attitude and turns his spidey-suit black. This extra attitude causes him to botch his proposal to MJ and they break up. She and Norman cook eggs. Norman recovers his memory and so Spider-Man fights him and explodes him. Peter celebrates by taking Gwen Stacy out on a date and does a lot of questionable dancing in the process. Then Spider-Man fights Sandman in the sewers and presumably kills him with sewage. Then Peter feels bad about being a dillweed and takes the black suit / space goo off but it bonds to Eddie Brock (remember him?) and he turns into Venom. Venom and Sandman (remember him? Not dead!) decide to team up to kill Spider-Man. Then Norman’s butler tells Norman (who is not dead from explosion, just burned) that Spider-Man didn’t kill his father. Venom kidnaps Mary Jane and then Spider-Man fights Venom and Sandman to rescue her. Norman returns as Green Goblin but this time is here to help. They stop Venom, Norman heroically sacrifices himself in the process, and then Spider-Man forgives Sandman for killing his uncle and Sandman blows away in the wind. Roll credits.
I sincerely hope you skipped that paragraph, or at least skimmed it, and here’s the thing: living through the 2 hours of Spider-Man 3’s runtime doesn’t make any of that make any more sense. None of it feels organic or earned or anything of that ilk. It’s not just that it’s overstuffed. The record will show that I am fully capable of loving an overstuffed motion picture. It's just messy, the same way that a hoarder’s living room is messy. Nothing has its proper place, it’s difficult to keep up with what’s going on or how anything relates to anything else, it’s easy to lose threads, and none of it resolves with any satisfaction. Here’s the thing though, all this mess happened not because Sam Raimi doesn’t know how to tell a coherent story. It happened because of Marvel Studios.
In the first two Spider-Man movies, Raimi had demonstrated that he had a coherent grip on what makes Spider-Man / Peter Parker work as a character. Every successful super-hero works because they have a compelling character hook that goes beyond “cool costume and sick action”. Batman works as a character because every Batman story is about a man who materially has everything but cannot rest while evil exists. The X-Men work as characters because they have good hearts and want to help the world despite the fact that society fears and hates them. Raimi understands that Spider-Man works as a character because no matter how cool having super-powers might be it doesn’t solve your professional or romantic or personal problems. Everyone loves Spider-Man but being Spider-Man doesn’t pay the rent.
Spider-Man 1 & 2 work as films because the audience can experience the same disconnect Peter Parker does. We see MJ be horny for Spidey while giving Peter the cold shoulder, and we see him navigate his friendship with Norman while knowing that his father is a psychopathic killer, and we see him being hounded by Mr. Ditkovich for rent. We feel Pete’s pain as we witness Spider-Man’s triumphs. I don’t care how neckbeardy it makes me sound: a triumphant moment of cinema is the crowd of people in Spider-Man 2 who have just witnessed Spider-Man save their subway car from plunging into the East River realizing that he's just some guy who wants to help. It’s not that he’s triumphant wisecracking super powerful hero Spider-Man or that he’s pathetic dweeb Peter Parker. He’s both.
No individual storyline in Spider-Man 3 gets to breathe enough to allow the audience to experience this pathos. Every storyline though has the barest bones of where such a story might exist. We have the outline of a compelling conclusion to the Peter / Norman friendship arc, but instead of, say, Norman learning the truth about his father himself slowly over the course of the film, we get an info-dump from a butler and he forgives Peter and all is well. We have to have this nonsense amnesia plot tacked on so that there can be romantic tension between him and MJ while Peter goes and canoodles with Gwen Stacy. Where there could have been a powerful story about wrestling with the nature of vengeance and forgiveness with Sandman, we simply see Peter out of nowhere turn into Gandhi in the last five minutes of the film and forgive Sandman for the most traumatic event in his life. Where we could have had a campy and fun story about professional rivalry with Eddie Brock we instead get roughly 5 minutes of Topher Grace mugging to the camera before being defeated by the power of clanging metal. This movie is attempting to be at least 3 movies at once, and instead of giving any of them room to breathe it just barrels through their stories and awkwardly tapes them together.
Of course the reason it feels like three movies is because it basically is three movies. Raimi, fresh off completing Spider-Man 2 had been given a tight turnaround time to turn in Spider-Man 3 to keep the momentum going / keep the money-printing machine rolling. Raimi’s original intent was to conclude the Norman Osborne arc and introduce Sandman as a villain, keeping the story as a well structured arc about vengeance and forgiveness. Conceivably in this initial outline we get a little more of Sandman as a character and allow American treasure Thomas Haden Church the ability to do some actual fun super villain acting the way that Spider-Man gave Willem Dafoe and Spider-Man 2 gave Alfred Molina some scenery to really chew. The newly founded Marvel Studios however had other plans. They trusted Raimi to make Sandman into a compelling villain, so they let him continue with that story, but they also insisted that the story should include beloved comic characters Gwen Stacy and Venom. Did they fit in Raimi’s story? Doesn’t matter. Gwen Stacy and Venom move units. They have the numbers to back it up, and if they could pull it off, Spider-Man 3 could be the greatest success in cinema history.
Folks, they did not pull it off. Spider-Man 3 became the final Raimi / Maguire Spider-Man movie, despite the fact that they were potentially attached for up to 7(!) Spider-Man films. Audiences and critics were unimpressed with what was ultimately a giant pile of references to comic books without an actual coherent story attached. What’s even more galling is that while it lacks the glue of, y’know, storytelling, the spectacle of Spider-Man 3 remains top notch. The fight scenes are really cool. Spidey saving Gwen Stacy from a crane is genuinely thrilling. JK Simmons is here as J. Jonah Jameson and he continues to absolutely crush it! I can even imagine a movie in which there is sufficient context to where it feels earned and satisfying when Peter Parker struts through the streets of New York City with his emo hair to James Brown. Spider-Man 3 is not that movie however. It is several vaguely movie-shaped piles of comic-book references stacked on top of each other in a trenchcoat pretending to be a movie.
As I write this, the Marvel Machine has printed money for over a decade and a half, but at the same time is struggling to find its footing in the present. Its last great success was last year’s Deadpool and Wolverine, a movie that not only is the exact same kind of pile-of-references-disguised-as-a-movie schlock as Spider-Man 3, but is also a film that takes one of the last truly great comic book movies — 2017’s Logan — and tarnishes its legacy as the most satisfying retirement of Hugh Jackman as the character of Wolverine. As you read this, the latest Marvel joint Thunderbolts* has come out, and maybe it’s burning up the box office, here in the past I don’t know. What I do know is two things. 1: This is the first Marvel cinematic property where I, as a former comics nerd, have no earthly idea what its source material is. I never read any Ant-Man comics or Guardians of the Galaxy comics but I knew what they were. Thunderbolts, not so much. I also know 2: Marvel is actively chasing me, a weirdo cinephile as a demographic for this movie. I’ve seen trailers that advertise that the film comes from “the stars of Midsommar, A Different Man and You Hurt My Feelings” and “the cinematographer of The Green Knight” and “the production designer of Hereditary”. Look, I appreciate being pandered to as much as the next guy, but I also know that Marvel movies live and die on hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office. I can’t imagine how thirsty one has to be to chase the audience of You Hurt My Feelings (2023, $5 million box office) to go to your $180 million budget film. Maybe it’ll be a huge hit! Maybe it’ll be an incoherent mess where Marvel’s reach exceeded their grasp and it will be remembered as the late MCU’s Spider-Man 3.
Rating: ★★☆☆☆ just fast forward through everything that’s not an action scene and read some wikipedia articles about Sandman and Venom and pretend there’s better glue between these moments. Or better yet just rewatch Spider-Man 2
Economics: Spider-Man 3 opened 18 years ago today on May 4, 2007 at #1 ahead of rear-window-for-teens Disturbia in its 4th week of release. It would ultimately gross just shy of $900 million worldwide at the box office plus $125 million in home video sales, which definitely makes it a financial success on its $250 million budget. What it isn’t though is the same kind of ROI of Spider-Man ($800 million box office on half of Spider-Man 3’s budget) or Spider-Man 2 (also $800 million box office on a $200 million budget). What it certainly represented was Sam Raimi and Tobey Maguire not making another Spider-Man movie, and thus killing the goose that laid the golden eggs.
Other 2007 films visited this week:
Civic Duty: Peter Krause witnesses a brown man next door keeping odd hours and assumes he’s the next Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Is it a racist diatribe about the evil wily middle eastern terrorists lurking behind every corner? Or is it a commentary on post 9/11 paranoia and how Americans have been programmed to see danger behind every corner? Or is it stupidly both at the same time? Yeah it’s stupidly both at the same time. I agree with 2007 Karina Longworth ★☆☆☆☆
the man loves this movie for reasons I do not understand. If you’re reading, I love your takes on constitutional law, Mr. Bouie, I do not comprehend your Spider-Man 3 takes
All I know about Thunderbolts is that the original comic was written by Kurt Busiek, who is a genuine comics talent. Now, how much of his original spark survives after the MCU hash grinder mills it is another matter.