Spider-Man 3
Directed by Sam Raimi
The usual Marvel Comics movie adaptation (X-Men, Hellboy, Daredevil) is never more than box-office fodder, and a second sequel to Spider-Man is designed to merely keep moviegoers in a perpetual state of adolescence. So it takes a while before director/writer Sam Raimi reveals his moral compass in Spider-Man 3. His stick-figure characters and action-oriented set-pieces are presented so simply, and with such familiarity, that the action-serial cliché of “further adventures” seems more a threat than a promise. Since the movie isn’t going anywhere, really, Raimi goes internal; he spends almost two and a half hours contriving an ethical conflict for its played-out protagonist.
Life frustrations mount for Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) in his career as a newspaper photographer vying with upstart photobug Eddie Brock (Topher Grace) and his on-going misunderstanding with his best friend Harry Osborn (James Franco). As the alter-ego superhero, Spidey, he battles Flint Marko (Thomas Haden Church), a confused everyman like himself who is transformed into criminal nemesis, Sandman. That’s when Parker turns to the dark side (even donning a black Spidey uniform) and Raimi takes on the personal, spiritual cost of Parker seeking revenge. This is both admirable and insufficient. While Raimi seeks to improve the comic book-movie franchise, he’s also stifled by its conceptual limitations.
Spider-Man 3 makes no room to explore the pathos of average people coping with daily life; the shift to comic book mythology childishly glosses the complex choices necessitated by Parker’s family problems, love life and social issues. That these fantasy characters come off the least perfect-looking ever suggests Raimi’s interest in making the genre attest to real life. But Spider-Man 3 never transcends tentpole movie triteness. Raimi may have a storyteller’s enthusiasm to embolden Stan Lee’s original adolescent fancy but given a more somber than necessary script (co-written with Alvin Sargent, along with Sam’s brother, Ivan) and the artistic constraints on a movie that was only made to make money, he fails to make Spider-Man 3 touch our unconscious.
In Spider-Man 2, Raimi’s evocations of 9/11 and the spiritual need of sacrifice in a multiethnic community gave the silly premise a surprisingly satisfying, primal power. But this film’s evocation of poverty, career disappointment, illness, death, the story’s comic book explanations (a mysterious, alien material brought to earth by a meteorite that brings out anger in anyone it contacts), is frustrating. Nothing’s fully thought through, everything’s conventionally resolved.
“If you want forgiveness, get religion!” Spidey blurts out, succumbing to the alien matter. Although Raimi eventually turns Spider-Man 3 into a parable about forgiveness, he avoids connection between those bizarre incarnations of inner feelings—Parker’s Spidey, Harry’s New Goblin, Brock’s Venom and Marko’s Sandman—and any recognizable belief system. Instead, Raimi flirts with moral models: sexualizing Parker’s badboy flip-out like the The Nutty Professor, evoking The Hunchback of Notre Dame with crucifix imagery and bell-ringing used to contain out-sized, evil aggression in the film’s climactic battle sequence. Raimi connects his comic phantasmagorical side (Evil Dead, Army of Darkness) to the pretensions of his awful “serious” side (A Simple Plan, The Gift). His moral compass shifts to juvenile Manicheanism.
