Tuesday, May 08, 2007

Spider-Man Is The New Black

So Spidey 3 finally hit. Saw it opening night with my posse. Good times. Liked it. If you somehow happen to be one of the few hermits out there who didn’t take part in the “breaking of all box office records” or perhaps a misguided youth who threw money away on a Jon Heder/Will Ferrell Movie.

What’d I think? It was a ride. A damn exciting ride that manages to keep its numerous plot threads from crashing down most of the time. The cast were all excellent, even Topher Grace (I hated “That ‘70s Show” very much).

Though I did have a small problem with the movie. The foreshadowing was incredibly thick. I found myself successfully predicting a lot of the big moments of the movie as though I was a soothsayer. It wasn’t bad storytelling, just incredibly obvious storytelling. Which I suppose is all right, since Spidey is something of a modern Morality Play. Responsibility. Vengeance. Doing what’s right. Not being an assface to the people that care about you.

And assface Peter Parker does become. See, he’s riding high at the beginning of the movie. He’s saved the city and popular with the masses. His girlfriend’s in a Broadway play. His best friend wants him dead. …Okay, maybe its not all wine and roses, but nothing he can’t handle and it seems like everything revolves around Spider-Man in a good way. Of course, he gets so wrapped up in all the good stuff happening to him that he completely and painfully fails to see the problems that Mary Jane is having (and Kirsten Dunst puts in her best performance of the 3 movies). Then he finds out that the guy who killed Uncle Ben wasn’t who we thought it was. It was a guy named Flint Marko, who’s conveniently just escaped from prison and been turned into the shape shifting Sandman (because that’s what happens when you get caught in a late night particle accelerator experiment) THEN an alien life symbiote from SPAAAAAACE lands and bonds with Peter, giving him the black costume.

After that, the movie can pretty much be subtitled “Peter Parker: Douchebag.” He goes from confident to cocky to arrogant bastard. Sure, he comes to his senses and ditches the symbiote, but not before a LOT of damage is done (like being completely responsible for the creation of Venom)

The scenes where you really see Peter acting like a total ass are both incredibly painful but also totally necessary. Its what happens when a character’s who’s whole tagline is responsibility gets irresponsible. And yeah, Peter gets so emo, it hurts. He pretty much deserves every beating he gets in the movie after the getting the symbiote.

See this movie, if for no other reason than Bruce F’in Campbell.

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