May 6, 2007
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More on Spider-Man 3
The thing that I find most interesting about this movie in its historical context is that it has pretty much exactly the same kind of flaw as X-Men 3. Both movies try to include a lot of divergent plot streams and merge them together into one coherent story. Both movies are extremely long and both movies are packed with over the top action sequences. And of course fundamentally both movies are based on fairly cheesy comic book plotlines that didn’t really make a whole lot of sense when they were first imagined years ago.
So the question arises why did I find one of those two movies thoroughly enjoyable and the other pretty darn despicable?
There are a lot of possible answers. One might say that it has to do with expectations. Perhaps after X-men 3 my expectations were lowered and I was looking for a comic book redemption. But that doesn’t ring true to me. I was looking quite forward to Spider-Man 3 forr some time. I loved the second movie and couldn’t wait for the third. Although I did like X-Men 2 *more* than Spider-Man 2, I can’t see as how in any way I can be have said to have had low expectations for Spider-Man 3. I was excited by the trailers and pretty pumped up about it, so much so that I went to the midnight showing and watched the movie on opening day.
So why then? Perhaps it is the betrayal represented by X-Men 3. A lot of comic book fans consider this the reason the movie was bad. X-Men 3 seemed to pretty much ruin or destroy many of the characters that people loved. Characters lose their powers, die, or (and worst of all) just don’t DO ANYTHING throughout the movie. You wait all this time for a movie to see your favorite characters on the big screen only to see them be pointless accessories to a lame plot line. That’s unforgivable.
Spider-Man 3 doesn’t have that flaw, though to be fair there are a heck of a lot less characters in the movie to represent. Still all of the major characters have scenes where you can say “that was pretty cool” or “that was a cool line” or whatever. Each character has a lot of screen time and it is a lot of fun to watch them in action.
Of course Spider-Man’s characters aren’t as interesting in general as X-Men’s characters. The villains in Spider-Man have always been pretty lame. Silly Goblins, and Octupuses, and Lizards and what not. Actually one of the triumphs of the Spider-Man movie series is making these particularly lame villains look surprisingly cool and certainly a lot more threatening than you’d think they’d be if you heard about them in abstract. So maybe in this respect it is expecations again. I had high expectations for the characters in X-Men 3 that met with disappointment whereas I had pretty low expectations for the villains at least in Spider-Man 3 but was pleasantly surprised
But I feel that that is not a really good expecation. I really don’t believe that it is might comic-book fandom bias that made me dislike X-Men 3. I really haven’t read a whole lot of the X-Men comics and most of what I have read is more recent stuff like the Ultimate X-Men series and Joss Whedon’s awesome Astonishing X-men series. And I’m not a person who demands that stories be cannon. I’m fine with them tossing the universe upside down, changing everything if they so please so long as they do it WELL. Want to kill main caracters? Fine. Go ahead and do it. But make their deaths into a good story. Make it mean something. Make the readers care.
That to me is the heart of what makes Spider-Man 3 a success whereas X-Men 3 a failure. Spider-Man 3 was just a better told story altogether. Sure it has lots of different plot lines going on at the same time, but the writers managed to weave them altogether into a consistent whole. There was nothing that made me say wtf what’s going on? There was no point where I was saying to myself “why I am watching this scene it doesn’t make any sense?” or “where are these characters where’d they go?, or “what was the point of introducing that plot twist or having that character in the movie, it would be pretty much the same without it?” And so on. Almost everything seemed to have a purpose and things pretty much fit together. I did not feel as if something was missing when the movie was over. It didn’t feel as if it were a hodge podge of random scenes the writers wanted to display without any consistent story line to draw them together.
In a way though maybe in this too, I enjoyed the story because of my expectations. The story starts off slow you see, it starts to add a little bit of a plot here, a little bit of a plot there, and I can remember distinctly thinking about thirty minutes into the movie “How can they possibly bring together all of these plots into a coherent story? There’s just too much!” And so with my expectatons brought low right there are the beginning I became pleasantly surprised when things did come together a lot better than I could have imagined earlier. Nothing seemed to be left out. It all worked.
More than that though there is a consistency also to the various plots in Spider-Man 3 that made it easier to accept them all being stuck together in one story. Yo see in Spider-Man 3 all of the major characters face pretty much the exact same symbolic tension albeit with different antagonists. Each of the charactes are facing the evil within themselves and that forms the core of the overall story. In a very real sense you aren’t really seeing four different stories. You are seeing one story told through four different characters and it is a story we all have faced ourselves so we can relate to it.
That I really believe is at the heart of why Spider-Man 3 succeeds as an act of story telling. It isn’t the best movie in the world by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a thoroughly enjoyable movie because it has a story that does not disappoint.
