Spider-Man 3: not good.

I was convinced earlier this week to attend a midnight opening showing of Spider-Man 3 because a certain flash celebrity wanted to go and got my office psyched up about it. We all bought tickets, but then he canceled on us at the last minute, preferring to stay home and laugh at all those geeks he'd made sit in a theater until 2:30 am. And if he knew how awful the movie would be, he'd be laughing even harder.

Marvel has taken pains to force the Spider-Man series to follow the same trail they blazed last year with X-Men. It goes something like this. In your first film, introduce the characters, and make them fight a bad guy in a stupid costume. In the second film, make the movie longer, increase the character development, and find a villain who doesn't look quite as retarded. In the third and final film, throw everything out the window with an abysmally awful piece of crap featuring the same actors pretending they resemble their earlier characters.

I'm happy to report that Spider-Man 3 was still better than X-Men 3, and much better than Star Wars 3, but as far as 3's go, it could've been so much more. The film's tag line was something like, "every hero has a conflict within". Spider-Man's inner conflict consisted of dressing in all black, adopting an emo hair cut, and dancing around Manhattan saying rude things to people. It was strange and stupid to watch - if I want to see inner conflict against evil in my heroes, I want to see them start killing innocents and call it collateral damage, or at least get really angry and spit a little when they yell at the villain, or maybe even get some new evil power that steals people's souls. Wearing a black suit and snapping your fingers at super models who clearly think you're dumb isn't an expression of inner conflict - it's an expression of inner retardedness.

The movie was also riddled with crappy cliche situations: things which ordinarily wouldn't challenge the mighty spidey at all become suddenly life threatening (oh no! it's a big stick!); Mary Jane, Peter, and Harry take their relationships to new levels of dysfunctional stupidity by misinterpreting situations in ways no sane person could and saying things that even the most insensitive idiot wouldn't; the bad guys stop suddenly and give cheesy orations on how they just wanted to be good, but couldn't, fifteen seconds out of beating the crap out of both Spider-Man and the city of New York, and Spider-Man gets teary-eyed and sympathetic rather than asking the obvious question: if you really wanted to be good, why did you throw so many cars through buildings?

Thankfully, this is the first Spider-Man movie that doesn't end in some horrible acted sentimental nonsense by Kirsten Dunst. Unfortunately, that's because most of the rest of the movie features equally superficial idiocy, but it's spread around to everyone.

I'm trying to find something good to say about this movie and struggling. I guess the....costumes....were well done. It's also one of the first movies who's teaser poster, shown above, doesn't so much tell you about what's going to happen during the movie as how you're going to feel afterwards, which I'd appreciate more if that feeling wasn't "depressed." It probably wouldn't have seemed so bad if I hadn't watched it at midnight, and if it hadn't been set up so well by the first two movies, and if it hadn't been such a god-awful movie.

I'll post about our trip sometime, I think, but it's hard to find a good way to condense two weeks into anything short enough to post.