It was 18 years ago that Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 3 came out, and as soon as I did not see it -- not being as big a fan of the first two as some people, and hearing this one was all over the place -- I entered a mode of incompletism. I only doubled down on that when I didn't see another Spider-Man movie until Tom Holland took on the role ten years later in 2017, though I did finally catch up with The Amazing Spider-Man in 2022. (On a night of jet lag in America when I didn't sleep a wink. Not ideal conditions.)
This past weekend, I decided to fill the remaining gaps in this web in one fell swoop. (Yep, that's two Spider-Man puns in one sentence.) And of course, that kind of thing means I'm going to share my thoughts on them here.
The Amazing Spider-Man 2
Spoilers ahead.
The first movie came on Saturday night, and for some reason I decided to watch the more recent of these two movies first, though that may not matter anyway because they were in different timelines. Actually, I know the reason: I had been thinking about watching this movie for some time, because I wanted to see "how they did it." Last spoiler warning, though I'm not going to talk about anything you wouldn't already know about if you saw Spider-Man: No Way Home.
"How they did it" was killing off Emma Stone's Gwen Stacey.
Probably at the time No Way Home came out, I became interested in the fact that Gwen Stacey -- the love interest for Andrew Garfield's Peter Parker, as well as one of the many random characters in Spider-Man 3 -- does not emerge from the film alive. I can't remember if I knew this going into No Way Home or discovered it there, but either just before or just after, I read the Wikipedia synopsis of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and knew that she dies of a broken back from a fall where Spider-Man, for once, cannot quite save her. (Incidentally, I have no idea where MJ Watson is in this world, and can no longer remember from my sleepless night in 2022 if the first film touches on this.)
That was one broken back I wanted to see. I mean, it's pretty unusual to kill off that character. I figured this was the kind of thing that only happened in a Christopher Nolan Batman movie.
It did not disappoint, I guess. I mean, it wasn't too dissimilar from what I was expecting, as you see Stone's body miss hitting the ground by about three feet, but not miss a fatal cracking of her spine as the thread Spidey shoots prevents her from hitting the ground full on. (Which would have killed her anyway, but it would have been a lot more gory.) There's still something a little shocking about seeing this, even if you know it's going to happen, in part because these movies rarely care about the real rules of physics. Usually it would be hitting ground = bad, not hitting ground = good, but not here. (But for some reason, I thought I remembered from the plot synopsis that she was falling off a bridge, rather than the inside of a clock tower.)
The rest of the film? Pretty disappointing.
I'm not going to say The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is awful, but I can see why they scrapped what I have to assume was a planned third installment starring Garfield. (If I could probably put myself back in a 2014 mindset, I would know for sure whether that third installment had been planned or not.) The movie's visuals have a kind of betwixt and between quality that now feels dated, clearly a step up from what had come just before, but just a bit out of step with what we have now.
As with most movies that have multiple villains, the villains are a bit lame here: another incarnation of the James Franco's Harry Osborn character from the first trilogy in the form of Dane DeHaan (and where has he gone anyway?), as well Jamie Foxx's Electro, another in a long line of disrespected but initially harmless dweebs who happen into superpowers and then take out all their accumulated rage about being disrespected but initially harmless dweebs.
Incidentally, this may be the first time I saw The Amazing Spider-Man 2, but it's not the first time I've written about it on this blog. In the post I just linked written nearly 11 years ago, when the movie came out, I complained about its subtitle, Rise of Electro -- a subtitle that apparently only existed in foreign markets, because I can see no sign of it anywhere anymore.
I'm not going to bother picking apart plot details and the like. In fact, I think that's enough talk about this film. However, I should say I did enjoy an opening sequence involving Peter Parker's parents on a doomed plane in which they are carrying some secret program they need to upload before the plane crashes, while being attacked by bad guys, in part because Parker's dad is played by Campbell Scott, an actor I miss seeing on screen.
Spider-Man 3
On Sunday night I went back to where my incompletism started with the third and final Tobey Maguire movie, and calling it all over the place was an understatement.
So I guess it was once a thing to match the number of villains to the number of sequels, as there are three characters in this movie who fight with Spider-Man at one point or another: Thomas Haden Church's Sandman, Topher Grace's Venom (never named as such) and Franco's Green Goblin, succeeding his father in this role. Unsurprisingly, they all get the short shrift in ways that are humorous.
Sandman is set up as the "big villain" of the movie as he's the first to get his superhero transformation (the details of which I really did not understand), though he's also the likeliest to disappear for long periods of time. Venom gets the latest introduction, at which point Grace's Eddie Brock feels like almost an afterthought because the film is nearly at its halfway point. And then Green Goblin has the benefit of a history in this trilogy, but not of any motivation I could properly understand. (He's mad that Peter killed his father. But this was two movies ago now.)
Oh, I suppose there is a fourth villain: Peter Parker himself.
Yes, the symbiote gets itself on Peter and he of course becomes the black-suited version of himself, as well as an asshole. This last part seems to be played just about as poorly as a similar plot gets played by Christopher Reeve in Superman III. (I might have to watch Superman III again just to marinate in some of this campy badness.) Although Superman III is miles better than Superman IV, it's not great, so being compared to it does not bode well for Spider-Man 3.
Because of all that's going on in this movie -- which must find meaningful arcs for both Kristen Dunst's MJ (sort of achieved) and Bryce Dallas Howard's Gwen Stacey (not achieved at all), plus include characters like Aunt May, J. Jonah Jamieson and Gwen's father, played by James Cromwell -- it feels like there are scenes missing that explain how someone got where they are. The one I most noticed was the one where, quite comically, Eddie Brock goes to a church to pray that God would kill Peter Parker -- as if -- and it just so happens that Peter is currently in the bell tower of that church at that very moment, struggling with the symbiote covering his suit. (This is how Eddie gets the symbiote dripped on him from above.) Because this movie, above all else, should be from Peter's perspective, we should know why he's in the bell tower at that moment, but the movie is unwilling to show us this, or incapable of showing us.
Overall this just feels like a scattershot mess. There are still some things I liked about it, particularly the closing set piece in which a cab and a piece of construction equipment are dangling from various parts of a Venom-created web, with MJ in peril. And I liked MJ herself, as this film reminded me again of how luminous Kirsten Dunst once was. (Still is, but I'm sorry, age gets the better of all of us in the end.)
It occurred to me that I have not, actually, watched all the movies in which Spider-Man appears, though I have now watched all of the ones where his name is in the title. The inclusion of Venom in this movie reminded me that there are two Venom movies I haven't seen, at least one of which has an appearance by Tom Holland's version of the character.
I'll have to save the Venom movie completism weekend for another weekend -- or, maybe, never.
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