SPIDER-MAN (2002)
The record-setting blockbuster in the comic book category... and, for the moment, in the whole summer-movie category, at least if you don't correct older sales figures for inflation. The teen geek angst element is taken straight out of the original Spidey-man story with no modernization, and as such comes off as cliché. Haven't you guys heard that nerds are cool now? I guess not. And Peter Parker seems to accept and understand his suddenly superpowered state much too easily and cheerfully.
There are three strengths to this movie: one is that CGI super-action is now able to blend with live action without the seams showing too often (at least, it looks good until you start comparing it with its sequel), the second is that they put together a screenplay that treats the characters as real human beings, and the third is that they got a real actor (Tobey McGuire) instead of a generic Hollywood mannequin to play the lead. Call it the Reeve Rule: you can teach an actor to bodybuild easier than you can teach a bodybuilder to act. And they do a good job with developing Peter Parker's realization that his job is to protect people rather than just, say, using his powers to make money.
There is some good action. The final battle is plenty rough. Unfortunately, the signature image of Spidey swinging through the city is rather spoiled by their attempts to replicate the movements and postures of the comic: the resulting moves often violate conservation of angular momentum, and thereby end up unconvincing to the eye.
The bad guy, the Green Goblin, is a bit disappointing. He's way toned down from the comic, and he displays plenty of evil but has no reason to be so evil. Worse, the otherwise excellent Willem Dafoe hams it up big time in the role. We're talking the Denny's "Just a Humongous Bucket of Eggs and Meat" ham lovers' double ham slam breakfast special with extra ham.
There are many strong points, but in the end the thing is not, repeat not, an especially great comic book movie. It may be the most polished and flawless rendition of a superhero yet, but it's formulaic. Everything it gives us appeared first in a comic book; nothing is really created anew. And the essential plot is no different from, say, Godzilla 2000: introduce one superpowered entity, introduce a second on a similar scale, make them fight. Just like Godzilla, in the next movie he'll have to fight two or three monsters.
SPIDER-MAN 2 (2004)
Well, they were going to make him fight two or three villains, but then they changed their minds and made the villain Doctor Octopus. And Alfred Molina's Doc Ock is the best comic book movie villain achieved yet. This is the sequel's strongest area of improvement over the original. The Green Goblin was not very scary, but Doctor Octopus is really intimidating. Another strong area of the film is the super-fights between Spidey and Ock: these also rate, I think, as the best achieved yet. (I hardly ever noticed seams between CGI and live actors this time.) And kudos to Sam Raimi for not slowing them down. He shovels the action at you as fast as your eye can take it in, sometimes a touch faster -- which is the way real fights happen, even without super powers. So many action movies rely on slow motion or unrealistic long pauses or repeats of chunks of time, just to make sure that the audience keeps up with everything. (One extreme example: a ten second drag race in The Fast And The Furious that lasts a minute and a half.) Of course, slowed-down action also helps lower the budgetary requirements, and that's not an issue with something as big and popular as Spider-Man.
I went in hoping, from what I'd heard beforehand, that this might be a contender for best superhero movie yet. Alas, it's at best a contender for the top five. The X-Men series still beats this one, film to film... but it's closer this time; Tobey McGuire was more than a little correct in saying that this "whooped the first film's ass". Much has been said about the quantity of angst and emotion used in the story here, and especially about the romance level of the film, which is certainly uncommon these days in an action movie. Unfortunately, I have to say that the romance and other emotional content is highly melodramatic, inflated to unrealistically operatic proportions. Plus, the first act is quite a bit too long, due entirely to how repetitively it drives home the various hard-luck aspects of Peter Parker's life, especially his love life. If you're in a space to swallow a man-sized helping of melodrama, it may work powerfully... if you prefer more adult and realistic approaches if may make you roll your eyes.
Another source of eye-rolling is the science element, which is stuck on a strictly comic book level. (You can run a fusion reaction in the open air, and even stand next to it!) There's some equally crude psychology, concerning Spidey's powers sometimes failing him. The acting is decent overall but hardly great, with Molina giving the best performance.
Sam Raimi's second Spidey film is much more Sam Raimi-ish than the first was. Unfortunately this means, among other things, reaching for cheap laughs about 50 percent too often. After a while it undermines believability. But despite all gripes this is a good film, and the quality of the story is above what we're accustomed to in action spectacles.
This was an even blockbusterier success than the first film, and so will tend to dictate the received wisdom in Hollywood for how this kind of movie should be done. This is fortunate, since it is much better than the typical other summer blockbuster crap coming out for the last few years... this might actually lead Hollywood in coming years to work harder at putting decent scripts into their action spectacles. In the last four years or so, there has been a trend toward blockbusters with less stupidity than the previous norm, and in hindsight I think it will be said that the Marvel comic book movies led the way on this trend. With Spider-Man 2 being the biggest financial success yet, we have good hopes for the trend growing stronger.
SPIDER-MAN 3 (2007)
Okay, this time, they pile on the monsters. A new Green Goblin shows up, so does The Sandman, but most importantly, Venom, the symbiotic organism that takes over Spider-Man's costume.
And not surprisingly, it turns out that three villains is one too many. Which begs the question of which one is the "too many" one, and the answer is clear: Sandman. It's a guy made of magic self-propelled sand grains that aren't even attached to each other half the time! I'm sorry, the idea is just too dumb to fly in a context where everything else has at least a halfway plausible veneer of pseudoscience to explain it. The Sandman idea is pure kid-stuff, while everything else in this film series at least manages to be adolescent. And the plot device they use to tie the character to Peter Parker? Muy bogus. Gallingly contrived. Retroactively harmful to the first film. And it becomes the basis of a forced sappy ending that's genuinely offensive.
Which is a shame, because Thomas Haden Church as Flint Marko / The Sandman is the best actor in the film. (Next best? James Franco as Harry Osborne / Mini-Goblin.)
My reaction to the film as a whole was, "How can a movie with so much righteous stuff in it be so annoying?" Make no mistake, a lot of individual pieces are terrific. There are no less than five major super-fights, and every one of them can stand next to the best such ever made. And a lot of the time, the ways they intertwine the separate plot threads is smooth and successful -- a surprising accomplishment given what a contrived patchwork the plot as a whole is. But they just keep throwing in these irritating mistakes and missteps.
The biggest misstep is the amount of soap-opera they try to set up between our romantic leads, Peter and M.J. -- in fact at one point, I turned off the DVD in disgust at the "soap opera plotting". And then I started to think about what I meant by that. And I came to the conclusion that bad soap operas work essentially the same way as bad horror movies: they depend on having the characters do improbably stupid things in order to put themselves in situations of conflict and loss. In bad horror movies, people get really stupid about self-preservation ("There's a killer in the house, let's split up and look for him!"). In soap operas, they're stupid about things like communication and paying attention to other people, thereby creating relationship conflicts that have dramatic consequences, but which a sensible person would simply avoid. In a bad case, the script makes the characters really sweat and work hard at the job of keeping the miscommunication going so that they don't accidentally straighten everything out. Want an example of that? Spidey 3. Feh.
The Venom story gets short shrift amid all this. The whole thing feels a lot more rushed and trite than it deserves to be.
If you enjoyed the first two Spidey movies, this one is worth seeing for the action scenes. But the whole thing is a perfect example of how no amount of filmmaking talent can undo the effect of having your plot designed by a committee of suits who approach storytelling as a matter of business investment and marketing.