The Five Worst Parts of Spider-Man 3… and How to Fix Them

May 25th, 2007 in Movies

Spider-Man 2 has often been cited as the best superhero movie ever made (personally, I still have a soft spot for Superman I), so I suppose it was inevitable that 3 was going to be a bit of a come-down. Fortunately, it wasn’t the brutal one that it could have been (I’m looking at you, X-Men 3…), but it definitely came off as a film in need of another script revision.

Here are, in my mind, the major flaws of Spider-Man 3 and how they should have fixed them (it should go without saying that the following contains SPOILERS):

1. The Meteor: Peter and Mary Jane enjoy a nice, romantic moment on a giant web that probably took six hours or so to meticulously craft. Just then, a mysterious, oozing meteor (containing the symbiote that will overtake Peter’s life) lands just feet away. Huh? Is this a 50s monster movie all of a sudden? Seriously, folks, that is some laaaazy screenwriting there. I can think of two options that would have worked better: Peter’s a science genius, right? Couldn’t he have created the substance in his lab, which would have the added benefit of beefing up his relationship with “lab partner” Gwen Stacy. Gwen was a huge part of the comics, but here her character is paper-thin. (Frankly, I think she should have been killed off in some accident tied to Pete’s black-costumed negligence. Spider-Man is nothing if not driven by guilt, and this sort of thing would tie into Gwen’s comic roots, where she dies by the Goblin’s hand. Or… Mary Jane’s fiancé in the second film was an astronaut (and Jonah’s son). Why not have him bring the creature back from space? Then Spider-Man either has to save the damaged shuttle as it returns, critically damaged, to earth, or he has to fight a symbiote-powered astronaut who also happens to be his girlfriend’s ex-fiancé.
   
2. The Jazz Club Dance Sequence: This whole scene felt like a transplant from the first Eddie Murphy Nutty Professor movie. Since when does Peter play the piano? And are we to believe that one of the symbiote’s powers is enhancement of dancing ability? I understand they were trying to add some much-needed humor to the film, but the all-dancing, all-piano-playing Spider-Man was simply too much to take. Couldn’t this have been just a simple Peter/Gwen slow dance, with him eyeing MJ the whole time?
3. Maguire’s Hair: Speaking of humor (albeit the unintentional kind), am I to believe they spent $250 million on this puppy, and not a single cent on hair stylists? The “dark” Peter looked like a reject from an emo band. I laughed every single time I saw his awful, awful “dark” haircut, particularly when he stops to style it in the alley for the first time.
4. The Length: Spider-Man 3 was, really, two movies packed into one, and it felt like it. Unfortunately, the side effect of ten pounds of plot stuffed into a five-pound bag was that character development went out the window. Mary Jane behaves erratically, Gwen Stacy is two-dimensional, and Harry Osborn’s magical amnesia made him seem like he was auditioning for Days of Our Lives. The filmmakers needed to decide what story they were telling and focus on it. (As I understand it, this was really motivated by two conflicting desires: the need to fit the Venom character into the mix, and the stars’ contracts, which expire with this film. I suspect that, if they had thought they could get Maguire, Dunst, and the rest back for another go-around, that they would have made this two movies, but they couldn’t, so they had to pack it all in one film.) Venom or Sandman, which is it going to be, guys?
5. The Coincidences: I’ve already mentioned the worst offender, but there were simply too many inexplicably lucky coincidences to be believed. (I think most screenwriting gurus say that you can get away with one, maybe two, without the audience getting peeved.) Eddie Brock just happens to be at the church where Peter is fighting the symbiote? Why not have Eddie following Spidey, trying to get a picture? Gwen Stacy happens to be at the same restaurant on the night that Pete is going to propose? She’s his lab partner and a model in mortal danger? I could go on, but basically, this is just lazy writing, the kind of stuff that they teach screenwriting students on day one, right after margins.

Oddly enough, all of this didn’t add up to a terrible movie, just a much weaker one than it could have been. On the upside, though, maybe the filmmakers and cast will want to come back and make a stronger Spidey 4…

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