I think I had a nightmare last night from about 3 minutes past midnight until 3 hours later.
It was about how Sam Raimi totally botched spiderman 3, to a degree where even my impenetrable veil of spiderman-fanboyism had to drop and I seriously considered leaving the theater towards the end.
What the hell happened?
The same actors signed on. And the same director.
Yet Spiderman 3 is what I’d expect from a director that doesn’t really care about spidey at all. All emotional parts in the movie were played out as if the criteria was “make it so a 5 year old can understand what’s going on”.
I remember fearing for X-Men 3 because Bryan Singer decided to defect to DC Comics (to do “Superman Returns”) and Brett Rattner took over. The fact that I expected X-Men 3 to suck ass meant I was positively surprised, even if Rattners little girly feet couldn’t properly fill the massive man-shoes that Singer left behind.
But Spiderman 3 was like lightning from clear blue skies. There was no warning that this movie might blow and suck, all in the same breath.
I looked over the credits, and the best explanation I can find, is that Sam Raimi pulled a Terence Trent D’Arby – that’s where your success gets to your head and you think you can do it all by yourself, and then failing miserably because your success was due to a team effort.
The only reason I have for thinking this is the fact that Sam and Ivan Raimi wrote the screenplay for Spiderman 3, and not for 1 and 2.
Now I must go and heal my broken heart with soothing fantasies of thwipping through New York City.
Update:
I am so glad to see so many people list the exact same complaints as I had – I thought it was only me and the people with me at the premiere who thought this was a crap movie.
In the days following the premiere, I have been quite shocked to see how most people (including most critics) seem to think it’s all fine and dandy. I guess that means that the first two spiderman movies were completely wasted on most people – like pearls before swine. I guess most people just want CG action sequences, one liners and an embarrassingly shallow plot.
As for some of the comments – the theory that Raimi botched it on purpose is kind of appealing. Or maybe that he just eventually threw up his hands and said “If you want a lame toy commercial, I’ll give you a lame toy commercial”.
After having seen “An Evening with Kevin Smith”, where he describes the process of writing a script for Superman and the completely ridiculous requests for changes he had, I don’t find that entirely unlikely.
I’ll grasp at anything that can explain such a radical departure from his first two installements, that were respectful to the source material and well-done.