Life is finally on track and working for both Peter Parker
and Spider-Man. The hero is celebrated by the city and Peter has the girl of
his dreams. To top things off Harry, after a heated battle with Peter, loses
his memory and it seems that his vendetta against Spider-Man will never be
realised. But all that glitters is not gold. Mary Jane’s career takes a turn
that puts strain on the relationship, a new villain known as the Sandman is in
town and Spider-Man’s perfect web begins to further unravel when a celestial
symbiote corrupts his morals and reveals his dark side.
Still relatively
complex a web of parallel running stories, maybe even more so than its
predecessor, Spider-Man 3 is (in my
opinion) a step up from the sequel. There may be more crammed into this is
terms of drama and plot, but what I really like is that all the smaller stories
are subtly interlinked and as such there is a much better balance that the
second film lacked.
Life is finally on track and working for both Peter Parker
and Spider-Man. The hero is celebrated by the city and Peter has the girl of
his dreams. To top things off Harry, after a heated battle with Peter, loses
his memory and it seems that his vendetta against Spider-Man will never be
realised. But all that glitters is not gold. Mary Jane’s career takes a turn
that puts strain on the relationship, a new villain known as the Sandman is in
town and Spider-Man’s perfect web begins to further unravel when a celestial
symbiote corrupts his morals and reveals his dark side.
Admittedly, by this
stage, I’m a little over the whole complex relationship that Peter and Mary
Jane have. I mean the whole irrevocable love story still strikes that sensitive
bone that females have, but here it sort of gets to the point where you just
get a little sick of the two of them together. Peter’s happy as all get out and
Mary Jane becomes this sort of moody and neglected other half. And because both
parties are being so obnoxious about the whole thing, you can’t really choose a
side to back.
As I mentioned before, there is a whole lot more in terms of
plotlines crammed into this thing. But they all work together really nicely
without each competing to be centre stage, which is something that I think
happened in Spider-Man 2. We have the
strained relationship between Peter and Mary Jane. We then have this story of
Harry losing his short-term memory with everyone uncertain of if he’ll get it
back. We’ve got the story of the criminal on the run that becomes the Sandman,
coincidentally making an inadvertent reappearance in Peter’s life. We’ve got
the mystery of this alien symbiote that enhances the aggressive and ‘bad’
instincts in its hosts. And finally we have this rivalry between Peter and a
new photographer at the paper. All these stories bleed into one another and
that’s what makes this movie work a good deal better than its predecessor.
The
action sequences are reduced that little bit and this, along with the added
excitement of special effects-driven characters makes the fights and battles
all the more exciting and impressive. It’s the drama between Peter, Spider-Man
and the rest of the world that takes the driver’s seat in this movie and it
just makes it all the more enjoyable.
Starring Toby Maguire, Kirsten Dunst,
James Franco, Rosemary Harris, Thomas Haden Church, Topher Grace, Bryce Dallas
Howard, J. K. Simmons, and James Cromwell, Spider-Man
3 is a step up from the sequel filled with action, romance, drama,
betrayal, hope, suspense, angst, comedy, and Toby Maguire sporting eyeliner and
a floppy emo hairstyle (watch out for that). It’s still not as great as the first one, but it’s definitely some kind of redemption and has the power to
bring the odd lump to the throat.
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