Schizo “Spider-Man 3″ & the Problem with Superhero Movies
I know I’m late to the game here — and for sheer snark I can’t imagine anybody topping Anthony Lane’s withering New Yorker review — but here’s my capsule analysis of the problems with the latest entry into the Spidey series.
Narrative is key to memory, and the more coherent the story the easier it is for the mind to encode that story into long-term memory. That’s why when you tell a story about an experience it’s easy to remember the story details but hard to remember the things you didn’t include in the telling. Eventually, you remember the tale and not the experience itself. I mention this simply because I find it hard to remember many of the details of Spider-Man 3, regardless of how spectacular the effects were.
Why can’t I remember? Because the film suffers from paranoid schizophrenia.
And I’m not talking about the movie-fun, endlessly narratable “Sybil” or “Three Faces of Eve” kind. This is more like talking with somebody who is hearing voices that aren’t audible to anybody else, and who is also jumpy and convinced the world is out to get him.
The evidence? Read on…
#1: We can’t believe the evidence of our own eyes: in the first movie the audience SAW Ben Parker (Cliff Robertson) shot and killed by a carjacker played by Michael Papajohn. Then, in the latest movie we find out that such is not the case… the REAL killer is The Sandman (Thomas Hayden Church).
What a betrayal! Movies can misdirect but they shouldn’t lie. That’s the difference between The Sixth Sense, which was great, and Fight Club, which, at the end of the story, essentially thumbed its nose at the audience and said, “psych!”
Even though we’ve had our revenge for Uncle Ben’s death in the first movie, like a mental illness the need for revenge comes back.
#2: Coincidence overload: Critics have already noticed the big one, here, which is when a meteor falls from the sky and lands right next to Peter (Tobey Maguire) and Mary-Jane (Kirsten Dunst), so that the Venom parasite can latch onto Peter’s motorcycle. If that was the only coincidence it wouldn’t have been bad, but another is when Eddie Brock (Topher Grace), who becomes Venom too late in the movie for anybody to care, but then, later, while Brock is in church unironically praying to Jesus, the Christian pacifist messiah, to help Brock kill Peter Parker, he happens to look up and see a battle between the Venom parasite and… Peter Parker. Fancy that!
Isn’t a habit of seeing connections between unconnected things a symptom of paranoid schizophrenia?
And there are other annoying coincidinks… like when Gwen Stacey just HAPPENS to be eating at the same restaurant as Peter and Mary-Jane, or when Gwen Stacey (Bryce Dallas Howard as a brilliant scientist and a supermodel AND the daughter of the police captain… ah… yeah…) happens to be at a fashion shoot when the villains attack. At least Lois Lane is nosy and curious and an investigative reporter– she has some agency for getting into trouble!
The problem with coincidence-laden plots is that it makes the audience incapable of trusting the story, and Spider-Man 3 has more coincidences than an average episode of Scooby Doo.
I’ve heard rumors that the Venom plot was foisted onto the story at the last minute, and that would make a certain tragic sense of these coincidences. The moral? Don’t make a superhero movie — or, frankly, ANY movie — by committee.
#3: Peter’s world: Yes, Peter is the only person in the movie who got superpowers when he was bitten by a radioactive spider, so he is unusual. However, he is also the only person in New York city who doesn’t have a cell phone, a personal computer or an iPod. Sometimes the movie is set in 2007 and sometimes it’s set in 1967.
Peter lives in his own world, like a schizophrenic. This is nowhere more apparent than when he becomes “Dark Peter” after having been taken over by the Venom parasite. Suddenly, the broke college student buys an expensive suit and oozes down the street oogling women who don’t know how to react. Is he cool? Is he creepy? Is he nuts? Did Tobey Maguire need a few days off from the shoot and ask Crispin Glover to sub for him? The movie doesn’t know how it wants this sequence to read, and therefore the audience doesn’t know how to react.
#4: Too many plots: It’s fine to have a LOT of characters in a superhero movie– the first two X-Men flicks showed that nicely as did the undeservedly maligned “Mystery Men.” And this week’s news that a Teen Titans movie is coming soon also suggests that it’s not sheer numbers that kill a superhero movie.
What you can’t have is too many plots, and that’s what hurts Spider-Man 3. Spider-Man fights The Sandman AND Venom AND The Green Goblin… all in one movie? That’s a whole bucket o’ villainy and no plot or motivation has enough time to get a head of steam before the story switches tracks.
On a similar note, there are two love triangles, one between Peter Parker, Mary-Jane Watson and Harry Osborn (James Franco, yet again mugged by a role both prominent and thankless), with another one between Peter Parker, Mary-Jane Watson and Gwen Stacey. That’s two guys and two gals and temptingly neat setup for a resolution in which Peter and MJ renew their paring while Harry and Gwen set up house, but the two triangles NEVER overlap.
#5: Too much fan service: Sure, Ursula was a cute character in the second movie, but the film makers bring her back here to no effect just because she has a following. The actress is cute, but every time she shows up on screen the movie stops dead in its tracks. The same is true of Aunt May… a fine character in the first two films who has nothing to do but give drive-by advice from time to time.
By the way… I’m NOT speaking, here, in my capacity as the guy who has 50,000 plus comic books in my attic (it’s amazing that my wife even still speaks to me), the guy who understands that Venom is from an entirely different era in the Spider-Man mythos than Sandman and the Goblin, the guy who gets the allusion to the 1960s death of Gwen Stacey in the long fall and rescue of Mary-Jane.
I know everything I need to know to insert details from Spider-Man 3, but the story still isn’t satisfying.
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