Spoilers Spider-man 3(take 2) Anticipation thread

I am puzzled the line “They all die fighting Spider-Man”

Sandman was forgiven and let go!

 

In that one movie, yeah. But we kinda know that villains return and next time, it might not end that well, or the one after, or…

 

But then his fate is not to have died fighting Spidey, because he was let go as part of the big Spidey 3 cry-fest dénouement

 

Which only adds to Dr. Strange’s very sus behavior in the trailers, that he’d tell Spidey that whopper… (haven’t read the leaks, so don’t come after me if I’m right!)

 

Just finished my rewatch of the first Amazing Spider-Man, seeing it for the first time since its initial release (well, I might have watched it once more before the sequel came out). It's far from perfect with its dubious Lizard CGI almost on the same level as Raimi's Venom, but what it does get right is very well done, particularly Peter and Gwen (who has more agency in one film than Mary-Jane did in a trilogy) and the tragedy of Curt Conners.

But I still hate the unnecessary subplot about Peter's parents which I know is far worse in the second one...

Same for The Lizard in the first Webb.

 

See, I like that but it bloated the second film

 

Reviews and Social Media reactions drop in 4 hours (1:30AM Eastern), so stay safe.

 

Not sure that equals "incel".

 

DO NOT READ THE REVIEW IN VARIETY. IT SPOILS EVERYTHING.

 

It most certainly does!

 

Well. Fuck. Good to know.

I guess it's time to go dark until I see it on Saturday.

 

Sunday, I watched Spider-Man 2.1, an extended cut of Spider-Man 2 that was released on DVD to promote Spider-Man 3. (I didn't pay full price for this -- I think I found it at Big Lots for $3 or $5 several years later.) Last night, Spider-Man 3.

It had been about a decade since I'd seen Spider-Man 2, and while I remembered some of the broad points of the film much of it I didn't remember at all. Overall, I thought there was an hour and a half of a good, occasionally great, film in here, and there was an hour of a pretty awful film. I have no idea how anything broke down on the writing of this film, but I decided that everything that was good came from Michael Chabon and everything that was bad came from the other three credited writers or Raimi's occasional lapses into schlocky direction. That's probably not how it works, but it's my story and I'm sticking to it.

It seemed pretty clear to me that Tobey Maguire demanded he could lose the mask so he could emote as Spider-Man in several of the big scenes. Because otherwise there's no reason for Spider-Man to lose the mask when he's trying to stop the Chicago L from crashing into Lake Michigan.

This movie was about as subtle as Mal Evans' anvil. I did not remember the Aunt May pep talk scene at all, but subtle that was not (and probably indicates that, after the bank rescue, she knows Peter's secret). I also didn't remember ghost Uncle Ben saying to Peter, "Damn it, you will not have a life of your own, you must be Spider-Man!" It was a tell-y film.

I had (mis-)remembered that Doc Ock was better developed as a character than he was. The scene where Peter meets Otto and Rosie (which I will say was written by Chabon) is so good at character that I guess my brain overlooked that Otto spends most of the film being little more than an unstoppable force for Peter to flail against again and again.

Time seemed wonky. For Peter, it's only been two years since he became Spider-Man, but for MJ and Harry it feels like it's been much longer. MJ is an established actress, Harry is the head of Oscorp. Heck, MJ gets engaged to an astronaut who walked on the moon -- and if MJ is twenty, which would track with the film film, John Jameson is probably in the later thirties. Then there's the whole sequence in the middle ("Raindrops keep falling on my head") which seems to span a few months for Peter, while for Otto it seems to span about a week.

JJJ wearing the Spider-Man costume and jumping around his office while chomping on his stogie was both hiliarous and stupid -- JJJ and Peter do not have the same body type, JJJ is not going to fit in Peter's costume.

I generally liked Peter better than I did in Spider-Man, but he's still a whiny ass. The thing that bugged me the most about Peter was how he kept insisting he was going to make decisions for himself (like his talk with ghost Uncle Ben), but then he doesn't allow other characters, particularly MJ, to make decisions for themselves. He is the arrogant know-it-all.

For all of its overwrought melodrama, I felt good when I finished Spider-Man 2.1, but I had to turn my brain off.

Now, for Spider-Man 3.

Great googly moogly, that's an interminable chore. It seemed like I was three hours into the movire before Peter had his first fight with the Sandman and (later) became infected with the symbiote.

Watching all three movies of the Raimi trilogy over three days, I saw that the core of the trilogy, whether intentional or not, is the Peter-MJ-Harry triangle. I only wish it weren't SO! MUCH! DRAMA! Who is friends with who? Who is mad is who? Who is dating who? Who is trying to kill who? Who is Norman's favorite son (real or chosen)? The problem is, this core of the trilogy rests on an underdeveloped relationship -- Norman's relationship with Peter, which is often referred to by Harry but wasn't something that really existed on film. Sure, Green Goblin said he loved Peter like a son, but there's nothing in Spider-Man that actually sells this. I might have believed it more if Harry's last line in 3 had gone, "My friend... my best friend... my brother."

I'm not going to go into a lot of details about the film -- its sins are legion and well-documented -- so I'll just mention, again, Peter is a self-centered ass. People keep telling him not to be, and he just can't stop himself. I struggle to see how this version of Peter and this version of MJ would end up together; they have serious communications issues that they've never been able to bridge, and maybe the tragedy of Harry's death would be able to bridge them in the short term (as the final scene implies), but unless Peter works on himself I don't see it happening long-term. Maybe I just don't get Spider-Man as a character -- I guess my platonic ideal of Spider-Man is the one who lives with Bobby Drake and Angelica Jones in Aunt May's house -- but Tobey Maguire's version seems like someone who thinks he should be a tragic character and lives his life as though he is when there's really no good reason to be that way.

Tonight, Amazing Spider-Man, which I last saw on the Sunday evening of opening weekend. I remember generally liking it, but I also remember I wanted it to be more like the film promised in the trailers.

 

Again, you succinctly stated how I feel about both films, especially Spider-Man 2 and the plethora of issues I've had with it. Good observation about Otto's characterization going from high quality to basic schlock. That table scene with Otto, Rosie, and Peter also stood out to me in particular because it felt like Molina and Murphy were acting in a completely different film from Maguire.

 

That scene is emblematic of the whole Raimi trilogy. There are moments of genuinely good filmmaking -- writing, acting, direction -- and they're surrounded by mediocre filmmaking at best, utter sclock at worst. For a moment Sunday night, again not really remembering 2 except in broad strokes, I thought, "Okay, this film is going to do for Otto what BTAS did for Victor Fries," and then it didn't go there. It didn't even try. Was Rosie even mentioned after her death? I don't recall it happening.

I remember liking these films when I saw them in 2002, 2004, and 2007 -- the first more than the second, the second more than the third -- and I remember defending some of the creative choices. (Organic webshooters, for one.) I look at them now and, while I don't feel they're dated, they haven't aged well. I guess I expected films written as early 2000s films, not films that took Stan Lee's comic book writing style circa 1965 and dropped it into a film made forty years later, because that's really what these films are -- ongoing melodramas that every couple of pages/minutes turn into something else, whether or not it actually follows from what came before, to up the melodrama and raise the stakes.

 

I think a picture popup from MSN on my work computer gave a major spoiler (though on the other hand, I had a feeling about that particular one). The soundtrack titles seem to give others.

At this point though, I'm probably going to watch it on either Blu or streaming if/when it gets pushed out to Disney so I'm probably going to not be able to avoid more spoilers

 

Lucky you. It's not out here till January 7th.
I'm either going to hit spoilers from youtube's home page's recommended videos, or some wally on social media will blow the whole thing open. There's just too many ways to stumble into spoilers. My only choice is to throw my phone into Mt. Doom.

 

Tickets booked for tomorrow night for me and the kids. It’ll also be our first time in Belfast’s new Cineworld cinema- left it too late to get IMAX or another fancy screen but still looking forward both to the film and checking out the new venue.

 

Planning on going to the first showing Friday morning.

 

The Red Carpet premiere was today and here's the footage from it:


However, unlike previous MCU Red Carpet videos, it's not a long continuous flow of interviews as it happens but instead a very choppy, abbreviated selections of interviews. While everyone was be very coy about it all, we definitely don't see all of what was talked about...

That said, Dafoe was the one who may have accidentally let loose the worst kept secret when he said he was happy to meet "new friends, old friends" while making it.

 

Wow. The interviewers are terrible.