Cinema Mishmash

While Spider-Man 3 may have smashed budget and opening weekend box office records, I am afraid it also trampled my high expectations, as unrealistic as they may have been. While the notion of a revelatory comic book franchise sequel may sound absurd, I submit that Spider-Man 2 was exactly that. I think even those who didn’t have a Spider-Man doll growing up (I had two) would agree that in the second installment, Sam Raimi took the essence of the Peter Parker mythology and elevated it, using the best tool a filmmaker has (no, not CGI): a great story with well-developed, complex characters.

The story in Spider-Man 3, on the other hand, could accurately share the same description as one of the better sequences of its predecessor: a spectacular train wreck. By overcomplicating the plot structure with too many characters, too many emotional journeys, and too many self-referential winks, Raimi and his collaborators failed to appreciate the need to earn audience goodwill all over again, no matter how much success was attained with the previous film.

Spider-Man 2 was innovative in terms of its visuals, its narrative, subtext, and emotion. Rather than strive to innovate visually, this third outing appears to be a collage of other recent – and mediocre – films: the pod race sequence in Star Wars Episode I becomes the Green Goblin alleyway chase. Jim Carrey’s shtick in The Mask becomes Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire), made up as the lead singer from Green Day, hitting the club scene. Harry Osborne’s (James Franco) schizophrenia seems like an ode to Jeff Goldblum in The Fly. The Sandman (Thomas Hayden Church) wandered off the set of some unfinished sequel of The Mummy. The only significantly original flourish was found in Topher Grace’s Venom, where Raimi’s experience in visual horror paid off without mimicry.

And speaking of visual flourishes, someone should have told DP Bill Pope that camera style should not call undue attention to itself. A particularly nauseating handheld scene prior to the Sandman’s emergence from a dump truck may have contributed to the sand-covered pile of vomit I and my fellow Navy Pier IMAX patrons had to walk around exiting the cinema. (Why it wasn’t cleaned up is among a host of housekeeping and other woes which will keep me from returning to what should be a premier Chicago venue.) Even more frustrating was a quiet scene between Peter and Aunt May (Rosemary Harris) in which she carries the weight of the scene, yet she’s a blur in the background. There may be times to manipulate the depth of field, but that wasn’t one of them.

Despite all the wringing of hands among the big studios about the death of cinema (due to piracy, iPods, HDTV, etc.), I suspect this will be a banner year for box office revenue. Cinema is often a means for escape, and times of political unease encourage escapism. (They also provide other great cinematic opportunities, such as reflection, discourse, and provocation, but I digress.) One can also find, within the sanctuary of the local multiplex, stories that, despite featuring superheroes or other fanciful subjects, subtly reflect current social issues, perhaps without overt intent. Spider-Man 3, however, has been artificially injected with so much “subtext” that it threatens to kill its host, not unlike the unexplained black goo from outer space tries to take over Peter Parker and his rival Eddie Brock.

Some claimed that United 93 and World Trade Center were premature and therefore exploitive, but at least their purpose was transparent. In Spider-Man 3 we have an early disaster sequence wherein some unexplained crane malfunction causes an I-beam (and eventually part of the crane) to slice through a corner of a glass and concrete high-rise, causing large pieces of the building and some office furniture to crash violently around the unsuspecting streetscape below. Next we see papers fly through the air as a fire chief arrives on the scene and calmly and deliberately barks orders to a subordinate to cut electricity to the whole block. He then stares heroically and calmly upward as if to say, “We’re ready this time, we’ve seen this all before.” All that is missing is some flag-waving . . . but wait! There is a moment toward the end of the film in which the reformed and re-focused Spidey swings, pauses, and looks directly toward the camera in front of a US flag that fills the entire frame. Was that merely another in a series of the film’s moments of self-parody, or something more sinister? The moment played for laughs at the admittedly odd crowd in my screening, as did several scenes which I am certain were not intended to be funny. With so much money at stake, I fear that the decisions which resulted in this final “product” have little to do with storytelling, even good light-hearted storytelling, but were the camel created by a committee of studio drones intent on determining what would “play well.” In the end, Spider-Man 3, like network television news, has absolutely no idea what purpose called forth its existence.

In the script meetings and production screenings of “dailies” I am imagining, I would like to have been there when someone came up with the idea that what the Spider-Man franchise really needed was a lot of crying. Honestly, I can see Thomas Haden Church’s agents saying, “Ahem, gentlemen, we’ve gone over the script and can’t seem to find where Flint Marko, a.k.a. Sandman, gets his wet cheek / lip quivering close-up. What say we add that near the end, after every other main character has cried to the point of dehydration, perhaps over some dialog that convinces us that his eventual violently destructive rage is still about needing money for his sick kid? And while you’re at it, Tom needs a bigger trailer.” “Why you’re right, of course,” so the overpaid studio exec says, “and to make sure Tobey isn’t upstaged, we’ll have our team of writers add a couple more scenes requiring copious amounts of Visine on the set. After all, the writers have been a bit harried trying to come up with a good explanation for why the black goo falls from outer space, or why a group of scientists would conduct a ground-breaking experiment in molecular disintegration without knowing if someone’s fallen into the equipment pit, or how Harry Osborn could change personalities four times. ‘Who cares!’ I say. Now that we’ve settled that, let’s look at that line of Happy Meal toys.”