A few quick thoughts on Spider-man 3

Ok.  Fun in many places.  Not as good as the first one, definitely not as good as the second.  Characters got short-shrift.  Too much of the dialog was Aunt May or Peter or Mary Jane or Harry referring back to something they'd said better in the previous movies.

And there was way to much CGI.

And that was mostly in service to sequences that were previews of the video games.

It was as if the filmmakers fell prey to George Lucas Syndrome.  "Let me show you all the new toys I got for my birthday!"

Whenever you expect an audience to react by saying, Wasn't the CGI work amazing?  it means you're making them pay attention the CGI work, which is not good, because what CGI work is after all is an advanced way to draw cartoons.

Half of Spider-man 3 is a cartoon.

In the old movie serials, whenever Superman leaped toward the sky to fly he turned into a cartoon.  Audiences were forgiving because those sequences were short and what else could the filmmakers do?

In Spider-man 3 whenever Spidey goes web-slinging he turns into a cartoon too.  But audiences today aren't expected to be forgiving because we're not expected to notice.  I don't remember noticing in the first two, probably because director Sam Raimi didn't give me time to notice.  In the action sequences the focus was on Tobey Maguire.

Tobey Maguire does a lot more voice work than stunt work in Spider-man 3.  Most of that voice work is saying, "Ow."

And, finally, despite all the improvements in the technology and the technique, CGI has only gotten cheaper, not more realistic.  At the end of it all, the giant Sandman running amok in New York City isn't all that great an improvement on the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.

Who was at least intentionally funny.

Comments

[Vir Modestus]

I was underwhelmed as well, and I so wanted it to be a good movie. I wanted it to be a good character movie and got too many things, too little of which was character related, all thrown together in a swirling mass of CGI.

They could have done a true "wrap up" movie by bringing together the original elements and finally coming to a conclusion. Instead, we got frenetic pacing with no point.

It's a renter. Not a first run.

[doug r]

They spent what, $250 million on it, and it looks so CGI? Although some of the Sandman effects did look great, especially near the beginning.
Did they run out of time and/or cash and have to rush some of the effects?
Overall, I liked a lot of the movie, but it seemed to take about an hour before it really got going and nothing really grabbed me like the traintop fight in Spidey 2.