Sam Raimi’s third installment of the Spider-man franchise, in my opinion, stands by itself, not holding a similar structure to the two previous films. Spider-man and Spider-man 2’s composition seemed much more action based with an emotional story line built around it. With Spider-man 3 it appears to be just the opposite, the action builds itself off from the emotional storyline. Unfortunately the film feels like it gets way too emotional and you feel as if you are watching a big-budget soap-opera rather than a fun action/adventure film.

From the beginning the plot branches out into different problems for perhaps too much of a variety of characters. Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) and Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst) are madly in love with each other and often hint at spending the rest of their lives together. While gazing up at the stars, a meteorite falls from the sky and an alien organism, a symbiote, attaches itself to his motorbike and later bonds to his suit. The creature magnifies psychological aggression and affects Peter both physically and emotionally. Harry Osborne (James Franco) is still holding a grudge against Peter/Spider-man, believing he murdered his father, and has utilized his father’s Goblin inventions to seek revenge. Driven by his rage, he attacks Peter and suffers a horrible accident leading to a powerful case of amnesia, forgetting all conflict between them. Outside of those matters, Peter’s career is in danger as a rival photographer, Eddie Brock (Topher Grace), presents The Daily Bugle with closeups of Spider-man saving his girlfriend’s, Gwen Stacy (Bryce Dallas Howard), life. Meanwhile, Flint Marko (Thomas Haden Church), an escaped convict, falls into a particle accelerator and becomes fused with sand, giving him sand manipulating abilities. Peter and Aunt May (Rosemary Harris) are called to the police station to be informed that Marko was Uncle Ben’s (Cliff Robertson) actual killer.

The weakest element of Spider-man 3 is the screenplay, written by Ivan Raimi and Alvin Sargent. Sargent is the only one who has any experience writing the Spider-man films, but also any screenwriting experience in general. The most disappointing piece would have to be the conflict between Peter Parker and Harry Osbourne. After a reckless airborne battle between Peter and the New Goblin, Harry has an accident and falls into a coma, recovering with amnesia. He completely forgets all conflict between the two of them, this of course during the time when there is the most chaos between other characters, so less organization and solution had to be worked out at the same time. When Harry finally learns the true fate of his father… the deus ex machina (most commonly used in Greek and Roman pieces it was a god or unexplainable force introduced to a written work or play used simply to solve the problem), or the easy way out, is practically yelling in your face that the writers of the screenplay had gotten themselves cornered and the time for resolution was closing in. As you can probably tell by the plot, the writers had too many storylines than they knew what to do with and it shows. For these reasons, the film often falls into slumps between action sequences.

The best story line in the film belongs to the background of Flint Marko and his struggles. Marko’s intention of escaping from prison was to steal money to pay for the treatment of his daughter who appears to be suffering a life-threatening illness. Like almost all the of the Spider-man villains, they start out as decent human beings who are involved in some kind of incident and use their powers to take out their suffering on others. The Sandman is by far the least emotionally transformed and we sympathize with his character since the beginning of the film- Thomas Haden Church has the best performance in the entire film. Bill Nighy’s Davy Jones from the two sequels of Pirates of The Caribbean comes to mind, a tortured soul wandering the lonely sea of assumption and misunderstanding. More of this character would have made up for the flawed Harry vs. Peter conflict.

Besides Church, the other performances are challenging to critique. Franco’s character has amnesia for half the movie, but I think he overplays his character as he parades around happily not knowing what’s going on and having no idea that he once held an aggressive grudge. Maguire is a bit better, but the screenplay takes such a turn for the worse his character becomes a dark ego-maniac who bursts into dance just to express emotion, it’s weird… his performance in the films go from realism to something the writers should never have penned to such an extreme level.

The special effects in the film are very good as they usually are in the Spider-man franchise, but at some points they seem a bit too large scale. Towards the end of the film Sandman becomes as big as a fifteen story building and I kept thinking to myself, “The special effects are too large scale… this is like Godzilla ‘98″ At the same time, the effects in the film can prove to be remarkable. A brilliant combination of direction by Raimi, cinematography by Bill Pope, and special effects supervised by James D. Schwalm capture the scene after Marko has his accident. The camera pans down the hill of sand as we watch it shift amongst itself, rise into a human head and hand pulling itself up and then collapsing back into nothingness. Then, on a second attempt, he rises into human form as the man pulls himself from his own makings. Wow.

Unfortunately it seems that if they decide to make at least one more Spider-man film, they better make sure they hire the right men and/or women for the task. Writers who know they have too much on their plate to start with and won’t try to jump a canyon with a bicycle, then being able to bring out the kind of performances the filmmakers and audiences expect to see for the characters… not of who they become… because in the end, they return to who they are.

Rated PG-13 for sequences of intense action violence.
Running time 140 minutes.