Movies: Spider-Man 3

To be quite honest, I didn't know Spider-Man 3 was opening on May 4th, 2007 until about a week prior. I remember seeing all of the promotion for the movie but I never paid attention because I didn't want to have the movie spoiled for me. From my quick glimpses I thought the movie was going to be really dark -- the mood to match Spider-Man's newly acquired black costume ... but it wasn't. The movie turned out to be far worst than I imagined.

I will try not to spoil the movie for those who may be reading, but here are a list of my grievances:

1. There was far too much crying from all of the characters.
2. Sandman was real let down. He only had about 10 lines in the entire movie, which I think was done on purpose to setup a possible spin-off movie.
   
3. Venom is only in the movie for about 20 minutes (another possible spin-off) with hardly in background information.
   
4. The film was a live action cartoon instead of superhero drama/origin story like the first and second films.
5. The action scenes were very boring and some seemed like they were recycled from the previous movies.

Spider-Man 2 > Spider-Man 1 > Spider-Man 3, in my opinion. This movie cost in the neighborhood of $260 million to make, and it has broken many records (highest one-day gross, highest weekend gross, etc...) but I don't think it was money well spent. I will assume that most of the money went to the CGI production which looked a bit fake and wasn't really used effectively.

I don't know what went wrong with this highly anticipated movie. I am thinking that Sam Rami's involvement in the writing of the movie have been its downfall. The was some weird hybrid of Spider-Man and Evil Dead (there was far too much of Bruce Campbell), which perverted the feel of the movie. I don't know. Maybe I was expecting too much after the very well done Spider-Man 2, which set such a high bar for any future superhero movie . I guess I was doomed to be disappointed.

With all that said, I can't recommend this movie to anyone to see in the theater. Wait for the DVD and watch it at you leisure.