Spider-Man 3

SPIDER-MAN 3 was intended for Imax theatres. I saw it at home on a DVD; I can only imagine that Imax audiences were hit with seasickness in some of the scenes.

As with some other franchises, there's not much point in seeing Spider-Man 3 if you haven't seen the first two episodes. All the characters are from a comic book series that goes back almost thirty years.

The place is New York City. Peter Parker, youthful newspaper photographer for the NY Bugle, has a secret identity as Spider-Man (Tobey Maguire). His sweetheart from highschool, Mary Jane Watson, is struggling to become a Broadway chanteuse (Kisten Dunst) -- and she has been entrusted by Peter with all the facts about his Spider Man identity. They have a mutual friend from highschool, Harry Osborn (James Franco), fabulously wealthy, whose father (Willem Dafoe) appeared in the first episode as the villain Green Goblin, and he blames Peter (whom he knows is Spider-Man) for his dad's death (in the second movie, Harry subsidized the creation of a formidable supervillain who almost killed Peter and Mary Jane). The situation is complicated by the fact that, although most of New York regards Spider-Man as a crime-fighting hero, the Managing Editor of the Bugle and Peter's boss, J.J. Jameson (J.K. Simmons), is determined to prove that Spider-Man is some sort of crook.

Our hero, Peter, lives in a very low rent walk-up tenement -- somehow he has a computer but not a telephone. He occasionally visits his dear Aunt May (Rosemary Harris) who raised him from infancy; her husband, Uncle Ben (Cliff Robertson), was killed off in the first flick, ostensibly by a carjacker that the Spider-Man chased down and killed. Peter evidently takes a rather light load of college classes, including a physics class where one of his classmates is the stunning Gwen Stacy (Bryce Dallas Howard), daughter of the chief of police (James Cromwell).

So you can see that this story is overloaded with characters. But we're not finished! This movie begins with the prison break of Flint Marko (Thomas Haden Church), who comes to see his seriously ill little girl; apparently his life of crime was solely to get the money to keep her alive. He gets chased by the cops into what turns out to be the experiment chamber of some nuclear lab where, naturally, he is turned into a supervillain, The Sandman. In the meantime, Peter, out on a date with Mary Jane, unwittingly takes home some gooey organism from an unnoticed (!) nearby meteorite. At his day job, Peter is being hassled by a new wannabe photographer, Eddie Brock (Topher Grace), who is going to cement his career by gratifying Jameson's desire for incriminating photos of Spider-Man.

Overloaded yet?

Harry gets some of his dad's Green Goblin gear out of storage and uses it to try to kill Spider-Man. A terrible accident in which an out-of-control derrick starts breaking up some skyscrapers (a scene that might be a bit too edgy for those who watched the people jumping on Sept. 11th) give Spider-Man a chance to rescue Gwen and solidify his hero credentials. Mary Jane is hired for a Broadway show (where she, Kirsten Dunst, does a pretty good rendition of "They Say Falling in Love is Wonderful" from Irving Berlin's 1946 "Annie, Get Your Gun"), but she's fired the next day. Peter, somehow, doesn't know that she's lost her job, so all his pep talk about how he (as Spider-Man) had to overcome some bad reviews and look at me now, rubs Mary Jane very much the wrong way and she breaks up with him just as he was ready to pop the question. The meteorite whatsit turns out to be some sort of symbiont -- it attaches itself to Peter and weaves around him a black version of his red Spider-Man costume - and it changes his personality (some like the Mask in the Jim Carrey movie), and Peter becomes a self-centered A-hole, deliberately wrecking Mary Jane's fallback job as a singing waitress. Eddie Brock comes up with a photo of Spider-Man stealing something and that runs on the front page of the Bugle, but Peter knows it's a fake and proves it to Jameson who fires Brock, who vows revenge on Peter.

The meteorite stuff has a moment of weakness and Peter tears it off himself and hurls it away ... where it coincidentally lands on Brock, who is transformed into a supervillain with powers not very different from Spider-Man (in the comics, but not in this movie, this character is named Venom). Without the meteorite's malign influence, Peter snaps back to his old sweet self and hopes to patch it up with Mary Jane. Brock and Marko form an alliance to kill off Spider-Man, and they use Mary Jane as bait.

Too Much Information?? Yes, that's the principal trouble with this movie; it seems to have more intertwined plots than a Russian novel But the special effects are just great. The acting and dialog are good. I must admit that some of the skyscraper chase scenes are so convoluted, they become disorienting and confusing.

This movie ties up some loose threads from the previous movies. There is always a chance for a sequel, but Kirsten Dunst said, some years ago, that she had originally, when she wasn't such a big star, contracted for three Spider-Man films, and she'd do a fourth only for a Lot of Money.

This movie runs two hours and twenty minutes. There's a lot of violence, so it's rated PG-13 with good reason. The DVD includes running commentaries but no deleted scenes.