Ebert (finally) Reviews Spiderman 3

Our self-appointed father figure and patron saint, Roger Ebert, has been sick for most of 2007, and so he has been backtracking during his recovery to review old movies. This week he reviews Spiderman 3, the latest from the blockbuster franchise. So you know where I'm coming from, I gave the first Spiderman movie 3 stars, and the second one, Spiderman 2, 4 stars. If you asked me to make the "best of..." comic book movie, it'd go like this: Batman Begins, Spiderman 2, and X-men 2 get 4 stars. I'll also put Hellboy in there,The Incredibles and of course Ghost World, but the latter doesn't really fit unless we're expanding our definition of a comic book movie to, well, comic books. So of course I should just say "superhero movie." There are no doubt more, but I have the memory capacity of a blind, deaf and dumb gnat, so I can't think of anything else right now.

Spiderman 3, though? Well of course it's going to suck. How did I know? Elementary dear Watson. I'd like to submit Exhibit A, which is "no Michael Chabon." Exhibit B? It's the last one of three, which means the odds are it's going to be putrid up there with Return of the Jedi [would you believe me if I told you I couldn't remember that movie's title?! I had to google it! I'm getting unbelievably old or something], Godfather 3, Austin Powers: Goldmember, the old Batman fourth and fifth movies and who knows however many other ones I just flat out hated. Exhibit C? Venom, Black Suit, Sandman, the New Green Goblin AND Gwen Stacey? Come on! I was disillusioned the second I heard it was this crowded. He's going to tell a story with all these people in 2-2.5 hours? Like hell he was. And he didn't.

Of course, the economist in me says the third movie is optimally bad, so why am I complaining? Why is it optimally bad? Because if the first two are good, then the third should be bad since you have a guaranteed audience coming in, so you should minimize cost by employing mediocre scripts. Good scripts, good acting, good directing are things a studio employs to address the uncertainty of profits. But if revenue is guaranteed thanks to the captured audience from previous incarnations, then there's some point over which subsequent incarnations should be falling in quality. You might say movies are convex in quality, in other words. The last movie in the trilogy should suck, if I have any confidence in the rationality of the studio executives. And thankfully, I am both encouraged to see trilogies usually suck it up on movie three, and disgusted to see how bad Spiderman 3 actually was. [Apparently, the new Bourne entry is the exception to my theory, though, also thankfully. See how I did that? I made a theory that makes me happy whether I falsify it or not. Win-win!].

It is nonetheless good to see Ebert finally getting around to seeing this movie and sharing his insights about it. I liked this barrage of rhetorical questions, not all of which are good (I know the answers to some of them, even if Ebert doesn't, but only because I have the vast reservoir of Venom's Todd McFarlane in my memory banks. Why I can remember this, but few other things, is something I do not understand.], but some of which are.

"We know that Spider-Man's powers do not reside in his red suit, which lies in a suitcase under his bed. So how do fake Spideys like Venom gain their powers when they are covered with the black substance? And how does a microorganism from outer space know how to replicate the intricate patternwork of the Spidey costume, right down to the chest decoration? And to what purpose from an evolutionary point of view? And what good luck that the microorganism gets Peter's rival photographer, Eddie Grace, to infect, so that he becomes Venom! And how does Eddie know who he has become?"

Not to geek out here, but if you're going to geek out, where else than on your geeky blog? But the alien costume doesn't set off Peter's spidey sense, first of all, which is why Peter doesn't notice it when the meteor lands. Secondly, everyone post-Peter gets Peter powers because the alien costume bonded to Peter, and there's some psychic transmission that took place from that experience. They don't get the Spiderman powers, per se. They just get the strength, webbing and clinging powers, which are native to the alien himself/herself, expressed physically as Spiderman powers (with some nice differences). And, the alien costume apparently fell in love with Peter, which is why he now behaves like a jolted lover and why the coincidental attachment to Eddy Brock (not Grace - Eddy is played by Topher Grace) works so nice, since Spiderman got Brock fired. And the suit can basically do anything, so making a Spiderman pattern isn't too bad. In McFarlane's original story, the suit was effectively a psychic camouflage. After Secret Wars, where Peter picked it up in the first place, Peter would just think of an outfit he wanted to wear, and the suit would "transmogrify" (to use a favorite Calvin and Hobbes term) into that outfit. I think in reality, Peter was actually just walking around in his underwear. Anyhow, that's why the suit does what it does.