Director Sam Raimi's 2007 would be
epic Spider-Man 3 is something of a cultural punching bag
people.
Love to hate it, and there's a definitive reason
for this scorn.
The villains.
Not characters themselves, but the fact there's
just too many of them.
Spider-Man 3 isn't alone in this, though.
This is a common problem for superhero films.
X-Men 3 has Magneto, Juggernaut, and the US military,
Angels dad, and an army of no-name mutants.
Batman and Robin have Mr. Freeze, Poison Ivy, and Bane.
And even the Dark Knight Rises features
Bane, Deputy Commissioner Foley, and Talia Al Ghul.
There's a virtual sea of films that spawn franchises,
and one of the major issues with the later installments
is the fact that the casts just balloon in order
to include way too many characters.
But why is the film so derided?
Why did Spider-Man 3 fail so spectacularly
when its predecessors, made by the exact same people,
were so successful they basically
kicked off the superhero film craze that we're still
living in?
Think about it.
Spider-Man 3 and X-Men are the launching pads
that produced the MCU.
But that success was cut short after only a few short years.
The dizzying heights of Spider-Man
and its sequel Spider-Man 2, commonly
thought as one of the best superhero films
ever produced, were tragically cut short
when Sony Pictures interfered with the creative process
and strongarmed the director of the multibillion dollar
franchise and to using not just one, not two,
but three villains.
And that's what we're here to talk about today.
Villains, and how too much of a good thing
is almost mathematically provable as a bad thing.
Most films and definitely superhero films
follow a very rigid structure, directly
descended from Joseph Campbell's ideals of the Hero
With a Thousand Faces.
This famous book that Campbell compiles
is a deep analysis of myths, legends, and stories
that every culture across the globe has told themselves.
It's an analysis that breaks down
these tales into their individual components
and attempts to learn why people from as early as the Stone Age
liked their story structure the same way we like them now,
thousands of years later.
There's always some sort of inciting incident that
acts as a call to adventure.
The main character must travel outside their comfort zone,
fight for a higher ideal or calling,
and learn some profound lesson.
Then at the end of the story they
will return back to their place of origin
as a changed and evolved person.
Every story from Star Wars to Jason and the Argonauts
shares these common elements.
They are the formulating building blocks
of civilization, practically.
They're the parcels of information
that allows us to understand the world around us.
Because this structure is so hard
wired into narratives, and the fact
that superhero films are almost more commodities
than escapist fantasies now, they
have a series of boxes that need to be checked,
much like stories from Campbell's The Hero's Journey.
You have to have your origin sequence,
you have to have your alpha costume and your beta costume,
you have to have fight scenes that showcase the character's
newfound otherworldly abilities, and most important of all,
you need a good villain.
Any villain worth their salt is a reflection of the hero.
They expose the audience to a deeper
truth about the protagonist, push them in new ways,
or expose the side of them they're
desperately attempting to hide.
If you're looking at superheroes and their paired villains,
Red Skull showcases what could happen
if Captain America became too authoritarian and too committed
to country over his ideals.
Loki is an exploration of the duplicitousness
of man's basic instincts, contracted against Thor's
inherent heroism.
And Mandarin's magic serves as a metaphor for a return
to the old ways, and how Iron Man's constant
striving for progress and the new
is always met with people yearning for the status
quo of yore.
In terms of the first Spider-Man,
Norman Osborn is a rich tycoon businessman
who has everything that Peter Parker lacks.
Power, wealth, societal influence, they all
come naturally to him.
He's also filled with guile and is constantly
attempting to play the angles, while Peter Parker is
pure of heart.
When he eventually falters, which
causes the death of Uncle Ben, it
compels him to swear he'll never embrace that side of him
ever again.
He's a good person through and through,
and this sets the character up for a lifetime
of attempting to help people to atone for this mistake.
Norman Osborn as a villain constantly pushes and tempts
Peter Parker.
They are polar opposites, reflections of each other.
And you understand this dichotomy and relationship
because of the time and energy Raimi
and company put into the construction
of the first Spider-Man film.
Which then leads us to Spider-Man 3.
Why do people hate it so much?
Why is it such a laughing stock?
I'm sure you can guess, but the simple answer
is that Raimi didn't want Venom in the movie.
Sony was convinced that the character
of Eddie Brock, a.k.a.
Venom, had a huge commercial and merchandise potential for them.
They knew that the character who originated
in the '80s, co-created by Todd McFarlane and David Mchelinie
had a massive following among hardcore Spider-Man fans.
Raimi on the other hand found the character
to be blunt, one note, and not thematically
in the line of the Spidey villains he loved.
Raimi was a '60s and '70s Spider-Man fan,
not much for the bombastic '80s and '90s work.
But the real answer is that there are just too
many villains in the film.
In this film, you have Harry Osborn, Venom, and the Sandman.
To make things even more confusing,
there's no hierarchy in this rogues gallery.
It's not as though there's a master criminal employing
these other two characters as foot soldiers.
Each one of them ostensibly has an arc
that is equivalent to a main arc of a villain in a film,
with only a third of real estate in runtime.
Harry Osborn is supposed to be a dark reflection of what
Peter Parker could become.
He is a boy the same age as Peter, however
he was raised in a decidedly different
socioeconomic bracket, which has warped him and caused
him to be jealous, filled with anger, and covetous.
It also doesn't help that most of the film
they gave Harry amnesia, and a horrible sky snowboarding
costume.
It's pretty bad no matter how you spin it.
The film also gives Sandman a healthy retroactive continuity
based origin.
It says that he was a part of the robbery that ultimately
caused Uncle Ben's death.
Each of the two arcs could be a movie in and of themselves,
but then to top it all off you have
the story of Eddie Brock, Peter Parker's competitive co-worker
who is given an alien symbiote costume that grants him powers
to rival Spider-Man.
To boil it down even more, Harry Osborn
is a dark reflection of Peter Parker,
Eddie Brock is a dark reflection of Peter Parker,
and Sandman is intended to be a character that
would showcase Peter Parker's greatest mistake.
You can see that structurally not only are these three
characters not working in tandem literally,
but their arcs don't complement each other either.
They're not exposing new sides of the character
that we're following, and they're also not
all thin slices of the same thematic idea.
It's very apparent why the film has this many villains,
but it's still frustrating.
Harry is there because after the revelation that he knows
Peter Parker is Spider-Man in Spider-Man 2,
the creative team couldn't walk that back.
So his storyline had to come to the forefront.
Sam Raimi is a big fan of Ditko era Spider-Man comics,
and obviously wanted to make a Sandman movie.
And Venom?
That's all Sony.
As outlined above, when you have these conflicting creative
visions, your film just ends up being a garbled mess.
The climax of the film featuring Sandman, Venom, Spider-Man,
the Green Goblin, is supposed to feel
like an epic showdown, when all the plot threads
we've been following come together
and crescendo into a grand finale.
What we actually got was--
I should never have hurt you.
Said those things.
None of that matters, Peter.
Just one cringey forced emotional scene after the next.
None of the arcs work properly because they
don't get developed enough, because there literally
isn't enough time.
There's way too many characters at the climax of the film.
Could this film have worked if Green Goblin was not
positioned as a Harry redemption story,
and was instead a Harry using Sandman and Venom as proxies,
trying to tear down his former friend emotionally
and physically?
Could the film have worked if we forgot
about Venom all together, saved him for another time?
Yes.
Absolutely.
But that's not the direction the film went in,
and what we're left with is a prime example
of how not to have multiple villains.
OK, that's it for today's episode of Nerdstalgic.
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