Maybe three is too many

Rating: 6/10 (13 May 2007)

I saw Spider-Man 3 just a couple hours ago. And I was disappointed, most definitely. While I love the character the two proceeding movies, this one suffered from the great third syndrome.
Two things: Firstly, this movie splayed out at one end a romantic melodrama, on the other end, a serious metaphorical discussion of free will and good and evil, and yet on another a raucous slapstick comedy. And a runtime of 140 minutes, or 2 hours and 20 minutes is far too long for this movie. The scenes with the aunt, in my thinking, could have been all cut. She provided absolutely nothing to the movie, except cliché after idiotic cliché. It was half tedium to see her on the screen and half unintentional humor. When I was ten years old I bought the first six Venom Comics "guest-starring Spider-Man" and I thoroughly enjoyed that little series (Feb 1992  Jul 1992).
The second thing: the special effects will most likely get an Oscar nomination (even though it is very far from that time). The Sandman special effects were awesome, some of the best shots in the movie. However, to me, I thought most of these special effects while most likely supremely expensive and meticulously crafted were too video-game like. Almost everything looked slightly animated, just ever-so-slightly but enough that any average viewer would notice this. My favorite comic book superhero of all time is Superman, and always has been. If anyone has the DVD to the first two movies in 1978 & 1980 with Christopher Reeve (shot as one continuous movie), you can see what great special effects are like. This was before digital photography, and all of these special effects in the first two Superman movies were done optically with so much planning, designing and practicing. It proposed they could make you believe a man could fly and they did do that. The effects in Superman & Superman II have not dulled with time. Effects of this magnitude cannot really be seen these days, and it is probably mostly a budgetary and time issue. Superman paved the way for creating an Oscar category for special visual effects, because in its time it didn't exist. The Superman special effects artists were awarded with a special achievement Oscar instead. Now this is a serious category every year at the Academy Award ceremony.
Now I didn't hate Spider-Man 3, but it was nowhere near as great as Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2. It suffered kind of like Superman III suffered. In Superman III there was a mix of comedy and "serious issues", which reviewers didn't like. And Superman turned evil for a little while as well. Batman Begins was not afraid to take a beloved superhero and explore his dark side with a fictionalized version Bob Kane's origin story of the Bat-Man. That is one of best superhero movies made in a long while.