This is a great movie, it really is.

Rating: 8/10 (5 May 2008)

I recently watched the third instalment of the Spiderman franchise and I have to say that I rather enjoyed it. When I looked up some reviews on the internet about this movie, I was amazed about the large amount of negative reviews this movie had gotten. Some of them didn't even labelled this as an average movie, but named it as "a complete let-down". This was the total opposite of what I was thinking. Spiderman 3 continues the story were 2 stopped. Peter parker (again brilliantly played by Toby Maguire) still takes on the world of crime as his alter ego Spiderman. Things are going rather well for Peter, since he now found a perfect balance between his social-life and his superhero-life. He has the girl, which is off course Mary-Jane, he wants and his grades are once again far above average. However things are soon starting to go downhill after a new invincible villain shows up, an unknown yet very aggressive virus plants itself in the Spiderman suit, his best friend still wants revenge on him for killing his dad and last but not least, girl troubles. Way to go, Spidey. Let's start by pointing out the biggest flaw of this movie: there are way too many things happening at the same time. It seems like the directors wanted to go all out with the last Spiderman movie they made and that didn't really turned out for the best. Let me get one thing straight, it's not like all these story's make the movie hard to understand. However, if you look up the other Spiderman movies, you can understand what I mean. In part 1 there were two story's: becoming Spiderman and one villain. Number 2 also had two story's: The inner struggle of wanting to be Spiderman and one villain. This movie has 4 story lines: Trouble with his friend who's planning his revenge, Trouble with his girlfriend who can't handle Spiderman's star status and TWO villains. What do you get if you fit twice the amount of content in one movie? Right, story lines that aren't as deep as they should have been. That's really a bummer, because the villains, sandman and venom, just scream for more background story. They give sandman a vague storyline, but there isn't a real conclusion for him. Venom is a cool character, but we only see him in his true form (and in the way we know him) in the last 20 minutes of the movie and that hurts, because he could have been the greatest super villain to hit the white screen by far. At least the other two story's (The troubles with his friend and his girlfriend) are decent, but the background story for those were created in the first two movies. A lot of reviewers claim that this movie doesn't stick to the original comic books. Well I can imagine why someone could find that annoying, but it doesn't concern me since I haven't read every Spiderman comic book there is and I'm sure that at least 80% of the people who see this movie haven't. So for most people this little thing wouldn't even matter. So, you know a few bad things about this movie, but let's be positive now. One thing everyone has to agree with are the quality of the visual effects. They are stunning. It's amazing how intense the directors could have made the battles without making it too unrealistic. No wonder they won the Oscar for best special effects with Spiderman 2. With all these special effects you are happy that there are more villains, cause this whole movie is eye candy. The action in this movie is very good, it's really how a superhero movie should be. If I'm honest then I can say that Spiderman is my favourite superhero (better then overpowered Superman and no powered Batman) and that's all thanks to the Spiderman movies. The great thing about this movie is that it knows that it's a superhero movie based on a comic and for this reason doesn't take itself too serious. It's a feel good action movie and one of the best in its genre if you ask me. After Peter's suit getting infected by the aggressive virus, Peter turns a little bit more to the dark side. However he doesn't turn in the cool, aggressive darker version of Peter Parker that you might picture him to become. Instead he starts wearing fashionable black clothing, hangs around with girls more and picks fights with people on bars. Criticisers say that this doesn't suit Peter at all and he doesn't act really like a bad guy at all. I think they might be missing the point. As I stated before, this movie doesn't take itself too serious. Spiderman becoming a complete bad guy would be a little too serious and the movie would lose a little bit of comedy the series always had. Dark Peter is quite hilarious, it had my laughing at a couple of scenes. Don't think that they messed up Dark Spiderman completely, because when he puts on his suit he is quite the vicious one. I admit that there are a lot of things to point out as bad in this movie, but I'm the kind of person that watches a movie to enjoy myself and not to find as many flaws as possible. Spiderman 3 is a very enjoyable movie, it's not an must-see, but the action, special effects and the cast makes this movie worth watching.