An "OK" film

Rating: 6/10 (12 February 2019)

It is pretty understandable what this movie is trying to do: be a good movie. But unfortunately, it suffers from a lot of studio interference. The studio wanted to tangle a lot in this movie with the love triangle between Peter, M.J, and Harry, the goblin story arc for Harry, and dealing with a new villain, but they shoved too much into it and made it less enjoyable as we would've liked it. Here are a list of some of the problems
1. Too many villains
Sam Raimi originally just wanted to have Harry as the villain and Vulture as a side villain. The studio made him cut Vulture and replaced him with Sand-Man and sadly went further by forcing Raimi to add Venom as a 3rd villain. All this does is makes it very hard to follow 3 bad guy's stories at once.
2. Bringing in 2 love triangles
In this film, the add Gwen Stacy to the mix to get another love triangle going with Peter and M.j. This is unnecessary and underdeveloped as well as time lengthening. Peter's triangle with Harry is fine. Any more is just time consuming.
3. Revisiting Uncle Ben
In this film, it is revealed that Sandman is the real murder of Uncle Ben, causing Peter to seek revenge on his death AGAIN. Peter had just gotten over his death and moved on. This just takes all development away from his character
4. The message
The movie's message is forgiveness, but the way they do it is very phoned in and not very looked upon. The movie barely shows any reason to be interested in this topic
5. The symbiote
In the comics, the symbiote is a type of black alien material that turns the user into a black costumed figure, but also makes them evil. This was the purpose for black spiderman and Venom. The symbiote in the movie does have both these characters happen, but in campy ways, When Peter has the suit on, he does good with the black spider scenes, but for the civilian scenes, he is pretty much a annoying jerk who dances randomly for no reason instead of acting more aggressive like in the comics. When Venom has the suit on, he looks and says nothing like the comics. He's skinny, annoying, doesn't have his echoing Venom voice and doesn't refer to himself as "we"
On the positive note, this film does have interesting performances by Kirsten Dunst, James Franco, Rosemary Harris, and Thomas Haden Church and has a few good moments and fight scenes and an excellent score. SO if you want to watch it, go ahead. Enjoy