/ 4 May 2007

Caught in the web

There is a key moment in Spider-Man III, after Spider-Man (Tobey Maguire) has discovered his bad side, having recently been tentacled by some black gloop from outer space. This gloop, by the way, has also provided him with a new Spider-Man outfit, except it’s in a sinister grey instead of Spidey’s usual stars’n’stripes-coloured get-up.

In the key moment I want to point out, Spidey has just changed out of this outfit and returned to mufti as nerdy Peter Parker. He stops, catching his reflection in a nearby mirror — and we know that such mirror-gazing moments are often instances of self-realisation for movie characters. (There is a parallel moment in the first Spider-Man movie, as Peter realises how the bite of a radio-active spider has transformed him — mostly, it gives him visible abdominal muscles.)

Now, having just experienced the thrill of being a bad Spider-Man, in his new grey suit, Peter glances at his reflection. With a brusque gesture, he pushes his fringe over his forehead so that it hangs loosely just over his right eye. Until this point in Spider-Man III, Peter has always been seen with his hair neatly quiffed back off his forehead, as befits a studious young nerd with what appears to be a distinctly preppy 1950s sartorial sensibility.

This new gesture, defiantly flopping his fringe forward, does not mean that he has decided to restyle himself after Bryan Ferry. No — it is more meaningful than that.

You can tell if he’s being Good Spidey or Bad Spidey by his outfit, but since the goodness or badness obviously overflows into Peter Parker when he’s not dressed up, we need something to tell us which way he’s leaning at any given moment. The fringe performs that service — just in case we weren’t able to read good versus bad from Peter’s behaviour alone.

Trying to decide whether specific behaviour is good or bad is a common moral dilemma, one often especially acute when trying to evaluate movie heroes. It’s a little easier with politicians. At least Spidey/Peter’s bad behaviour doesn’t come from within, as it usually does in human beings, torn as we are in the endless Manichaean struggle between good and evil. Spidey’s badness is generated by the aforementioned gloop, which arrives via meteorite and coincidentally lands near Peter and his girlfriend as they canoodle in the park one evening.

Whether internal or acquired via infection, this split personality notion is a good idea to juice up the third Spider-Man movie; we needed some moral conflict and not just more romantic indecision. A similar thing happened to Superman in the comics, as I recall, as well as in Superman III — caused by the red kryptonite, I think, or was it the black? Superman, in fact, split into two entirely separate beings; Spidey stays unified, just has these terrible mood swings. At any rate, the key signifier of Peter’s hair, in relation to his goodness or badness, is a clue as to what kind of movie Spider-Man III is.

That is, it is a popcorn movie. It is said that cinemas make more of a profit on foodstuffs than on the movies themselves, hence the need for audiences to have something to occupy the eyes while munching a large cardboard box of popcorn. Spider-Man III occupies the eyes for two and a half hours.

The good-side/bad-side plot device is a decent one, but it takes a long time to get there, given the tortuous love triangle with Peter/Spider-Man’s friend and enemy Harry (James Franco) and his Valium-eyed girlfriend, Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst), and various other matters Spidey has to attend to. These include new villains in the form of the Sandman (Thomas Haden Church) and Venom (Topher Grace).

The former, serendipitously, has some history with the Parker family. As the Sandman (no relation to Neil Gaiman’s Sandman), he is not very impressive, despite a lot of computer-generated effort — but perhaps his jerky, unconvincing movements are typical of creatures made out of sand. Venom is more striking, having a set of Alien-style teeth, but we don’t really get enough of him.

The Bizarro-Spider-Man, unfortunately, is not made very much of either — the idea is practically thrown away, in fact. Still, it is an occasion for his aged aunt to deliver some homilies on revenge being bad for you or something, backed up by flashbacks in black and white. Overall, the action is average. It tends to be repetitive, too. If this is a popcorn movie, it should whiz by with lots of thrills and little to angst over, but it drags itself out like it’s Dr Zhivago.

Munch, munch, munch.