Spidey, third times’s NOT the charm… May 27, 2007
Posted by ghostof82 in : Film General , 1 comment so farAm I one of the only people on the planet yet to see SPIDERMAN 3? Looking at the film’s box-office, it would seem so. Strange thing is I have little interest in seeing the film, a bizarre thing really, considering my childhood love for the character.
Back in the early 70s, when ghostof82 was so young that even ‘82 seemed a lifetime away, I read comics with a passion. Marvel Comics printed UK reprints of its ‘biggest’ US superheroes in weekly two-colour format, and our friendly neighbourhood web-spinner was my favourite. I absolutely adored Spidey- it was unlike the other comics, Peter Parker was the star most of the time, his alter-ego of Spiderman seemed almost incidental to the soap-opera of his nerdish life as he struggled on, an outsider at school, awkward with girls, problems with money. His one escape was donning the Spidey costume and taking on the criminals, but even as a superhero he struggled- while Johnny Storm had his fan club and the adoration of the public, Spidey himself was treated with suspicion and as a menace. I loved the comic so much, I waited for every Saturday morning with eager anticipation of the comic being put through the letterbox. I remember lying awake in bed early on Saturday mornings, waiting for the clang of the letterbox, and then sneaking quietly downstairs to the hall to feast my eyes on the latest spectacular cover and to read his latest adventure.
So here we are some thirty+ years (ahem)later, and Spidey is one of the biggest film franchises on the planet, with three films now and no doubt a fourth inevitable. The films are big-budget, quality productions with some of the finest cast and crew talent in Hollywood. So why am I so disinterested in seeing the latest cinematic adventure of my childhood hero?
Part of it is no doubt my distaste for much of modern Hollywood’s output- basically the budgets have reached the point that it all just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Modern films just seem so safe, so obviously produced by some marketing committee as hellbent on selling toys and merchandise as much as putting bums on cinema seats. It leaves us with many films that are too calculated, leaving me feeling more manipulated by the films than actually involved in them. Maybe I’m just getting old, but does nobody else think its a disgrace that a Studio can sink near $300 million into a Spiderman film? They should be able to film an entire trilogy of Spiderman films for that kind of money. Would a $100 million Spiderman film be any worse than a $300 million dollar one? Sure, maybe the action scenes wouldn’t be quite so spectacular but would the film really be much worse for that? Why spend all that money?
There is also the element of diminishing returns. Third films in a series often suffer from the curse of the threequel. I have a theory about that. Film-makers make the first film with some success, and having learned from the experience of making the first, can make a second film that improves on the original. FX guys have ironed out the new techniques, the cast are familiar with the characters, the director and producers have learned what works and what doesn’t. But by the time the third feature comes around, it is a victim of its own success. In order to surpass the second film, Hollywood tends to equate bigger with being better, and throw more money at the film in order to make bigger set-pieces, bolder stunts, more eye-popping fx. But it doesn’t necessarily make the film any better than what preceded it. Indeed, very often the charm of the original is lost. Look at STAR WARS films; EMPIRE was much better than STAR WARS, as the filmakers had learned so much from making STAR WARS, but by the time RETURN OF THE JEDI came around, it was spoilt by trying to squeeze too much in -it was really two films in one. And no, the attempt at marketing teddy-bear toys, sorry, Ewoks, didn’t help either…
So I haven’t seen SPIDERMAN 3 yet and I’m afraid I may wait for a dvd rental, which seems a shame really, but the reviews seem to validate my reservations. Maybe SPIDERMAN 3 isn’t all that bad a film afterall, but I don’t mind taking my time catching up with it.
As for Spidey, well, I recently bought a dvd-rom of his complete adventures. Every issue of the American original, from 1963 through to summer of 2006, complete even with the ads and the original letters pages from all those years ago. So now I am able to load up the old adventures from my childhood and marvel again at the original, real Spidey (Steve Ditko era, obviously), undiluted by Hollywood. Bliss.