Caught in the Web
Yesterday I went to watch, with a group of friends, the much anticipated Spiderman 3. Thinking that going on the third day to watch it would mean less human-traffic, I went to book the tickets for me and my friends only 15 minutes before the show.
I have never been as miscalculated in my life.
The queues for the 5 different ticket booths extended through the whole top floor and onto the stairs downwards to the ground floor. That is approximately 150 meters in distance, and, given 5 different queues, and an approximate of two people standing per meter (ideally), there were more or less 1500 people waiting to get the tickets. Of course, there were two times for the show, but all the 1500 insisted that they be fitted into the 9:30 show since no one has the patience to wait one more hour.
To add to the craze, some frantic person booked 20 seats then started selling the tickets for a slightly higher price to the people standing at the very end of the line – all of whom were more than delighted to get their grubby little fingers on what could have been perceived as a limited ration.
I waited in line.
I arrived at the booth at 9:50, the movie having supposedly started at 9:30. Fortunately, big premiers like this also get a lot of in-movie ads. I found exactly 4 empty spots at the very back of the theater. Knowing the theater however, I knew that those were actually the best seats in the house. I successfully made the transaction and rushed with my other three friends frantically into the theater. The movie had only just begun.
Unlike the previous two Spiderman movies, Spiderman 3 focused a whole lot more on emotional and character development rather than on supervillians. This is largely in due to the more complex plot that involves many established as well as new characters, but it also should be attributed to the nature of the main villain, Venom, or rather, the Symbiotic being. For the non-comic fans, this Symbiotic entity may be as ridiculous as Kryptonite (coming from a meteor and all) but it is actually a powerful entity in and of itself and it does some considerable changes to whomever it possesses – and it possesses many of the Marvel Universe characters to create some new and interesting supervillians, the most known, Venom, being featured in this film.
Although I haven’t managed to take a liking to Toby’s role as the lead actor, he did a pretty good job in Spiderman 3 as well, but I would attribute his success to the character of Spiderman as well as all the other supporting characters.
The story like I said is much more complex, and the creators of the film wanted to split the film into two but then reduced the film to a 2.5 hour version after not being able to come up with a successful intermediate climax. Although now that I have seen the movie, if they had somehow managed to introduce the character Carnage then it would have turned out to be an epic film. But again, there are too many Spiderman villains that focusing on defeating all of them would be a saga in and of itself – especially considering the insurmountable volumes of comics already produced.
And this is exactly why I liked Spiderman 3, because it showed us that heroes and villains are all, in the end, human, and that each hero has a dirty side and each villain has a good side – once you understand their point of view.
I’m not going to tell more of the movie – but I just want to point out that I was quite impressed with the special effects work done in this film, especially that they were produced by Scott Stokdyk and not Dykstra who worked on the previous two films. The sand effects for the Sandman were particularly awesome.
Anyway, go watch it because it is well worth the money. And for a little bit of fun, I am throwing in a little bit of Spidey art for you to enjoy.