For a summer opening blockbuster Spiderman 3 had all the standard elements: amazing special effects, great action scenes, cool villians, and cooler heroes. These elements were combined to make a reasonable movie but it just didn't hold my attention. I was looking forward to the new Spiderman movie just because I liked the other two but this one was a bit disappointing. There were too many times in the movie where the pacing slowed to a crawl and the story just became uninteresting. At least 30 minutes (of the 2:20) could have been cut out without missing any of the action or lessening the story.

It is probably no surprise (the black suit kinda gives it away) that this movie deals with the darker side of each character's personality. Spiderman becomes obsessed with vengeance for his uncle's death. The black suit feeds his aggression and encourages him towards the wrong. This theme is repeated in each of the three villains. Two of them recognize the destructive power of the dark side and, at least in a small part, redeem themselves. The third villain embraces the aggression.

Spiderman comic book fans seem to be saying that the storyline in the movies is following the book storyline fairly well. If that's the case then they all know what will become of The Sandman, Harry, and Venom. Not being a comic book reader I don't know. It appears that Harry has given up on his quest to kill Peter Parker. It appears that The Sandman has also decided to abandon his life of crime. And at the end Venom dies. But in comic books nothing is certain. It could be that all three of those guys come back and end up being Spidey's enemies again.

I guess we'll see where this all goes. The film studio has confirmed that they intend to release a Spiderman 4 in 2009. I'm sure we'll be hearing about it by next summer.

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