Spider Man 3 - Go See it. Now.
Spider Man 3 was an excellent movie, it really surprised me (and I thought number 2 was good). Movies usually don’t surprise me very often. Plot twists and great use of visual and sound effects kept me wondering why I even bother to make my own movies, this stuff puts me and so many others to shame. Then again the movie is rumored to have a $300 million dollar budget.
The flick runs about 2 hours and 20 minutes, but don’t let the long run time fool you - it’s a great film! Especially when you see it in IMAX. There were even parts where the action/special effects made people clap mid-way through, something I almost never see. The actors did a great job, everyone gave very believable performances and Topher Grace (from that 70’s show) was no exception. The writers & director are some kind of genius breed, keeping the series fresh through the end of the 3rd film. I hope they don’t make a 4th film for a long time, I just don’t see how they could top this one. Although, I have been wrong before.
Interestingly enough, the success of the spider man films lies not in Spider Man himself but in the Villains he fights against. Think about that, why do people love Star Wars so much? You know Darth Vader is, like, the cooooolest bad guy ever, and you didn’t actually wear Luke Skywalker masks for Halloween did you? No, you wore Vader helmets. We are attracted to things that we consider “bad ass”, just the way it is.
OK enough ranting, I thought the Sand Man was especially cool:
The director is quoted here:
“I had people bring in 12 different kinds of sand — this is where people think the movie industry is insane — so I could look at it.” A team of more than 200 programmers at Sony Imageworks then spent the equivalent of 10 man-years writing code that rendered the billions of individually manipulated sand particles.
Visual-effects supervisor Scott Stokdyk elaborated:
“We shot footage of sand every way we would need it — thrown up, thrown against blue screen, over black screen. John Frazier, the special-effects supervisor, shot it out of an aero can at a stuntman. Anything we could imagine sand doing in the film, we shot.”
You can read more on the making of the “Sand Man” from Spider Man 3 here.
