X-Men: The Last Stand vs. Spider-Man 3

Last Stand is redeemed by Magneto, and the film's handling of the mutant cure angle. Spider-Man 3 is redeemed by Peter's and Mary Jane's arcs: two kids who had zero idea what they were getting themselves into when they decided to be together.

 

Both films then fail on the exact same fundamental level of feeling the need to do too much in too little time, and wasting characters that matter in the process. It's just that Last Stand is paced better, breezing by its worst elements, and Spider-Man 3 has a better, more competent director at the helm who still managed to get loads of ambitious ideas out in that film (i.e., that BEAUTIFUL Sandman resurrection sequence, the very ending, ironically moreso now since thats Raimi's final statement on Spider-Man, period.)

 

So, yeah, this one's kind of a wash.

I've always said that The Last Stand reminds me of one of those patented Marvel "SENSES-SHATTERING CONCLUSION!!!!" issues where there's zero plot and all fighting.  And on that level, it works for me, despite bungling the Dark Phoenix storyline by removing Cyclops from it.

 

But Spider-Man 3 has that awesome Dark Peter Parker sequence, the Sandman origin Justin mentioned, and the final fight is suitably epic.  So yeah, I'd have to say it's a dead heat as well.

I didn't get angry watching X Men, so I guess that one 'wins'.

X3 is a good story with bungled execution. Plus, I think we have to take into account it's rushed production status.

 

But even that aside, Spider-Man 3 fails harder. Every new viewing only highlights more problems with it's story (The black goo appears from nowhere without explanation, DIRECTLY NEXT TO the hero! Surprise, we retconned Uncle Ben! The "bad" Peter is just a whiny douche! Hey Harry, your dad's death wasn't Peter's fault and I just never get around to telling you! Sandman's arc was cut from the film! Venom is a cardboard cut out!)

 

And any way you slice it, at least X3 is 30 minutes shorter.

Spider-Man 3 is a great film, with some truly abysmal moments. It's let down as a whole by its absolutely horrendous third act, but I personally think there's more than enough great stuff in the first hour and a half to keep it from being altogether terrible. It's a flawed movie saddled with elements you can tell its creators resent, but even with the seams showing I have a lot of affection and time for it.

 

The Last Stand just irritates me the more I see it and despite a few strong moments there's very little to redeem it. I'm not even annoyed they didn't nail the Phoenix story-arc, I just find the way that the Mutant Cure is handled (especially in light of how Singer made Mutation a lot more overtly analgous to Homosexuality in the first two films) to be very troubling. Looking at it, I find that my sympathies lie far more with Magneto than the X-Men.

For the life of me I cannot understand how people can defend Spider-man 3 in any capacity. It's aggressively bad.

 

Spike, you describe it as a great film with some truly abysmal moments, I'd call it an awful film with some great moments. People have immediately, and correctly, singled out the Sandman birth as the standout. It's a haunting sequence made by a director who is involved. The first fight between Peter and Harry is kinetic and exciting and it's loaded with characterisation and tension. For the first 40 minutes the film is good at best. Then the wheels come off spectacularly...

 

Even if you aren't familiar with what happened behind the scenes it is plain to see that Raimi is focused solely on the Sandman and clearly loathes the symbiote. The strutting, dancing Peter is ridiculous. Intentionally so, but still it's a disastrous decision considering the film tries to get deadly serious five minutes later. The symbiote brings out Peter's darkness, it makes him stronger. In the film it gives him mad piano skills and eyeliner. There is just no sense of threat there whatsoever. When Peter hits MJ we shouldn't be wiping away tears of laughter from our faces. Likewise for the scene in the church tower to resonate in anyway we need to be afraid of the suit. Peter needs to be afraid of the suit. 

 

If Raimi one day admits he intentionally sabotaged the symbiote storyline just to spite Avi Arad I would believe him.

 

Great idea for a thread by the way.

 

 

 

I might give it to Spider-Man 3 because X3 fucked up the characters the worst. It's like someone stepped in and said "hey let's have this character do that!" "but that doesn't make sense" "who cares, we need to make the deadline!" Spider-Man's problem for me is being overstuffed, and having some really bad acting, but those didn't make me pull my hair out like X3 did.

Spider-Man 3 is made by a vastly talented but compromised filmmaker.

 

X-Men: The Last Stand is made by fucking morons.

 

Real Sophie's Choice for me here.

Spiderman 3's fails narratively, while X3 fails cinematically.  Pick your poison.

 

I find Spiderman 3 easier to like mostly because Raimi's goofy sensibility is harder to be mad at.  X-Men is more self-serious in its approach, so its failures hit harder for me, even if they aren't as blatant as SM3's.

 

They're both utter shit. One was obviously the victim of studio executives and the other was directed by Brett Ratner.

This thread brought back a few people I haven't seen post for a while!  Naisu job!

 

I think X3 coasted by on its mediocrity.  

 

Spider-man 3 aimed much higher and fumbled it in some VERY obvious ways and it FELT like an overlong slog.  Over time, I've come to appreciate what it set out to do.  I love the understated ending and the first half hour or so before Peter learns about Marko.

I think the better question is which is better X-Men 2 or Spiderman 2?  I think we know where Naisu stands, but to me Spiderman 2 is still the best superhero movie we've gotten, in no small part because it has the best action sequence in the train fight.

Spider-man 2 has lost very little of the luster from my first viewing.  I still think it's great.  Not even my disappointment with the 3rd movie can take away from it.

 

X2 has diminished considerably since the high of seeing it that first time.  I'm not sure how much X3 affected my estimation of it.  Not much, I think.  Still love so many sequences and moments from the film, but not the whole.

 

I also believe that Spider-Man 2 works so well because Raimi had a lot more free reign and Alfred Molina's excellent work as Doctor Octavius.   As for X-men 2 it's a great sequel that demonstrates how well Singer had nailed the whole "mutants living us" angle. It's a shame that we'll never get to see what he had planned for X-Men 3.

 

 

I've only seen Spiderman 3 and X-Men 3 once each, so I don't remember them super-clearly, but while I was annoyed by SM3, I actively hated XM3. It's such a brutal mishandling of the source material. Not only does it quickly kill off 2 major characters for no real reason, it also gets rid of Nightcrawler (undoubtedly the highlight of X2) without even addressing it. It's just a dumb, ill-conceived movie.

 

As for X2 and SM2, I've never quite gotten the unadulterated adoration SM2 gets around here. It's a very good movie, and I enjoy it a lot, but I'm not over the moon about it. X2, on the other hand, works like gangbusters. It starts off with a bang (one of my all-time favorite action scenes) and never lets up.

The White House attack is the X series best action sequence.  In fact, it's about the only really great one.  Wolverine's fight with Deathstryke is pretty good, but the rest are collections of sometimes cool action beats that never develop the pace and energy to come together as a sequence.

Again, I think they have cool moments, but they tend to be brief or disjointed enough that they don't develop the energy of a truly great action sequence like the White House attack (or the truck chase in Raiders or the train fight in SM2 or whatever example you want to use).  And I really like the movie.  I just think it produces more great moments than great sequences.

X2's strengths lies not in the action--which is good and makes good utilization of a variety of powers--but in moments the punctuate the beats between the accent. Magneto's prison break is a microcosm of this--it's little things, like his smile when the guard first enters the room, feeling the presence of an old friend, or just the casual way he walks out while the metal balls wreck havoc on the place. The whole film is filled with these character building flourishes, and that is what makes the whole damn thing feel so rich and enjoyable.

 

That said, Spidey 2 wins by a mile. I've stated it elsewhere, but just the way they pull of making Peter Parker a living, breathing, three dimensional character that works entirely based on the grounds the film sets up--no prior comic book reading required--is a straight up triumph of filmmaking. "Go get'em, Tiger" is still one of the best moments of the last decade.

Last Stand has Hugh Jackman's sexy ass.  Last Stand wins.

I haven't ever really gotten into this here, as I know the movie is crazy revered, but the love Spiderman 2 gets is completely mystifying to me. I don't exactly dislike it, but I just don't understand it. I find it to be a pretty boring sit, frankly. Lots of characters I don't care about, and some I actively dislike (Dunst and Franco do nothing for me), several long talky scenes spelling out some fairly general stuff about heroism, a villain made sympathetic to the point of being neutered, and a deeply irritating Importance of Being Ernest subplot. 

 

Although I should point out that I don't really give a shit about Spiderman. This did not stop me from liking the original quite a bit though, but then, that might just have been Dafoe.

X3 is middle-of-the-road mediocre, never hitting the high highs or low lows of SM3. It's a wash, but Raimi may get extra credit for effort and legacy. I agree with the poster who said they weren't mad when they left X3. It doesn't offend enough to warrant ire. Course that may have something to do with tempered expectations. We knew we were getting mediocrity as soon as Ratner was set to direct. Raimi had us expecting a slamdunk finish after SM2.

This times a thousand. X-3 being naff was almost a forgone conclusion. I remember when I came out of Spider-Man 3 I just couldn't understand what went wrong. Not even Bruce Campbell saved it for me. Just bollocks. 

 

Though this fight has been fought many times, and will be fought many times in the future, I don't think the symbiote is bringing out the darkness making him stronger, it is releasing all the pent up inhibitions which keep him from utilizing what he has. I hate the entire Sandman story, but love Dark Peter because that is exactly how Peter Parker thinks cool, suave people are. He grew up watching movies with his grandparents. Hell, had we more time in the film, Peter would have found a way to go to the Copacabana.  He wants to be the tall, dark stranger.

 

 

 

This is the problem when you have three villians. We have to afraid of his black pants. Do we need scenes where Peter is sitting on his couch watching the suit threaten to kill a puppy if Peter doesn't put it on?  Creepy shots of Peter looking out of the corner of his eye with the closet door behind him?  I am being facetious, but really?  The suit makes him unlike himself. He has worshipped the ground Mary Jane walks on. The suit made him the guy he hates: the guy that beats on Mary Jane, like her father and her previous boyfriends.

 

Ultimately, the movie was a disappointment for me. The focus was too spread out, the retconning was terrible, and I think they wasted the film by trying to cram it full. Hell, Venom/Goblin would have been fine enough. I have never been in love with the Sandman as a character, so I could care less about having him in the film.

 

 

 

This would bother me the most because I like Sam Raimi, but I have little appreciation for anyone who sabotages a job out of spite.  Any job. Do the job to the best of your ability, even if the guys you are working for a pricks, do the job and never take another from them.

There are parts of Spiderman 2 that I like a lot, but I am kinda in this boat. I like Spiderman much better, and I feel it is because of Dafoe

 

I think it's a little more complicated than that. He's always gone on record as hating Venom. By the time it came for part three, he wanted the two-parter with Sandman and Vulture, but that jerk Avi Arad demanded Venom, and Sony pushed against Vulture. Raimi could have pulled rank and acted up, risking his job, but he played it safe, even though he went in blind, with no idea how to make Venom work. I kinda wish Raimi was a jerk about it instead and put his foot down on the "No Venom" idea, even if Sandman being there when Uncle Ben died was a Raimi-sponsored misstep.
 

 

  I think SM3 should have made Peter full of himself before he gets the black suit. Then he would acted like more of a tool and that is what pushes MJ away. I found it weird that the script had MJ just once try to talk to Peter about how she was going though a rough time. Then she goes back to Harry. There is also that scene where a crowd cheers Spidey swinging by and she makes a disgusted look because its not for her. There should have been more incidents of stuff like Peter giving Gwen Stacy the upside down kiss. Peter was supposed to have an arc of learning some humility, but the execution was weak. The script also made MJ be kinda of a bitch. Still like Lee and Campbell's cameo's.

Got to side with X-3 here, if only for the sequence of Pryo and Magneto using there powers creatively. I love me some Spiderman but comparing the two films X-3 is a better ending to the series than Spiderman 3.

 

Ok that's fair and I get that. My issue is that 'goofy Pete' is the extent of the suit's hold on him. Struttin' Pete is a great start to showing his descent but the film is so jam packed that there isn't time to any more than that. There's just about enough time to squeeze in a backhand to MJ. Pete never loses control he just becomes a bit of a prick. Up the stakes, have him beat a mugger half to death. Make the suit dangerous.     
 

I really like Venom but even if they'd jettisoned Sandman there still just isn't enough time in one film to introduce the symbiote, eeeevil Pete, Eddie Brock and then Venom. It just doesn't work. I think the film would have worked better with Harry going completely mad and working with Marko (give me some time on that I'll add some fanwank later) 

 

 

 

I was being silly there. Sort of.

 

 

I could shrug off X3 because I knew going in that it was going to be disastrous.  I bought my IMAX ticket for Spider-Man 3 almost a month in advance.  When that film was over, the guy next to me looked at me and we both shook our heads in disbelief at what we'd seen.  I still want my $12 back.

No love for the building falling scene in SPIDER-MAN 3? Makes the destruction in TRANSFORMERS 3 look like vomit.

I personally would have prefered your version of the film and thought the same at the time. But if the studio is going to push Venom, why include the Sandman as well.

 

I'm just pissed because at the time, Raimi had meetings with Ben Kingsley to play the Vulture. And when they were going to do Spider-Man 4, John Malkovich was going to be the Vulture. That's two great Vultures. WASTED.

I heard Larry David was in the frame at one point too.

Spider Man 4 certainly would have been an interesting flick. I remember reading Larry David, and Malkovich in talks for the Vulture, and Anne Hathaway as his love interest. Than I also remember like it was yesterday reading about Jason Statham playing Electro and Jim Carrey as Cletus Kassidy aka Carnage.

 

I didn't hate Spider Man 3 as much as X Men: The Last Stand because I didn't care for the antagonists as much. I loved the phoenix storyline all of my life and they butchered it. It bothers me even more knowing that they wanted to do it right (as I remember reading ages ago) but the Fox wanted an approach not as "mythical". In a fucking X Men movie. 

 

I understand they made Venom a pussy, but I've never really understood the appeal in Venom. I realize he's viewed as Peter Parkers Darth Vader, but I've never been all that interested in him. So it didin;t bother me as much when they fucked up that story.

 

Spider Man 3 has great performances all around, even from Grace who does the best he could with the little he was given, and an excellent main plot involving the Sandman with a show stealing performance by Thomas Hayden Church. The action scenes are all fantastic, the effects were top notch, the music was beautiful and it felt climactic. I always say Spider Man 3, is a good movie, but a bad adaptation. Had they had cast someone believable as Eddie Brock and given Venom more power than people probably wouldn't have hated it as much.

UrchineSLICE, Maybe if Raimi didn't try to make Sandman...Likeable people would have enjoyed the film more too.  I hated seeing Spider-Man just let Sandman leave like that.  I would have actually liked to see Spider-Man make a deal with Sandman.  Sandman Goes to Jail, in return for a story about his sick daughter, leading to her getting cured, but Sandy paying for the death and destruction he caused.  The only semilikable Spider-Man villain is...The Lizard!  Most of the others are...EEEEEEEEEEEvil!  Not so with Raimi's Spider-Man!  I am hopefull that Marc Webb, will make a better film about the wall crawler.

I'm with you there Duke. I couldn't understand why Sandman couldn't have just been a criminal. Osborn and Octavius had that "they're went all that bad" thing going on. I was really waiting for a straight up villain. Boo-urns   

Peter Parker's Darth Vader hahahaha

 

I'd have loved to see a full on Absurdist take on Spider-Man with Larry David as the Vulture, just being an asshole and using the power of Anti-Gravity to steal women's purses! And Hollywood really really needs to learn that because ONE movie has a villain related to the hero, YOU DON't HAVE TO MAKE EVERY MOVIE USE THAT SAME IDEA!

One of the things that were so great about the Spiderman comics is how random they were. Spiderman would be "on patrol" and run into a guy with a "battle suit" that makes steel like Rings out of pollution, a suit that is covered with Rings, worn by a guy who calls himself.....The Ringer! And Spiderman just laughs his ass off while dodging all those rings before mashing the Ringer in the face. Or Rocket Racer, or Frogman....and Electro, while a legitimate threat, had a goofy as hell costume.

 

I think Raimi "gets" all of this, but the Suits want fucking Spider-Hamlet, so we got a half-assed version of both. Bah.

I also agree with Duke. Spidey can still catch the bad guy and turn him over without being hate filled and obsessed with revenge. In the first two movies  he is a nice vigilante. He is more about stopping crime and helping people than hurting someone. Spider-Man isn't Batman where he pummels people and scares the shit out of them.