Spiderman III: attack of the plotholes, or, what a rubbish film this was.

Isn't it interesting that when Tobey Maguire is hit by the black goo, that, contrary to most evil transformations, he actually turns into a sexually attractive figure. The film is so incoherent that it is hard to tell what precisely is criticised, but it isn't his promiscuity, because the film presents his song to Kirsten Dunst as his climactically galling act. This opposition raises the question of what Spiderman ought to be. Ought he be chaste? Not necessarily, because the film rewards his entanglement with Dunst. Instead the envenomed Maguire is criticised for having agency: we're only comfortable with a figure like Spiderman if he is entirely contained and subservient in every regard. As Spiderman, his access to and obeisance to a moral code that other characters in the story skate around, as normal people everywhere skate around the moral codes they're looking for, is a compulsion. He is a embodied social justice who, with inhuman constancy (and this is why his relationship with Dunst suffers) fulfills his duty.

There's nothing new about such embodiments, of course. But what is interesting is that when Spiderman is envenomed, he too is given choice, as Maguire was. And when he has that agency - or free will, if you like - he becomes, instantly, an anti-hero.

The lack of faith that this volte-face demonstrates in the franchise's underlying premise - that a person could single-handedly have the power to fight his people's wrong-doing - is what makes Spiderman III so unhappily miscarried a film. The authorial distrust that inverting the hero provokes would be strong enough, properly paced, for two hours' captivation at least. That's why the film is so staggeringly alienating. When authorial trust/distrust is relegated to the role of peripheral gimmick, so is the audience. At which point, it's really pretty hard to engage with the film at all.