The "Spider-Man 3" trailer has been bothering me for a while. While the production looks as visually slick, the trailer shows that instead of a nameless thief that Peter Parker could have stopped killing Peter’s Uncle Ben, it was really the man who would eventually become Sandman that did it.
Presumably, they want the money-shot battles between Spider-Man and Sandman to be more personal, and to have a hook to make Spidey darker in this installment. Certainly, ret-conning Sandman as the murderer is one way to do it. But really, it's a needless change since any fight between Spider-Man and a bad guy becomes personal when Peter Parker sees people being threatened or getting hurt. It doesn’t need to be Uncle Ben, Aunt May, or Mary Jane. He cares about everybody because he knows that “with great power comes great responsibility”™. He knows this because of his Uncle’s death, and as a result, he’s keenly aware that anytime he drops the ball someone could die.
Here's the thing: if Uncle Ben was killed by Sandman, someone Peter Parker did not know about and had no way of stopping the night of the murder, then Spider-Man’s whole character falls apart. The lesson isn’t that with great power comes great responsibility, but that it really does not matter how much power you have or what you do because bad stuff just happens sometimes.
This is not to say that traumatic events are necessary for someone to be a hero (think of Superman, who does the right thing because he can). But central to the Spider-Man mythos is his guilt. It's what motivates him, because it’s pretty clear Peter would have used his powers for personal gain but for the murder. Take that away, and why shouldn’t he go back to his original plan of using his spider powers to earn a buck? Momentum is not a compelling reason to continue being a hero.
Maybe this part of the movie will just be a head game -- perhaps staged by former-BFF-turned-eventual-arch-enemy Harry Osborne -- where Spider-Man is made to think Sandman did it, thus cutting Peter loose of his moral compass. I hope it’s something like that because otherwise, while this flick is sure to look cool, I don’t know if the character it portrays could truly be called Spider-Man.
Posted by JakeM at January 12, 2007 11:24 AM | TrackBack