Spider-man 3: A Review

“If you want forgiveness, get religion” - Spider-man

Christ gets a prominent role in Spider-man 3. Driven to desperation, Eddie Brock, the photographer who failed in his attempts to surpass Peter Parker at the Bugle, finds himself in a church. Kneeling towards the front, he looks up at the crucifix, a vivid image of Christ on the cross, and begins his prayer. Humbled, emotional, weakened, he stumbles in the address until he finally states his single request to God: “Kill Peter Parker.”

OK, so maybe it’s not the best showing for faith in film. Nonetheless, the Spider-man saga has provided interesting commentary on heroism, if not faith, over the years. Building around the mantra that Stan Lee gave to the character from early on, “With great power comes great responsibility,” we have seen through the films a young man fighting to understand the nature of the abilities that were thrust upon him and how he can best make use of those powers for good. But Spider-man isn’t Batman, and consistent with the character the movies haven’t tried to move too much into the inner life and explore Parker’s motives. We have seen his sorrow over Ben’s death, and we have seen his failed response to that death. Beyond that, most of the emotional drama that has driven Parker to date has been his struggle to live out his new existence while still living an “ordinary life.”

Spider-man 3 is a worthy, if lesser, successor to its predecessors. $300 million can buy you some eye-popping special effects these days, but it seems it can’t always buy a good editor for a script. While the movie resists the “franchise-killer” label that other superhero “thirds” have embraced (see Batman and Superman for excellent examples), it is still a franchise that is at a crossroads, struggling to make a decision as to whether or not it is going to let these characters grow. Peter and Mary Jane have now secured their place on the list of the most boring romantic couples on the screen, having a relationship that is still marred by a thoroughly adolescent inability to communicate the barest of emotions, and as a result we feel like we’re lost in an endless relationship cycle manufactured by silly misunderstandings. While it may be unfair to simply shout at the characters, “Grow up,” the movie often fails to lets us see them grow at all.

Despite this weakness, Spider-man 3 does give us hints at a deeper voice that makes the film imminently watchable. The film’s three villains, Green Goblin, the Sandman, and Venom, all provoke Spider-man to face three basic issues in his life. In Green Goblin, the identity assumed by Peter’s friend Harry Osborn, Parker must encounter the costs his alter ego has imposed on the people he loves. In this journey, Goblin takes Spider-man on early in the film, and winds up losing his memory. This lets us glimpse at a rejuvenated Harry, freed from his resentment of Peter as he is freed from his memory of Spider-man’s involvement in his father’s death.

Alongside Harry’s story we are introduced to Flint Marko. A fugitive, we see him first on the run from the police, pausing in his run to visit his daughter. After seeing his softer side, we see him stumble into a restricted location into the middle of a radioactive science experiment (always the magic elixir of the Marvel universe). This transforms him into the Sandman, the springboard for some of the movie’s best effects. Oh, and it also turns out that he was also involved in Ben Parker’s murder, a revelation that is laid on Peter as an early piece of the unwinding of his relatively joyful existence.

Our third villain in the rogue’s gallery is Venom/Eddie Brock. Eddie is an ambitious photographer bent on stealing Peter’s job. Venom’s origins remain a mystery in the film, but originates as an alien black oil-like substance that first finds its way to Parker. The parasite tends to act as a symbiote, first attaching itself to a host then magnifying certain characteristics of its host, particularly the aggression within the host. This is key, because it tells us that whatever we see of the people who become victim to the parasite exhibit that which was already within themselves.

For Parker, the parasite’s first victim, it brings out an aggression and anger that we have only briefly glimpsed in previous movies. On the street, he is ridiculously confident, oblivious to the disgust of others at his newfound swagger. In costume, he is angry and aggressive, showing no restraint against his foes. For Brock, the second victim, the effects are even more pronounced. Consumed by anger, he transforms into the character Venom, a vicious parody of Spider-man, set on killing him. Both victims manifest their darker side, and so allow us to glimpse the shadows of their souls.

With the stage set for a grand piece of action, spiritual themes emerge that shape the film in significant ways. Chief of these is the matter of forgiveness. When Ben died, Peter went after the one he assumed was his killer, the one that he failed to stop shortly before Ben’s death in the act of committing a theft. While he wasn’t directly responsible for the thief’s death, Peter blames himself for both deaths. Facing the Sandman in this film, he does his best to kill him, and through all three stories Peter must face his need to forgive. As Aunt May reminds him, the key for Peter is not in forgiving others, but in forgiving himself.

This theme of forgiving oneself is echoed in other recent films. I think especially of The Lookout, a recent suspense film that deals deeply with a character driven by his own failure to forgive himself. In both cases, we see people who shape their lives around the realities of unforgiveness. For Peter, one of his greatest needs in his life is to extend grace to himself, and his failure to do so proves destructive to his most precious relationships. Both films suggest a broader need in our culture to contend with our failure to forgive ourselves for the mistakes of our past.

Along with this theme of forgiveness, we also see the theme of vengeance. This is such a common theme in modern super-hero films, often manifesting the values of the old westerns, that we could often pass on the issue without comment. Here, though, the desire for vengeance is paramount in Peter’s struggles. When Peter learns of Flint’s involvement in Ben’s death, he is consumed with a need to bring him to “justice.” After he assumes that he has done so, he is angry with Aunt May for failing to share in his exuberance. Aunt May reminds him of the limits of “vengeance,” and the need to let go of the pain of the past.

Peter can’t let go, and so we are invited to connect his desire for vengeance with his failure to forgive himself. Indeed, they are the same problem, as Peter can’t forgive either himself or others. He is tied up in the past, and is desperate to know the freedom of forgiveness.

Standing behind these two issues is the issue of sin itself. Actually, sin is not the film’s word, so maybe we should speak of it as “corruption.” The film’s world-view posits that Peter’s desire for vengeance and unforgiving attitude are not character flaws that exist in a vacuum, but are manifestations of a darkness in his soul. Peter doesn’t forgive because there is something within himself that doesn’t want to, a dark spot that revels in the blood lust of vengeance.

The problem with Spider-man 3 is that it doesn’t believe it’s own vision. The film positions itself well in trying to understand the universal corruption of the human soul, that which Christianity calls sin. But what is the solution to that corruption? For the film, the solution lies within Parker himself. Similar to his mantra, Parker comes to see his need to “make good choices,” knowing that bad choices will always prove tempting.

This reveals a basic failure to understand its subject. If Parker has this darkness within himself, if the aggression, anger, and selfishness that we see when he dons the black suit is truly an expression of his deeper urgings, why should we believe that there exists within that same person the ability to “shut it off?” If this corruption is real, than it should effect the whole person, including whatever faculty that Parker must rely on to make that good choice.

It strikes me that the filmmakers are ready to give us a universe that has good and evil, and even see some of that evil lying within ourselves. But they’re not ready to call that evil “sin,” and as such, there is something missing in their moral universe. The Christian view helps us understand Parker’s problem. Through the Christian story, we see Parker’s corruption, made manifest through the alien symbiosis, as the expression of the darkness that we all inherit from the fall. But this problem of sin cannot be solved by ourselves. The darkness is too deep, and it consumes too much of what we have become.

I don’t want to be too hard on the film, because too often Christians believe the same thing that the film does. We don’t like to talk about sin, and at times the church can present the false notion that we are generally decent people in need of minor correction. The gospel story, that we are desperate sinners without hope but for the divine intervention of the cross into our lives, falls away as we present ourselves as morally upright and upstanding citizens. We redefine our moral boundaries so that we can suggest that we generally comply with our diminished moral universe, and can praise God for covering over the slip-ups.

What the we need, and what the film needs, is a deeper understanding of the human condition. Yes, we need to forgive ourselves, and yes, there is a vital connection between our failure to forgive ourselves and our inability to forgive others. But these are merely manifestations of the deeper problem from which we need rescue. At our core, we are in need of transformation, and that transformation must ultimately be found outside of ourselves. We cannot generate it, and we cannot maintain it. We are paupers in need of grace, no matter how good our disguise.

Spider-man 3 understands the need for salvation. Christianity speaks of a need for a Savior. The difference between these two is critical, because in the end we cannot have the former without the latter.