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    BBVA | España

    BBVA | España

    Finance and Business

    (0 Ratings) Rate It

    App

    BBVA app. Download it and conveniently and easily do your everyday banking from your mobile. Get a...

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David McK (3547 KP) rated Spider-Man 3 (2007) in Movies

Oct 17, 2021  
Spider-Man 3 (2007)
Spider-Man 3 (2007)
2007 | Action, Mystery, Sci-Fi
6
6.3 (42 Ratings)
Movie Rating Watch
The black Spider-man suit (0 more)
Emo Peter Parker (0 more)
Too many cooks doth spoil the broth.

Or, in comic-book film terms, too many villains.

Which is the biggest problem with this, the last of the three Tobey Maguire starring Spider-man films: here, we have Sandman, Venom (apparently by studio mandate) and a younger Green Goblin (Hobgoblin?) all competing for screen-time, with the result that none of the character arcs really feel all that complete.

As the movie starts, things are going well for Peter Parker/Spider-man. Not so much for his love interest MJ Watson.

He fails to notice; too caught up in his own success.

Of course, his obliviousness soon drives a wedge between them, a wedge that coincides with the appearance of both the Sandman (pretty well realised) and of the symbiote from outer space that bonds with his suit and eventually with Parker's photographic rival Eddie Brock, becoming Venom (a character that, by the by, is eventually better realised by the movie of the same name than in here)
  
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Gareth von Kallenbach (980 KP) rated The Dark Tower (2017) in Movies

Jun 19, 2019  
The Dark Tower (2017)
The Dark Tower (2017)
2017 | Horror, Sci-Fi, Western
6
5.6 (68 Ratings)
Movie Rating Watch
Adapting Stephen King stories for the screen has long been a difficult problem for Hollywood. For every “Misery” and “The Shawshank Redemption”, there are many others such as “The Mangler”, “Cell”, “and Graveyard Shift” and many more where things did not go as planned.

The big issue is that King often creates detailed characters with complex backstories and puts then in fully developed worlds that despite their supernatural nature, often are easy for readers to relate to.

Also as any reader of his books knows, King is not one to spare the paper and his books can be very lengthy offerings. This is an issue for Hollywood as they are forced to condense a 400-800 page plus story in many cases to fewer than two hours of screen time. The solution has been to try television movies such as “The Langoliers”, “The Tommyknockers”, “The Stand”, and “It”. The problem with this format is that while spreading the story over multiple nights allows more time for the story, they gore and adult content which is often the core of the story has to be greatly watered down.

Which brings us to “The Dark Tower”, an adaptation of King’s largest offering as the series covers seven books and a novella, not to mention a Prequel comic and more. The series rolled out from 1982-2004 with King often saying that he might never finish the series. Fortunately for fans he released three books from 2003-2004 and was able to declare the story told.

The story tells of a world like ours, but different that has “moved on”. It is a dying world where Roland (Idris Elba), is pursuing a wizard named Walter (Matthew McConaughey), who is responsible for laying waste the world and killing all that come into Roland’s life. The books follow his unrelenting chase of The Man in Black over countless years and how he has become a cold and driven individual who thinks nothing of using people to get his revenge.

Roland is the last of the “Gunslingers”, a Knight like group who protected the world and who used guns that were rare in their world to keep the peace. Roland is highly skilled and unlike his now dead companions, is impervious to the magic of Walter which has allowed him to remain alive and continue his quest.

The Man in Black is fixated on destroying the Dark Tower, which protects the many worlds in the universe from the outside evils that look to destroy it. Along with a young boy from Earth named Jake (Tom Taylor), Roland must find a way to save the universe and exact his revenge.

The film keeps the conflict between Roland and The Man in Black but greatly condenses the story as it includes references to things in the first two books but omits much of the backstory and plot of the novels to tell what I would call a story that was inspired by, but not based on the books.

This is at the core the biggest issue with the film. I have read the books and while I wanted an adaptation that was closer to them, I did find myself enjoying the film more than I expected to. The leads were very good and even though they had a very watered down script to work with, they did a good job and the finale does have some nice visuals and action to it.

People I know who have read the books have naturally been very disappointed with the film but those who have not read the books have mentioned that they enjoyed the film and accepted it as a fun bit of escapist adventure.

There has been talk of a television series that would focus more on the third book onward which hopefully would include how Roland gained new followers from our world who were trained to be future Gunslingers. That remains to be seen as the success of the film will likely hold the key. I hope we do get to see it as there are countless stories and characters yet to tell in this universe and I think fans deserve to see them as King wrote them.

http://sknr.net/2017/08/03/the-dark-tower/