Salon’s Stephanie Zacharek is a much better writer and movie reviewer than I could ever be, so I’m going to let her do the talkin’ for me today. I just want to preface her review (reproduced in part below) by expressing my delight in the none-too-violent end of the alien goo (through the ringing of metal against metal) and in the anti-denouement between Spidey and the Sandman. The anti-revenge mode is one I can definitely jive with.

I also really enjoyed Eddie Brock (Topher Grace) taunting Peter/Spiderman with the franchise’s catchphrases, i.e., “My Spider-Sense is tingling” and “Go get ‘em, Tiger.” That is in-jokes done right.

Here’s Stephanie Zacharek:

How to step into adulthood without being a jerk? That’s just one of the questions [director Sam] Raimi, who co-wrote the script with his brother, Ivan Raimi, and with Alvin Sargent, riffs on here. Spiderman 3 is overloaded with the usual special effects, all but one of which are easily forgotten: There’s simply very little that’s particularly new or exciting about Spidey’s swinging between and around skyscrapers while assorted baddies try to cut him down. And Spiderman 3, like the two pictures that preceded it, suffers from an overall lack of cohesiveness: The picture is entertaining enough as you’re watching it, but afterward, the picture still feels like a bunch of events strung together, more than a rich, fluid whole.

But Spiderman 3 is a vast improvement on the last picture in the franchise — in which the chemistry between M.J. and Peter was barely an afterthought — and it’s a deeper, richer picture than even the first Spiderman. Raimi and his co-writers have taken care to give the relationships between the characters more tangible contours than in the last picture, and the actors give better performances as a result. Dunst has more sparkle here, and Maguire draws some surprising creepiness out of his usual boy-next-door demeanor. Of all the actors here, though, Franco is the one who has improved with each successive picture: As a young man battling his own dark side, he brings smudgy layers of depth to a character that might otherwise be a cartoon. In one sequence, a verbal face-off with Peter, his left eye droops in a sinister, lazy appraisal of his sometime best friend; the moment suggests that Franco might have more to show us than most of his roles have required of him.

Spiderman 3 doesn’t have the operatic dazzle of the first X-Men picture, or the mournfully poetic quality of the often, and inexplicably, maligned Superman Returns. But Raimi at least manages to make it both huge and human. He also pulls off one of the most beautiful special effects I’ve ever seen, in any movie, a testament to the ways in which CGI, used right, can actually humanize a film. After Flint Marko — a criminal who’s done all the wrong things for the right reasons — steps into that whirling particle-physics blender, he’s no longer himself: He’s a mound of sand, a one-man desert, and before our eyes he tries to re-form himself into some semblance of the man he used to be. As he tries to stand, rivers of sand run from his muscles. His contours take shape, fall away, and then stubbornly rebuild themselves: He’s a piece of sculptural poetry, a song of being and becoming, a living, moving Henry Moore statue.

Eventually, a bigger-than-life creature, an anguished giant, emerges from this hill of sand. He’s clutching a locket containing a photo of his little girl, and as he surveys this tiny picture, we know that he’s remembering not just the man he used to be, but the man he failed to be. In this one astonishing scene, Raimi and his special-effects artists give us an image redolent of the great beauty, and the gravity, of silent film. Without a word, they sing the ballad of the disappearing man.