I went to the opening session at 12:01am, much as I had done with the previous two Spider-man movies. This time I wore my awesome Spider-man shirt, and I blended in with the rest of the fandom around me.

I rather enjoyed it overall. There were new villains, certainly popular ones. Venom was a tough call to make for a single movie, especially given just how much back-story is needed for him to come about. This made a lot of the earlier parts of the film feel very drawn out, but I can’t see how else you could have covered all of it and kept Venom in the same movie. In a lot of ways, I think it might have been better to have Venom in another movie and just have the setup for it in this one – but that has its own issues, particularly in light of the director and main actors talking very publicly about taking a break from the mega-franchise that has occupied their lives for the last ten years or so.

Some scenes in the movie cater to the “emo” side of Peter Parker as he deals with a lot of issues and is psychologically affected by the alien costume. Since Peter Parker is a raging geek in the extreme and has had a particular ‘look’ going for him throughout the previous films, most of his “emo” was just utterly hilarious, and appreciated as such with peals of laughter from the entire audience. As were his John Travolta moments, for that matter.

I really enjoyed a lot of the CG scenes, particularly with the alien costume. I thought Thomas Hayden Church did a superb job as Flint Marko as well.

The movies on the whole have screwed around with some of the chronology of character introductions and so on, but generally they have kept true to the character intentions. This movie did some more messing with things as they introduced Gwen Stacy, the new Green Goblin and so on… they set out to achieve an awful lot and they did pretty well, I think.