Spider-Man: Hero Within

I was really not expecting much honestly, but after watching it, I am blown away! The story itself feels completely organic and it flows well. Peter's troubles as SpiderMan are more fleshed out and the romance with MJ seems real. My only complaint is with some of the video fades and cuts that others have mentioned. They felt too abrupt and seemed a bit out of place. That is my only complaint though. If you enjoyed Raimi's Spiderman films, please give this edit a try! I was quite pleased and surprised as well.

I definitely saw the overall narrative and enjoyed the way parallel moments from Spider-man 1 and 2 (like Peter's wall crawl) being in one film brought a certain fusion to the series. A keen sense of storyline was apparent while I was watching. I clearly saw focus on a few key storylines.

As others have said, certain fades were weird. I felt some scenes were cut short for sake of excising so-called "goofy moments" that I rather missed.

Though the intention of the edit is known to the viewer going in, I still feel a shortened version of Peter's other nemesis' could've served as "warm up" villains before focusing on Ock and could've beefed things up a bit.

In all, this feels like Spider-man 2 with one scene from 3 and 15 minutes from 1, and doesn't feel as daring as a 3-in-1 edit sounds. But for intentions sake, I enjoyed it.

This was a brilliant, brilliant fanedit. I loved it! The choices made by the editor and the way the whole thing flowed was superb, IMHO.

If I am to offer some constructive criticism, the colour timing from SM & SM2 are very different to SM3. Personally, I would have tried to re-time the SM & SM2 footage to match the more muted, blueish colour palette of SM3. I also would have moved more of the 'montage' stuff to a bit earlier when Peter first decides to be Spider-Man. Having only the SM3 footage after Spidey makes his choice feels a little short, and yet you do include a montage a bit later that I feel would have worked it a bit better moving it further up. Just personal taste there. I'm sure it's fine as is.

One of the other things I think could be improved (and I'm clutching at straws here) are some of the transistions. If you're going to use a 'fade' then it needs to be rendered a little better or put in a different place or take longer as I noticed it didn't match the fades that Sam Raimi's editors used. The music was sometimes a little off in those transitions too. Perhaps a change of score would help or a audio substitution of some kind.

I really, really liked this edit. And the DVD menu was superb. Excellent edit!

Very nice combination of the best parts of Spider-Man 1 (the origin) and 2 (the villain) in the style of the already classic Superman: Son of Jor-El. As would be expected, due to the characteristics of such a project it can never be 100% perfect and a couple of things are implied more than stated, but those are minor and I thought the new narrative worked wonderfully for the most part. I was not bothered at all by the late introduction of Doc Ock, because the origin segment was so entertaining and because it gave this a Superman the Movie flavor, of which it really has the same structure: origin, creation of heroic persona, first heroics, and it's just now when we get to meet the baddie. In this respect, I thought the use of the crane scene from Spider-Man 3 was brilliant, and reminded me a lot of the helicopter scene from Superman. A classic introduction. The scenes from SM1 have also been color corrected to match the look of the sequels, and the result is spot-on.

However, I must say the edit abuses quite a lot of dissolves between scenes. Some have been already pointed out: the most jarring one is the one after Peter first tests his webshooting, and which I have solved by fading to white for a second before fading to Peter arriving home. The one after Doc Ock decides to rebuild his sun project in the warehouse feels quite awkward too. Others are not that bad, and some even work fine, but most of them I felt would have worked better as straight cuts. Some audio transitions aren't quite perfect either: when MJ says "do I get to say thank you" in the upside down kiss scene, the line ends a bit abruptly, and at the very end when it fades to the epilogue there's a bit of stray music. The epilogue, incidentally, I think would have worked better as a post-credits stinger in the style of the Avengers movies, it feels too fast to be a movie finale.

Extras on the DVD are very nice, with two hilarious shorts, a few trailers of goodness to come, and a feature-lenght commentary by g1orkatsos, Neglify, and juice, in which they, in their usual style, talk about a lot of things. Even about the movie sometimes.

I recommend this edit, it's a lot of fun and pretty solid storytelling, but being the obsessive perfectionist (read: nitpicking pain in the a**) that I am, I feel that it falls a bit short of true greatness due to the excess of dissolves.

This was a pretty good edit. It's not perfect, but it's enjoyable.

Quality - A/V Quality is excellent. 10/10

Visual Editing - There were some awkward edits (a few dissolves that felt out of place and a couple cuts that stood out a little bit), but they weren't "deal breakers" for me. There was some really spectacular things done with the editing as well, such as the footage used from Spider-Man 3 and all the extraneous characters that are cut out perfectly. 7/10

Audio editing - There were 2 transitions that stuck out to me, but it's not like you raped my family or anything. 9/10

Narrative - This is the real interesting part to me here. When I first watched the workprint I was irked by the flow of the story, as we spend so much time setting up Spider-Man's origins without introducing the villain until half way in. But it's kind of how Amazing Spider-Man is structured, in that the villain's story seems like an afterthought. And in a way it's almost like how Batman Begins in structured (spending majority of time on pure origin and then halfway through get to the bad guys). Watching it a second time, this didn't bother me and I was able to get more into the story at hand. 8/10

Enjoyment - I love Spider-Man 1 & 2, so it was easy for me to really enjoy this edit. 9/10

Recommend? If you're a fan of the Spider-Man movies I think you'll like this take on the story. But if you're a stickler for perfection the flaws may stick out more for you.