Here’s a true story I think about sometimes. A couple of years ago, I was interviewing Sam Raimi for the launch of Ash vs. Evil Dead. We started talking about Spider-Man, and I told him I liked Spider-Man 3. He looked down at the ground, sighed a heavy sigh, and said, "Yeah. You and my mother."

Well, Sam, it’s still true. I do like Spider-Man 3—and 10 years after its original release, I'm still happy to mount a defense of it. As hot takes go, this one is closer to lukewarm. I’m not making the case that Spider-Man 3 is the best superhero movie of all time, or even that it’s the best Spider-Man movie. It's pretty clearly the worst of the ones Raimi made. But I still think Spider-Man 3 has been unfairly overlooked, and criticized for all the wrong reasons. (Honestly, that dancing-in-the-street sequence is a blast.) Much of the movie is good, and the parts that are bad are still interesting. At the very least, I’ll take a compelling mess like Spider-Man 3 over a by-the-numbers retread like the Amazing Spider-Man franchise any day.

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Spider-Man 3 begins with an opening credits montage summarizing the plots of the first two movies. It’s a needless gesture—the first two Spider-Man movies grossed an eye-popping $1.5 billion worldwide, so it’s safe to assume most moviegoers were familiar with them—but it does highlight how much Raimi insisted on treating all three of his Spider-Man movies as a single continuous story. This is more unusual that it might sound. The Marvel Cinematic Universe prides itself on being one massive, interconnected story, but it’s still pretty easy to break the movies into discrete parts. (Think about, say, the broader impact the events of Iron Man 2 had on the MCU—if you can even remember the events of Iron Man 2—and you’ll see what I mean.)

Raimi’s densely interwoven approach to Spider-Man also comes with some problems. One of Spider-Man 3’s biggest missteps comes early, when Harry Osborn—who discovered that Peter Parker was Spider-Man, and thus the sort-of killer of his father, in the last movie—briefly develops amnesia and forgets Peter is Spider-Man again. It’s the laziest possible solution to the problem, and a transparent effort to delay the big clash between Peter and Harry for as long as possible. (It’s also, like several of Spider-Man 3’s more eccentric flourishes, a needlessly convoluted solution to a story that might not even be a problem. Isn’t it just as plausible that Harry would delay confronting Peter because he feels kind of, you know, conflicted about murdering his best friend?)

But while Raimi had built up a Rubik’s cube of narratives to develop by Spider-Man 3, he had also developed a world with a density and a history that few standalone superhero franchises can rival. There are moments in Spider-Man 3—like Peter thoughtlessly kissing Gwen Stacy at a pro-Spidey press conference, in an echo of the legendary upside-down kiss from the first Spider-Man, or the climactic return to the graveyard where Norman Osborn was buried at the end of Spider-Man for Harry’s funeral—that trade on powerful images and moments that were cultivated years earlier. Even minor characters—Peter’s landlord and his daughter, Harry Osborn’s butler, and J. Jonah Jameson’s assistant (played by a pre-fame Elizabeth Banks)—are treated generously by Raimi’s fleshed-out world. If Spider-Man 3 sometimes twists itself into knots to make its story hold together, it’s only because it actually took the time to build a universe full of complicated characters and actual consequences.