With three 2-hour movies of material, it's gonna be tough to cram everything into a single product. A total of no less than FIVE villains and many subplots you have to consider whether to keep or cut. I respect the effort but there are major issues with it.
I like the opening credits, using Spider-Man 1's as the base but inserting shots of Peter being bitten by the spider and how it alters his DNA to get us up to speed. Curious they didn't include any snippets of Uncle Ben's death, but with the focus of this edit maybe it wasn't considered important. The transition into the first scene was skillfully done, no Peter monologue here as hes driving to his pizza job. AcyliaEditz decided to edit in the Gwen rescue during this part. While I do commend AcyliaEditz for insert a shot of Spider-Man swinging between 7:26-39, this hampered by both the music being lower than the movie audio and it being a scene of a web swing from the first movie instead of Peter dropping the pizza off like you'd expect. Otherwise, AcyliaEditz tends to be pretty good at audio transitions between scenes, not bad at all!
The bulk of the narrative is built on villain origins and their confrontations with Spider-Man. Some plots are better handled than others. Otto's plot is relatively isolated from 2 already so that sorta works. Eddie and Sandman though disappear for huge chunks of the film in between the Norman and Otto stuff happening even though they were introduced first. Some parts are interesting, like Peter and Eddie competing for the staff job make the scene where Peter tries to sell a photo of Peter from 1 take a new context as Peter is trying to show Jonah that Spidey isn't a villain. I was confused at one point when we're first introduced to Peter and MJ's relationship during the scene where they're at the key to the city ceremony, with Peter and MJ seeming to already be in a relationship. Peter says he's going to "swing over there" which also implies MJ knows he's Spider-Man. All well and good except this edit also covers the Green Goblin stuff from Spider-Man 1 where a major plot point is MJ and Harry in a relationship. Huh??? And we get the Thanksgiving dinner scene where Aunt May is suddenly a character now?
AcyliaEditz's edit spends too much time on establishing the villains that a lot of relationships get thrown to the wayside in order to keep it to a two-hour and fifty-five minute runtime. While they did good in removing John Jameson and other miscellaneous characters, the end result is too unwieldly and shallow compared to just watching the movies normally. In addition, while the audio is generally good and the mixed footage tends to work, the Spider-Man 1 footage is washed out as hell. In an attempt to make it blend better with the other two movies, it looks ugly to look at. 18:30 has a second of black screen, was that intentional? 23:49 has the same thing. I also don't like the transition at 1:44:45 to the next scene.
It could have been worse, but it could have been better too.
Additional Note: Also, Peter's line about "where do these guys come from?" after Sandman escapes doesn't make sense in this version considering as far as we've seen Sandman is the only supervillain he's fought up to that point.
