IFDB Review: Spider-Man: Hero Within:

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.

More...