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davidmann95 · 7 years

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Well, that was unexpected.

I know we’ve all had over a year to get used to this kid’s take on the character, and two to wrap our heads around the concept of Homecoming in the first place, but it really is worth reflecting again for a moment on how this movie is impossible. This movie can not be. Spider-Man’s over there, and the X-Men are over there, and the Avengers are over here, and we all knew from day one of Feige & companies’ grand experiment that never the twain would meet. Hell, it wasn’t even just box office failure or negotiations that led to this, but the franchises’ sheer freak incidental connection to The Interview via Sony and therefore the North Korean hack a few years back, with the humiliating scope of how little Sony knew what they were doing with Spidey spilling out into the public eye and forcing them into a corner where they had to take the only realistic way out that everyone was also now yelling at them to do.

But, well, it happened, and in getting the biggest character they could under their umbrella, Marvel Studios had to take on what must have been an almost unthinkable degree of pressure with this flick. Because with this, they had to:

1. Do a movie with an exponentially more popular character than they’d ever handled before.

2. Do the sixth movie in this characters’ series and make it distinct, without moving him into wildly new narrative territory because they want to bank on the preexisting affection for him.

3. Handle this characters’ second reboot in a decade, when the last one was already getting reboot fatigue complaints.

4. Establish this character not just as a successful new franchise like Doctor Strange or Ant-Man, but as the guy who they’ve all but publicly announced they’ll be positioning as the central figure of their $11 billion and counting cinematic universe once Evans and Downey leave.

5. Do all this knowing that if they fuck it up out of the gate they might not necessarily have a second chance to get it right, Sony might just take their ball and go home.

So...it’s fair that I wasn’t expecting too much here, right? Not that I thought it would be bad by any means, but the trailers weren’t exactly blowing me away, they weren’t going to address Uncle Ben which meant the arguable biggest underlying idea of Spider-Man - his overwhelming guilt - wasn’t going to be in here, they were shortchanged a lot of Spider-Man’s biggest stories between wanting to avoid the previous ones and Sony wanting to play hardball with the villains (whether in the hopes of prodding Marvel to fork over a billion or two to buy Spider-Man back outright, or because they’re genuinely dumb enough to think that after all this they can really make a successful solo Venom/Kraven/Mysterio/Black Cat/Silver Sable movie series), and it had an untested director and like six writers. By all indications, this was going to be a very conservative, standard-issue, focus-tested-to-hell-and-back MCU flick where they’d play it fairly safe while integrating him into the larger universe and giving Tom Holland a chance to charm audiences into accepting him, and hopefully all involved would try something a little ballsier for the sequel. No crime, understandable given the circumstances, but they’d have a lot of work to do later on.

This is the first great Spider-Man movie.

Some obvious caveats there: yes, the first two Raimi films are great superhero movies, but as far as I’m concerned that the dude in there is named Peter Parker and wears Spider-Man’s costume is a complete coincidence. They’re the endpoint of a very particular, masochistic strain of thought on the character as defined by pain and isolation - rather than being a dumb teen who thinks the world is constantly shitting on him, because he’s a dumb teen and of course he thinks that - losing in the process most of his charm and energy in favor of framing him as sainted, suffering martyr to New York’s sins. The Amazing movies on the other hand had a basically perfect Spidey in Andrew Garfield, the embodiment of the frustrated, funny, cocky, eventually decent Parker of the original Lee/Ditko years, but he and Emma Watson’s great Gwen Stacy were embedded in some overall crappy movies, which had the unfortunate side-effect of rendering that interpretation of the character radioactive for the time being.

This, on the other hand?

Not to too dramatically oversell what happened here - this isn’t an all-timer hall of fame entry to stand alongside your Dark Knights or Logans. They didn’t take any bold, outlandish risks with it either; this isn’t any more of a deviation from the tonal norm for these movies than, say, Winter Soldier. It’s got flaws to be sure: a couple characters don’t get the time and development they probably deserve (especially Zendaya’s Michelle, who it feels like the writers wanted to invest with a little more of a sense of character development by the end than she’d been given), the plot definitely isn’t as tight as it could be, and the music’s nowhere near as good as the trailers and early parts of the movie would have you think. But it’s a damn fun and funny movie with a lot of heart and palpable stakes, anchored by a take on its hero that, rather than going for a more generic “goofy savior” cartoon-style version I was expecting, ends up pretty heavily and thankfully indebted to Brian Bendis’ original run on Ultimate Spider-Man. It’s a Spider-Man who really does always want to do the right thing and doesn’t want to hurt anyone, but at the same time he’s shortsighted as hell and driven by a boundless need to prove himself for the sake of both spite and a hope of acceptance, mixed with low-grade resentment of his circumstances that gives him just enough of an edge to feel like an actual teenager. Left without the option of talking about his sense of responsibility in terms of guilt, the filmmakers wisely chose to instead blur the line between where his sense of heroism ends and his self-interest begins and ask how far he’s really willing to go in favor of the former, and what kind of strength there actually is in him when it truly comes down to it after a whole movie’s worth of him essentially treating superheroism as an after-school gig.

Speaking of him as a teenager, boy all the high school stuff was great in this one. Maguire and Garfield both paid lip-service to that material as a necessary component of his youth, but speaking as someone only a few years out of those days, this absolutely felt authentic. The crappy announcements, the deliberately weird kids who clearly think they’re better than everyone else, the assholes, no one really knowing yet how to keep themselves in check emotionally, the low stakes that are still at that point the most important thing in your world - even the physical classrooms felt real (I got some serious nostalgia seeing those stacked chairs in the visibly repurposed music room, or the gigantic hall pass). It’s as petty and small-scale as Peter’s time as Spider-Man largely is, and therefore can integrate into the plot as an important part of what’s going on far more easily than ever before, even aside from being the source of a ton of excellent bit players like the teacher in charge of the debate team. The larger characters by and large do just fine too; Tomei’s warm and funny as May, Harrier does a solid job as Liz Allen (especially considering that while she’s the love interest and ends up pretty important plot-wise, they never cheap out try and position her as some true love figure when she and Peter barely know each other), Batalon is fun as hell as Not Technically Ganke, Zendaya steals her scenes even if I get the impression there might have been some meatier work left on the cutting-room floor, Downey is Downey, Favreau as Happy Hogan does a great job essentially taking Jolly Jonah Jameson’s place as the dickish, unreasonable authority figure in Peter’s life, and Keaton is scary as hell with just enough screwed-over “how dare you take what I’ve earned” resentment in the vein of many of USM’s better villains to make him feel like a real guy. And you saw Civil War, you already know Holland’s basically perfect.

There’s a dozen other bits I’d love to go into - like how much mileage they pull out of him not operating in Manhattan proper, or how well the seemingly out-of-place tech actually ends up working, or any number of great moments - but I’d prefer to keep this largely spoiler-free. Suffice it to say that the trailers, which already indicated a pretty decent time at the theater, were misleading: as much as they showed they really did leave a lot of the best out, and what they kept generally works far better in context. To be sure there’s room for improvement in the next one, but this was a far better reintroduction and recontextualization of the character than anyone had any right to expect, and it absolutely does the heavy legwork of setting him up as an engaging figure for the MCU to believably end up pivoting around in years and movies to come. Upper-tier Marvel to be sure; somehow they did the impossible and managed to actually earn a title that brazenly cheeky as hell. Sony, for once you made the right call with Spider-Man: stop thinking you have good ideas and let the grown-ups handle things from here.

#Spider Man: Homecoming #Spider Man #Peter Parker #MCU #Review #Opinion

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