Can't You Just Be A Friendly Neighbourhood Spider-Man?
- Alex Clark
- Jul 9, 2017
- 5 min read
Spider-Man: Homecoming
July 7th, 2017
Dir. Jon Watts
This is the 6th Spider-Man film and 3rd reboot of the series that we have had since Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man in 2002, safe to say there is a fair amount riding on both this film and Sony themselves. Sony, after having decided to go through the first 2 reboots on their own, has decided from their better judgement that this one requires the help of Marvel and Disney. After a brilliant teaser we got in last years Captain America: Civil War, it was Peter Parker’s time to go it alone.
This film manages to swing through that pressure with flying colours. We get two hours of a Spider-Man film that we’ve always needed, and a general consensus is that it’s the best Spidey we have all seen since 2004’s Spider-Man 2 but I would say it goes one better than that, and it’s the Spider-Man film we’ve always needed and always waited for. There is one main reason for that, and that in Tom Holland they have managed to get a young kid to play Peter Parker, a young kid at school, and that’s always how Peter Parker should be. Toby Maguire was 27 and Andrew Garfield 28 when they first portray Parker, and as good as their performances are (at times) they over 10 years older than Parker is in the comics and that just isn’t how it should be, and at times it so obvious that they are that much older. In Tom Holland, I think they have really hit the nail on the head. He’s young, he looks young, he acts young and that is just what we need. He is stepping out into an established world full of grown billionaires, Gods and super soldiers. There should be a clear line in the sand between what Tony Stark or Cap can do against what little Peter Parker can manage.
Homecoming is just as much a Peter Parker movie as it is a Spider-Man movie, which is a welcome change. We don’t get a bloated origin story that we have all seen a million times; or we don’t see Uncle Ben die again. We jump straight into Parker’s life post Civil War, although the timeline being screwed up a bit to what effect yet, I’m not sure.
We are given a good blend of Parker as Spider-Man and Parker as a smart although failing kid at school and the strain of being an after school superhero can have on his young life, love and family relationships with Aunt May. What he also is through all of this is very naïve. We get a snippet of mentor Tony Stark through this film, and as incorrect Stark can be at times, he was usually always right in his father figure role, giving Parker Homecoming’s version of ‘great power comes great responsibility’. But 16 year old Parker doesn’t want to listen to Stark when he has the abilities he has and the suit that’s been given too him and runs head first into danger every single time, and doesn’t look at the bigger picture to stop himself getting injured or almost killed. This approach does work at times to humorous effects through quite a lot of the film.
Parker’s desperation to get Toomes leads him to find the suit has a lot more Stark tech than first realised and we get a good few scenes where he can no longer control the suit, and also ‘Interrogation Mode’ worked brilliantly. It’s this extra tech, which was a real surprise for me, and it worked much better than I thought it would have if I were told two years ago there would be Stark-tech heavy suit coming to Spider-Man rather than a traditional one. What we do get because of that is a lack of certain traditional Spider-Man powers, namely his Spider Sense. The guys behind the movie gave the reason as to separate it from previous adaptations but surely that could have been sorted without taking away something that is signature to the character. The upside we get with the high tech suit is brilliant action sequences that are becoming staple with the MCU. We get 20 minutes or so with the ferry and also Washington DC which is brilliant and also a great change to see Spidey outside of his normal New York settings. In fact, we get Parker outside of New York more in this movie that possibly inside New York, or very close and really that could be the biggest distinction between this adaptation and other without losing the Spider Sense.
Michael Keaton is brought in for what has turned out a fantastic antagonist in the MCU playing Adrian Toomes. He loses his work because of Damage Control, a government organisation created to clean up after the Avengers. Desperate to make ends meet for his family (as they always are) he starts hijacking the alien tech from Damage Control and selling it on, creating his own Vulture persona at the same time. I think Marvel have really struck gold with this one, we all know Keaton is a brilliant actor and to bring him into this setting has the same effects if not more on this film as getting Willem Defoe to play Green Goblin in 2002’s Spider-Man. The twist and turns that Keaton gives as Toomes, and those haunting speeches really do put him up there as one of the best Marvel villains, up there with Loki, although Loki having had much more screen time to show what he is capable of.
The other supporting actors in this movie also hold up brilliantly in Iron Man’s corner we get Happy Hogan and Tony Stark. We actually don’t see Stark as much as it made out in the trailers; in fact we get more Happy than Tony, which I think, is a good thing. Tony Stark has the characteristics to really take a film away from others, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But this film needed to play out as a Spider-Man movie, not an Iron Man one. Ned is brilliant as his best mate, and him knowing Parker is Spidey is all the better for the story. His other school mates and possible love interests MJ (who isn’t actually MJ which I’m not sure about) was weird and funny, Liz who is important to the story in ways I wont spoil. We also get small parts from Aunt May and Flash Thompson, the latter who I don’t like at all. Whether that’s done on purpose or not, we will have to wait and see.
Tom Holland is a fantastic Spider-Man, but by no means is he the perfect Spider-Man. I know how weird that sounds, but that is just what this film needs. We don’t really need another Spider-Man where one night after getting bitten by the spider he can crawl, jump, swing and fight perfectly. We have here the perfect imperfect Spider-Man. His fighting is iffy at times, he ruined a lot of people’s gardens, he is naive and very stubborn but that gives the character so much more room to grow. It would be no good to sit and watch 2 more Spidey films, plus the forthcoming 2 part Avengers if he was perfect at doing what Spider-Man can do. He needs that training and that mentoring for him to really give us what we have been waiting so long for; a Spider-Man portrayal who is just like who we fell in love with on the pages.
8/10 – We get a colourful, fun, and at times mistaken-stricken Spider-Man in Marvel’s first solo venture into the web-slinger. And after 15 years we finally get the Spider-Man film we have all been waiting for. I loved him after his cameo in Civil War, and I love him even more after this. Spider-Man is one the most popular characters to come out of a comic book, and this is very almost the film he deserves.
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