Spider-Man: Homecoming Review — When Spider-Man Joined the Marvel Machine
Watching the Spider-Man films with the kids has produced our first serious disagreement. They preferred Spider-Man: Homecoming to Spider-Man 2 and Spider-Man 3, although the original Tobey Maguire film remains their favourite. I went almost exactly the other way. Homecoming is funnier, cleaner and easier to follow than the later Sam Raimi films—and, to me, less interesting.
The reasons have less to do with Tom Holland than with what happened to Spider-Man when he joined the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Raimi's films could be melodramatic, excessive and occasionally ridiculous, but they built Peter Parker's story around guilt, responsibility, romance and personal failure. Homecoming strips much of that away and replaces it with something more controlled: a high-school comedy about an enthusiastic teenager trying to convince the Avengers that he deserves promotion.
It works, and the kids' reaction made the appeal obvious. But watching the films relatively close together also makes the trade-off unusually visible. Marvel gives Spider-Man a bigger universe, better technology and a lighter touch. In the process, some of the character's weight disappears.
An Origin Story Without the Spider Bite
One of the smartest decisions in Homecoming is not to repeat the familiar Spider-Man origin. We do not see Peter bitten by a spider. Uncle Ben does not die on screen yet again. There is no extended sequence in which Peter discovers that he can climb walls and jump between buildings.
Instead, the film assumes we already know what Spider-Man is. Tom Holland's Peter has even appeared once before, recruited by Tony Stark for the airport battle in Captain America: Civil War. When Homecoming begins, he has returned to Queens and is waiting impatiently for another call from the Avengers. None comes, so Peter spends his evenings performing the sort of neighbourhood heroics that seem embarrassingly small after fighting Captain America: giving directions, stopping thieves and trying to persuade Tony Stark's assistant Happy Hogan that he is ready for something more important.
That changes when he encounters criminals using extraordinarily powerful weapons assembled from alien technology left behind after the Battle of New York. The weapons eventually lead to Adrian Toomes, played by Michael Keaton, a former salvage contractor who has discovered that repurposing alien machinery for the black market is much more profitable than cleaning up after superheroes.
The plot is refreshingly straightforward. Peter finds something dangerous, the adults refuse to take him seriously, and he decides to investigate it himself. After the narrative congestion of Spider-Man 3, where villains and subplots seemed to be fighting each other for screen time, the simplicity is welcome.
Skipping the familiar origin does more than save time, however. It removes the tragedy through which the Raimi film defined Peter's moral universe. Uncle Ben is never named, and the idea that great power brings great responsibility is not established through Peter's guilt over his death. Homecoming begins after Peter has already decided to become Spider-Man. Its version of the origin story is therefore less about acquiring powers than acquiring judgement: Peter has to learn that becoming a more important superhero is not the same thing as becoming a better one.
From Raimi Melodrama to High-School Comedy
Raimi's Spider-Man films were never humourless. They deliberately mixed camp, broad comedy and melodrama, sometimes tipping far enough into excess that the result became funny in ways that may or may not have been intended. But they took Peter Parker's problems seriously. He struggled with money, guilt, loneliness, responsibility and relationships. People died. Friendships collapsed. Characters made terrible choices and then spent significant parts of the films suffering because of them.
Homecoming operates at a different emotional temperature. Peter's problems are largely those of an awkward teenager who desperately wants adults to take him seriously. He worries about parties, school competitions and girls while his friend Ned becomes almost impossibly excited after discovering that his classmate is Spider-Man.
Tom Holland is extremely well suited to this version of Peter Parker. He convincingly behaves like a teenager: he talks too much, makes bad decisions, gets overexcited and constantly overestimates his own abilities. His eagerness to become an Avenger is simultaneously charming and irritating in exactly the way adolescent ambition often is.
This probably explains much of the difference between my reaction and the kids'. Holland's Peter is easier for them to identify with, and the film rarely requires them to sit through prolonged emotional misery before returning to the action. The storytelling is cleaner and the jokes arrive more reliably.
I still prefer the older approach. Not because a Spider-Man film has to be dark, but because Raimi's melodrama gave Peter's choices consequences that extended beyond whether Tony Stark would be impressed with him. Homecoming is far more controlled about what it attempts. That saves it from the spectacular failures of something like Spider-Man 3, but it also denies it some of that film's strange ambition.
The Iron Man Problem
The biggest change to Spider-Man is not Tom Holland. It is Tony Stark. Peter's fundamental abilities are still his own: he has superhuman strength and agility, can climb walls, and was already building web shooters before Stark entered his life. Tony does not create Spider-Man. What he gives Peter is an enormous technological layer on top of him.
The Stark-designed suit talks to Peter, tracks targets, provides sophisticated systems and offers an absurd collection of specialised web modes. Peter spends part of the film discovering what his equipment can do in much the same way Tony Stark once experimented with successive Iron Man suits. To the film's credit, it recognises the problem this creates. One of Peter's central lessons is that the suit cannot be the thing that makes him Spider-Man.
Acknowledging the problem does not entirely remove it. Raimi's Spider-Man felt like someone whose body had been transformed; the strange thing about him was Peter himself. Holland's version remains biologically superhuman, but much of what the film finds entertaining about his powers comes from Stark Industries. He increasingly resembles a junior Iron Man equipped with spider-themed hardware.
That makes perfect sense inside the MCU. Stark technology is everywhere, and connecting Peter to it helps tie him into the larger universe. But that is precisely the trade-off: the more naturally Spider-Man fits into the machinery of the Avengers, the less peculiar he feels as Spider-Man.
When the MCU Becomes Required Reading
That larger universe creates another problem that became particularly obvious when watching the film with children who had not seen all the preceding Marvel movies. The kids could follow Peter's immediate story. What confused them was why alien weapons were circulating around New York in the first place.
Homecoming opens in the aftermath of the Chitauri invasion from The Avengers. Alien machinery has been left scattered through the wreckage, and the Department of Damage Control takes over the salvage work that Adrian Toomes had expected to perform. Years later, Peter's entire confrontation with the Vulture grows from that leftover technology.
If you watched the MCU as it was released, this probably felt like rewarding continuity. A battle from one film creates economic and technological consequences that become the premise of another. The fictional universe persists instead of resetting itself after every adventure.
Watching selectively years later exposes the other side of the model. Homecoming is comprehensible without seeing The Avengers or Civil War, but it is no longer entirely self-sufficient. Tony Stark's relationship with Peter, the Chitauri technology and Peter's obsession with joining the Avengers all arrive carrying baggage from other films.
The original Spider-Man required virtually no external knowledge. Everything necessary to understand Peter Parker's world existed inside the movie itself. Homecoming inherits an entire cinematic history before its opening credits. That allows Spider-Man to interact with Iron Man and Captain America and lets events elsewhere in the MCU have consequences in Queens, but individual films inevitably become chapters in something larger rather than completely independent stories. For committed Marvel viewers that is part of the attraction. For everyone else, the MCU occasionally starts to resemble homework.
Vulture, MJ and a Different World Around Peter
Adrian Toomes is one of the strongest things in the film because he remains comparatively small-scale. He does not want to destroy the planet or tear open a portal into another dimension. He wants to make money.
His resentment is also understandable. A massive superhero battle leaves valuable alien technology scattered across New York. Toomes's company expects to profit from cleaning up the wreckage, only to find the work taken away by a much larger official operation. He concludes that the system belongs to people with the power and connections to write its rules, and decides to take his share anyway.
The conclusion is criminal, but the grievance underneath it is recognisable. While Tony Stark occupies penthouses and flies around in fantastically expensive armour, Toomes exists much closer to ordinary economic frustration. The film touches a class conflict here that it never quite allows to become central, but it gives Vulture more substance than the disposable world-conquering villains that often populate superhero films.
There is also a familiar Spider-Man device at work: the villain turns out to be much closer to Peter's ordinary life than expected. I will leave the details there, because the way Homecoming reveals that connection is one of its better moments.
Peter's romantic world has changed just as dramatically. The Raimi trilogy invested enormous amounts of time in Peter's relationship with Mary Jane Watson, eventually turning that relationship into one of its weaker elements. Mary Jane too often alternated between romantic objective, source of friction and person waiting to be rescued.
Homecoming largely avoids that structure. Peter has another romantic interest for most of the film, while Zendaya's Michelle remains on the edges of events: sarcastic, observant and apparently unimpressed with almost everyone around her. Late in the film she mentions that her friends call her “MJ,” initials that unmistakably echo Mary Jane without simply replaying the same character.
Even with relatively little screen time, Michelle feels capable of existing independently of Peter. That alone makes her more interesting to me than much of what the Raimi films eventually did with Mary Jane.
Aunt May has been similarly reworked. Rosemary Harris's version was elderly, financially vulnerable and one of the moral anchors of Peter's life. Marisa Tomei's May is younger, more glamorous and considerably less important to the plot, with the film repeatedly turning other characters' attraction to her into a joke.
None of these changes is inherently worse. Several make Peter's surroundings feel more recognisably contemporary. Taken together, though, they remove much of the emotional architecture surrounding the older Spider-Man. Uncle Ben is absent, Aunt May carries less moral weight, and romance is still mostly potential rather than tragedy. Peter's home life becomes lighter at exactly the same time that his superhero universe becomes larger.
Better Effects, Less Spectacle
Technically, Homecoming is obviously far beyond the 2002 film. Spider-Man moves more naturally, environments are more convincing and filmmakers can stage action sequences that would have been extremely difficult fifteen years earlier. Strangely, that made the effects less impressive to me rather than more.
Watching Raimi's first Spider-Man today, there are moments when you can almost see early-2000s Hollywood discovering what computer graphics will allow it to do. Spider-Man swinging between Manhattan skyscrapers was not merely an action scene; the ability to put something like that convincingly on screen was itself part of the spectacle.
By 2017, audiences had already watched aliens invade New York, cities fold over themselves and superheroes routinely flatten enormous pieces of urban infrastructure. Digital impossibility had become part of the basic grammar of blockbuster filmmaking. The technology had improved enormously while the sense of technological wonder had diminished.
Modern visual effects create an odd problem: once almost anything can be shown convincingly, impossibility itself stops being enough to make something memorable.
A Bigger Universe, a Smaller Spider-Man
I have enjoyed many of the Avengers films, but I came to Marvel from the outside. I was never particularly interested in comics, and by the time the MCU became one of the dominant forms of blockbuster entertainment I was already becoming fairly tired of superhero movies.
Marvel deserves credit for finding a remarkably effective formula. Humour, charismatic actors, interconnected stories and spectacular action produced films that could appeal well beyond traditional comic-book audiences. Science fiction and fantasy were already moving decisively into the mainstream through things such as The Lord of the Rings and later Game of Thrones, but Marvel pushed costumed superheroes towards a level of cultural dominance that would once have seemed improbable.
Whether we are better off for having had quite so many superhero films is harder to answer. There is an unknowable opportunity cost to any dominant Hollywood formula: money spent pursuing one kind of success is money not spent discovering another. Without the superhero boom, perhaps we would have received more ambitious original science fiction or fantasy. Or perhaps studios would simply have found another successful formula to repeat until everyone became bored with that instead.
Homecoming shows why the Marvel formula became so durable. It is hard to dislike. Holland is charming, Keaton gives the story a grounded villain, the jokes mostly work, the action moves quickly and the plot never becomes difficult to follow. My kids enjoyed it considerably more than two of the three Raimi movies.
I still think the Raimi films are more interesting, even when they fail. Beneath their melodrama was an attempt to make Spider-Man's powers collide painfully with an ordinary life: money problems, family obligations, romantic failures, guilt and the knowledge that saving one part of your life might destroy another.
Homecoming has a different concern. Peter already knows he wants to be Spider-Man. What he has to learn is that becoming a more impressive superhero is not the same thing as becoming a better one. That is a perfectly good Spider-Man story. It is also a revealingly Marvel one.
The effects became better, the humour broader, the storytelling cleaner and the universe vastly bigger—and somehow Spider-Man himself became a little smaller.
Comments
Post a Comment