Spider-Man: Homecoming Review — When Spider-Man Joined the Marvel Machine
Official poster for Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017). © 2017 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. and LSC Film Corporation. Used for purposes of review and commentary. 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 enth...