Spiderman: Homecoming Thoughts

Okay, so I'll try to keep this spoiler-free (which will be hard, because one of the things that made this movie onto my top 5 MARVEL movie list is a MAJOR spoiler but it was SO GOOD.)

but basically here's my general overview and opinion of Spiderman: Homecoming.

So this story doesn't involve an origin-arc. That's actually quite a relief to someone who's seen all the other Spiderman films, as it's essentially drilled into our brains: Peter gets a radioactive spider-bite, gets superpowers, does dumb stuff with them, roundaboutly gets Uncle Ben killed. But this element (or lack thereof) could be confusing for first-time viewers who didn't read the previous sentence.

BUT this version of Aunt May reacts much more realistically to the tragedy of Uncle Ben's death than the others (though perhaps rivaled by the Amazing Spiderman's May. I don't know, I haven't watched it in a while), so I can give her points for that.

Still....

Egh.

The villain, Vulture, gets points for appearance. I mean, seriously, his suit makes him look HUGE and when you get Peter's eye-view of their first encounter, he's pretty scary! Plus, he looks more like an army paratrooper or something than some guy who's hair migrated to his collarbones.
              

But though the fights were great, the real conflict between the two was a little vague. I can't tell yet if it was they both shared the ambition to stand out or make a difference but by different means, or if it was the classic "what you're doing is wrong" "says who?" (which isn't terrible, but in this case, just didn't make the struggle really personal).

Yet one of the most interesting things to me about this Spiderman is that the fight isn't based on himself. Peter has every opportunity to run away from it. Vulture blatantly told him to stay out of it. Tony told him to leave it to others to fight. Peter knows that he's not as strong or powerful as Vulture. If Peter walks away and pretends it never happened, nothing bad will immediately happen to him.
Yet Peter fights anyway.
Because if he's not the one to get hurt, it's going to be someone else (and that someone else is NOT his girlfriend!)

So probably my favorite elements of this adaptation is that Peter is the every-man (not the Super-Nerdy Toby Macguire or the Cool-Nerd Andrew Garfield, though they did good jobs as well). He is literally just a high-school kid, ambitious, unprepared, scared, and a bit awkward, but a firm friend to the friends he has. Yet he is also a hero in that he is the most self-sacrificing and caring Spiderman I've seen so far but to describe further would cause me to reveal a spoiler.

On the note of girlfriends, there is more than one female supporting character, and they not both going after Peter or at each other's necks! which is a lovely relief because this is a high-school story, Peter's only fifteen, he doesn't need that much romantic drama yet.

The two girls here would be Liz and Michelle, the socialite captain of the academic team and the constantly reading, messy haired and make-up-less loner.

 

Another great thing: they didn't portray Michelle as the stereotype 'loner/reader girl' (refer to Tom Hiddleston above.)

But as for the nitty-grittyness of the film, there are two almost f-bombs, one of which is Liz playing a 'game' with some of her friends, 'f-, marry, kill', and various other swearwords, an insult name given to Peter references to part of the male anatomy (though it's only mentioned twice), Peter undresses to undershorts twice, Liz and May often wear form-fitting and slightly revealing clothes, Michelle gives Peter the middle finger at one point, and then of course the villain tries to kill Peter, and at one point turned one of his assistants to ash after mistaking a bomb-gun for an anti-gravity gun. In covering up for helping Peter on a mission, one of his friends says that they are perusing porn.

So yeah, overall I think it displays one of the best heroes MARVEL has churned out lately (so far) in that he is human, young, and genuinely cares for other people above himself, but the garbage they threw in does make it rather hard to watch without getting disgusted by the fact that this is the social norm now.

In summary:

Comment below what you thought of the movie and who your favorite character is!
I'm gonna go raid the cookies.