After the sequel to The Amazing Spider-Man crashed as hard as a movie that size, Sony needed to do something to make one of its most coveted properties work. To accomplish that, they brought in Marvel to help as they rebooted the franchise in its entirety. This seemed like a risky move as it was getting so close to its recent failure, but Captain America: Civil War revealed what appeared to be very promising. Although personally still unconvinced, Spider-Man: Homecoming made me believe in what they were asking the general public to buy.
Due to his recent experience with the Avengers, fifteen-year-old Peter Parker (Tom Holland) is full of excitement. He wants to do more, but to his dismay, the life of a superhero is not always full of action. This level of inactivity forces him to return to a normal routine that is difficult for him to accept, so he resorts to becoming a local hero in the neighborhood. With your attempts to be more active, you also have to find time to juggle everything that life has in store for you. That alone is difficult, but things get even crazier when faced with an antagonist (Michael Keaton) with his own wants and needs.
In what may come as a surprise, Spider-Man: Homecoming feels exactly like the teen movie it’s supposed to be. I think most filmmakers would be tempted to turn something like this into a typical superhero movie where the protagonist reaches insurmountable heights in a way that should only be described as quirky and hyperbolic. Instead, Homecoming is going in a direction that could be seen as based on a time when some expect and even require sensationalism.
With this measured approach, it’s important to make a movie that shows the audience who Peter Parker / Spider-Man is. From what we see, he is a child learning about life as he grows up in a world that becomes more complicated and demanding around him. He doesn’t have a great deal of support and guidance, even with his loving and caring Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) trying to be there for him. What makes that relationship even more difficult is that he can’t allow her to get too close due to the secrets she’s keeping from him.
Add to the fact that Tony Stark can’t be around much, this makes the movie even more reasonable and emotionally honest as it accurately replicates a “coming of age” story to a large extent. This being his current arrangement, this puts Peter in a position where he finds himself facing problems that he will have to deal with on his own. As a result, we witness growing pains in a way that we are not used to seeing in movies. Although he’s brilliant, he doesn’t know everything and is still trying to figure out most of it. In this sense, he is essentially a normal teenager, but he only has the great responsibility of the superpowers that he has to carry.
Giving Aunt May, Tony Stark, and the other adults around her more to do on a daily basis also stands out as a defining feature of Homecoming. With their lives as hectic as they are and seeing the way they interact and deal with him, he makes adults feel like adults. In return, this allows Peter Parker from the Netherlands to appear young, immature and shortsighted. As you watch the movie, you will feel like you are much older than him. And that’s obviously important because they are.
Turning adults into adults is an aspect of the movie that also helps create an understandable and even identifiable villain. Nor is he here seeking revenge or trying to achieve something akin to world domination. He simply wants what many adults want for themselves and their families. This is something that is established early on when we meet him and learn why he chose to follow this path.
The only thing that bothered me was the obvious CGI in some of the scenes where they were pretending to be in New York. I know they wouldn’t shoot in New York for financial reasons, but this affected me a little more than I would have liked. Other than that, there really isn’t much to complain about. While this is troublesome, it’s not something that took away from everything else this gave me as a viewer.
Because of the way everything is set up and how well the characters use to build the world shown to us, Spider-Man: Homecoming provides more depth and quality than the vast majority of movies, regardless of the genre they are released in. moment. And if you want to stick only to its genre, Homecoming is one of the best superhero movies I’ve ever seen. In the end, it just goes to show what can be done when you don’t take the easy route and completely trust genre conventions.
