FA+
Shop
**spoilers** Spider-Man: Homecoming **spoilers**
8 years ago
Saw Spider-Man: Homecoming today. I know a lot of people are excited that Marvel got Spider-Man back, but why did they seem to forget that Spider-Man has Spidey sense and should be able to dodge things? We don't need the obvious Spidey sense of the original trilogy, but there are only two scenes where he consistently dodges things. Maybe he's just inexperienced at this point, but it seems weird to have Marvel botch something like that.
Michael Keaton's Vulture was the best part of the movie. The reveal of who he is in relation to Peter was one of the better twists in a superhero movie and Keaton handled it so ably. His amazing performance kind of overshadowed a lot of the other parts. Zendaya's character obviously will have some role in the coming movies, but in this movie, she didn't seem to have a character. She just commented on things and winked at the audience. Hopefully in the sequel, they'll start developing her if she's supposed to be MJ.
Happy Hogan should be fired. His negligence of Peter led to a near-loss of a lot of Avengers tech that would have been disastrous down the road. There is no reason to promote a man who is given one job and fails to do it. The same could be said for Tony's refusal to take Peter seriously to the point that he takes away Peter's suit and nearly gets him killed. They tried to shoehorn in that silly lesson about being more than the suit, but it just seemed like, in retrospect, a bad move. Having said that, in the larger scheme of things, there's been a clear effort to make Tony more morally grey and this fits well with that.
Going back to that lesson, I felt that there was some hint of Peter feeling like Peter Parker is the costume and Spider-Man is who he really is and I don't know how to feel about that. I associate that general idea with Batman more than anyone else. I feel like Peter has always felt a pull between being Peter and being Spider-Man, but he's not supposed to be consumed by Spider-Man to that degree. I can understand the allure of superhero life being better than "civilian" life and Peter hasn't had quite as much hardship in this current continuity than he has in the comics, so maybe that's all that they were going for and I'm reading too much into it.
Overall, it's a Spider-Man movie. It's difficult to say where I place it in the ranking of all of the Spider-Man movies. I don't think it was as good as Spider-Man 2, which I consider the best one. It's continuing in the footsteps of the last two Spider-Man franchises by having everyone in New York City know that Peter Parker is Spider-Man, so there's that, I guess? I hope that in future films, we get more Spider-Man because I feel like this Spider-Man hasn't fully developed yet. He has a couple of wisecracks, but I want a full-fledged wisecracking Spider-Man. Andrew Garfield has gotten the closest to that.
Michael Keaton's Vulture was the best part of the movie. The reveal of who he is in relation to Peter was one of the better twists in a superhero movie and Keaton handled it so ably. His amazing performance kind of overshadowed a lot of the other parts. Zendaya's character obviously will have some role in the coming movies, but in this movie, she didn't seem to have a character. She just commented on things and winked at the audience. Hopefully in the sequel, they'll start developing her if she's supposed to be MJ.
Happy Hogan should be fired. His negligence of Peter led to a near-loss of a lot of Avengers tech that would have been disastrous down the road. There is no reason to promote a man who is given one job and fails to do it. The same could be said for Tony's refusal to take Peter seriously to the point that he takes away Peter's suit and nearly gets him killed. They tried to shoehorn in that silly lesson about being more than the suit, but it just seemed like, in retrospect, a bad move. Having said that, in the larger scheme of things, there's been a clear effort to make Tony more morally grey and this fits well with that.
Going back to that lesson, I felt that there was some hint of Peter feeling like Peter Parker is the costume and Spider-Man is who he really is and I don't know how to feel about that. I associate that general idea with Batman more than anyone else. I feel like Peter has always felt a pull between being Peter and being Spider-Man, but he's not supposed to be consumed by Spider-Man to that degree. I can understand the allure of superhero life being better than "civilian" life and Peter hasn't had quite as much hardship in this current continuity than he has in the comics, so maybe that's all that they were going for and I'm reading too much into it.
Overall, it's a Spider-Man movie. It's difficult to say where I place it in the ranking of all of the Spider-Man movies. I don't think it was as good as Spider-Man 2, which I consider the best one. It's continuing in the footsteps of the last two Spider-Man franchises by having everyone in New York City know that Peter Parker is Spider-Man, so there's that, I guess? I hope that in future films, we get more Spider-Man because I feel like this Spider-Man hasn't fully developed yet. He has a couple of wisecracks, but I want a full-fledged wisecracking Spider-Man. Andrew Garfield has gotten the closest to that.
Also, for the MJ thing, I read somewhere that calling her MJ was just a joke, and she's not the MJ. She may or may not end up being a serious love interest for Peter. I think she will be, but we'll see.
As for the Happy/Tony thing. Happy is Tony's best friend and isn't going to be fired. It's not really established in the movies all that well, but in the comics they are very close. There are a few more reasons, though. They are very clear throughout the film that Peter doesn't respect professional boundaries with Happy. It's established early on in the movie that Peter messages Happy for every little thing, and Happy was particularly busy with prepping for the move. And while it was a pretty big mistake, his boss also created Ultron, who almost destroyed the entire world, and he's still allowed to be Iron Man, so he'd be kind of a hypocrite to sack Happy for getting sick of dealing with a teenager and ignoring him.
For Peter being too caught up in the superheroing, I think that's intentional to really show his immaturity. He's putting his entire identity into a persona that no one even knows is him. As he gets older, he'll have to reconcile his superhero side with who the "real" Peter Parker is, and that will probably be the focus of the next film. He's a teenager, still trying to find his place in the world. To me, this was GOOD character building.
I'm glad you brought up Happy and Tony's relationship in the comics, but it's weird that you think Tony being a hypocrite would be out of character for him. He's kind of an awful person at times. In the movies, the creation of Ultron was a result of his PTSD from the Battle of New York and then he wanted /all/ superheroes to be registered, but I won't go too far down that particular garden path. Both Tony and Happy bungled the handling of Peter, failing to understand that he's eager to help. Yes, there was definitely an element of 'boy who cried wolf' and I don't really expect Tony to be a good role model. Going from "I need to create Ultron to protect against future threats" to "probably not a problem that someone is clearly weaponizing tech from the Chitauri and Ultron" seemed inconsistent. The destruction of the bank and the restaurant showed that this was a big deal. I guess it's good that, by the end, Tony recognized that Peter is an asset and knew what he was doing. Upon reflection, maybe it was Tony's fault primarily. I mean, in the age of superheroes, they must have realized that someone would try to steal their giant plane of stuff and the utter lack of physical security enforcement was a problem. Get someone to fly alongside it or something!
The movies have shown Tony is not great at thinking of unintended consequences of his actions. Even in the very first Iron Man movie, he was shocked that his weapons could be being sold on the black market to fund America's enemies. He's a measure none, cut once type of guy that's just so brilliant that it works out for him more often than not.
As for the plane thing, it's possible there was something more urgent the heroes had to deal with, and their state-of-the-art stealth systems and other tech was so good they had no reason to believe that anyone could do anything about it at that point.