"If you're nothing without the suit, then you shouldn't have it."
Hello everyone!
I mean, come on, Infinity War just opened in theatres and it is EXPLOSIVE!
Makes me want to go back to Iron Man and watch it all from the beginning again. That would be a movie marathon to remember.
Instead, however, I picked the one presentation-movie from Phase Three that I hadn't gotten to yet (next to Black Panther) and sat down to watch it sometime last week. It's one of those things that just happens to me, I try to keep on track and end up falling woefully behind.
There's literally nothing like trying to catch up to the Marvel Express.
I'm talking about Spiderman: Homecoming.
Okay, as per usual, all Marvel-related links can be found at the bottom of the page.
Now, to business.
Spiderman is probably one of those superheros who's gotten as many reboots as I have versions of Lord of the Rings. Is there nothing new in the comics to discover?
Don't get me wrong, Spiderman was one of my first ever superhero movies growing up - but Peter Parker, at the time, was played by Tobey Maguire. And I still remember that kiss in the rain with Kirsten Dunst while he's hanging upside down. I think it even won hottest kiss on the MTV awards or something ...
I digress.
Suffice to say, I didn't watch the Andrew Garfield Spiderman versions. I was planning on it, but then they announced that they'd recast Spiderman for Avengers, and I decided that, you know what, I don't want to get the faces all mixed up (looking at you, DC and Flash).
So then I waited and finally watched Homecoming.
Oh right, side-note, I didn't watch Captain America: Civil War. I diligently refuse to watch movies where superheroes fight each other.
Anyway, moving on.
I have to say ... I was disappointed.
It's not that I was expecting a hell of a lot from a movie that's supposed to showcase how a teenager will become an Avenger. But what does it say about the movie in general that my favourite scenes were the ones with Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.)? Or the one scene with Gwyneth Paltrow?
Nothing good, sadly.
The premise of the story is pretty basic: after Civil War, Iron Man sort of takes Peter Parker under his wing, having made him a suit and all that jazz, and tells him to go home and learn to be a hero by being your friendly neighbourhood Spiderman. Peter goes and does it - but at the same time he keeps hoping and wishing for something better, something where he can prove himself. In fact, he's SO thirsty for some more action, he gets right what he wants.
Because of course there's a bad guy. There always is.
In this movie he's played by Michael Keaton, and I have to say I was marginally more impressed with him than I was with the rest of the cast. At least he's got the mileage behind him to pull off whatever script they give him.
In this movie he portrays a man who was originally supposed to help in cleaning New York after the Avengers demolished it in their battle against the Chitauri, but of course S.H.I.E.L.D. waltzes in and kicks him off the job, so he and his cronies start stealing alien tech, refurbishing it, and selling it on the black market. This, naturally, falls under Spiderman's nose.
Now, this is where I agree that Iron Man should have taken Spiderman a little more seriously.
I mean, he has time to globe-hop it to an Indian wedding (for some reason), he can make time to figure out that, uh, big bad is trying to fry things up with Chitauri tech.
But anyway.
Tony is a little busy parenting Peter instead of being a colleague, so Peter goes and does a little superhero-ing by himself - which goes about as well as you'd expect it to go.
I mean, one of Iron Man's fully-tech robots has to fish him out of the river, so ...
That's not stopping the kid though. And Stark should have figured that one out. Was he not a kid once?
Let's not answer that.
While trying to keep his superhero identity a secret from his aunt May (who, I swear, is eating some freaky mushrooms in this movie - was she not supposed to be a moral compass and support for Peter? No wonder he turned to Stark for it, of all people ...) and trying not to flirt with this girl he likes (who turns out, naturally, to be the bad guy's daughter), Peter attends a debate competition, but mostly spends his time cracking the suit and removing the tracker Stark put in there.
Yeah, the suit has a 'training wheels' stage. I'm not even going into that.
Peter manages to save his debate friends from a falling elevator, but unfortunately he can't really do much when it comes to a ship that's pretty much going into halves because of alien tech. Karen, the suit's AI, helpfully tells him as much.
Luckily, however, Iron Man is there to save the day - and not an autobot this time, either.
Tony Stark got into gear as soon as he realized something was up (he's a genius for a reason), and he delivers a hard lesson: people could have died that day, and while they didn't, they would have been on Peter's conscience. Would he want that?
As any father would, Stark takes the suit away from Peter, not that it stops the kid from going after the bad guy. He'll just do it in his old suit.
Determined, and with the help of a friend (ok the friend's been helping him all movie) he actually gets himself onto the plane taking off from Stark Tower (or is it Avengers' Tower?) with the alien technology, which the bad guy obviously wants, and the plane - and tech - are pretty much particles on the ground soon enough. Bad guy also gets taken to prison, but Peter actually learns all about death in that situation because the pilot of the plane, unfortunately, dies.
Somehow, however, this actions prompts Stark to bring Peter further into the fold and the Avengers' training centre, but Peter turns down the offer and goes back to his own neighbourhood to be a friendly spider some more (let's ignore his aunt walking in on him in Spidey outfit which Stark gives back to him). Meanwhile, I'm giggling like a maniac because Tony and Happy both look appropriately terrified of Pepper when she emerges to ask if they screwed it all up and where the kid is.
Lucky for us all though, at least Happy's held on to that engagement ring since 2008!
The end.
Look, you might have noticed I didn't pay much attention to this movie. I'll admit I even skipped ahead a number of times. This just wasn't a story that appealed to me on any level, and I only really enjoyed the Stark scenes. I don't even get why Zendaya was in it, either, after as much hype about it as there was. I may be getting too old to sympathise with the plight of teenagers. Or maybe I just couldn't connect with Spiderman in this version. Either way, this is one I won't rewatch.
For me, this was just a Marvel miss.
xx
*images and video not mine
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