Marvel Marathon: Spiderman Homecoming

Back in Christmas I thought I was being a little overeager starting my Marvel rewatch so soon, however now that the year is in full throttle I think I was about right. Essentially I had to watch Spiderman as a short TV series in 20-30 minutes blocks!

Spiderman is an interesting one in the context of the whole MCU, of course we have the whole ‘rights’ debacle, but also, similar to Civil War I feel like this was a movie that Marvel put a lot of effort into – not saying that some of the others were low effort – just that between wanting to get Spidey right in yet another reboot, superhero fatigue creeping around, and some fairly heavy complaints about casting choices in Dr Strange I think that Spiderman Homecoming was a high priority for Marvel Movies.

And I think overall they succeeded, watching through all the films, Spiderman feels very fresh (quite an achievement as film number 16) Tom Holland and the character writing for Peter Parker is brilliant. I usually don’t like secret identity plotlines, or superheroes trying to balance their ‘real lives’ because it comes across as cheesy, yet I think Homecoming plays this game with just enough humour and fun that its not a drag. Not to mention the scene where Peter discovers the vulture is Liz’s father and we have a tense car ride to Homecoming where we see Vulture work out Peter is Spiderman – it’s a almost psychological thriller-esque style of moment which is unusual in an MCU but probably one of my favourite Marvel scenes ever.

So between the meme-y and awkward humour there isn’t too much to hate about Spiderman. I confess the action gets a little tired in the film, I sort of felt like once a few gags were made about Spidey having to run across a sports field, using the wrong webs etc, the action always devolved into Spidey clinging to walls (a difficult tension to sell as wall-climbing is a superpower so like we don’t know how powerful it is) and then webbing together the environment again, eventually engaging in some sort of muscle straining moment.

What is really cool though is Ragnarok is next, and I’ve been dying to rewatch that for ages!