He’s way over-exposed, but the initial idea was fascinating. What Spiderman 3 got wrong is that the symbiote isn’t supposed to be Jekyll and Hyde – the symbiote doesn’t change who you are – but rather that it’s an obsessive lover. Initially, the costume is super-handy: unlimited web-fluid, don’t have to rely on flexing the wrist, don’t have to worry about laundering your costume, don’t have to worry about changing out of civilian garb. (Note, it’s not about becoming more powerful, it’s just more useful…)
But then the suit starts acting on its own to remain close to Peter – it doesn’t want to be taken off, it starts wearing him at night, it gets aggressive towards potential rivals for his affections, etc. And then when Peter realizes it’s alive and tries to get rid of it, it lashes out with the resentful fury of a lover scorned, trying to wrap him up, subsume him, merge the two FOREVER. (Note the subtext of the heteronormative fear of male penetration…) And of course, eventually it hooks up with someone on the rebound who shares its love/hate for Peter and becomes this haunting evil presence in Peter’s life, his dark inamorata.
If it remained at this level, it would be an all-time great villain. But then they just over-used Venom, brought in Carnage and succeeding photocopies, tried to make Venom a protagonist, and on and on.
What makes movies feel “crowded” or “overstuffed” with villains is that filmmakers have felt the need to treat all of the villains equally when it comes to screentime (especially since they’re often introducing them in the same movie that they’re using them) – if instead of that, you’re using already extant villains and make them part of the whole story instead of their own stories, it’ll go much smoother. To give an example, Spiderman: Homecoming featured…
(cut for spoilers)
the Vulture, the Tinkerer, two Shockers, the Prowler, and Scorpion. But it didn’t feel crowded or overstuffed because the film didn’t feel the need to make all of their villains equal in screentime, or give them all backstories and arcs. Rather, Vulture was the main villain and everyone else was part of his story as either a henchman or a customer. Very quick little bits explained that the first Shocker was a flaky hothead and the second was more cautious and loyal, that the Tinkerer was a quippy nerd, that the Scorpion was a psycho that no one liked, and that the Prowler was laid back and only tangentially in the game.
Moreover, in future movies, we’re not going to need a full backstory to explain why the second Shocker or the Scorpion want revenge against Peter Parker or who the guy making the bad guy’s tech is. The previous movie does the setup for us in the same way that Cap: Civil War did the setup for Parker so that Homecoming didn’t have to explain how he became Spiderman besides a quick joke about the spider being dead.
So that’s how I’d do a Sinister SIx or an Acts of Vengeance – rather than giving everyone equal weight and doing backstories and arcs for each villain, you put the focus on the ensemble, and trust in the setup you’ve done in previous movies to do a lot of the work for you so that you can maintain pacing.
As for the black suit, I think the “cool” or “not” thing misses the point – in the comic, the suit doesn’t change Spiderman’s mind beyond making him tired and a bit snappish b/c his body is fighting crime while he’s asleep. The suit is more useful (it can mimic street clothes, it produces its own webbing, and it responds to his thoughts) and it has new vulnerabilities (fire and sound) but only Black Cat thinks it’s cool (Mary Jane hates it, for example). It’s not a Jekyll and Hyde story.
Rather, the plot dynamic is about the suit as an obsessive lover – that it cares for him and wants to help him so much that it begins to act on its own and eventually tries to permanently bond with him against his will, and then reacts to Peter’s rejection by developing an obsessive love-hate relationship as Venom.
But the problem with Spiderman 3 is that it tries to do too many stories: it’s about Venom and Eddie Brock, it’s about Sandman and retconning him into the Uncle Ben story, it’s about Harry as the Green Goblin, it’s about Mary Jane vs. Gwen Stacy, and on and on. One of the things that Homecoming showed is that you can have multiple villains – it’s got the Vulture, the Tinkerer, the Shocker, the Scorpion, and the Prowler – but you need to make them part of one story, in this case the Vulture’s story.
I’ll put my short, non-spoiler version above the cut for people who haven’t seen it yet: it’s good. It’s really good, head and shoulders above the Amazing duology and it holds its own against the Raimi films more than you would think.
Specifically, it has two major strengths: first, as many people have noted, Tom Holland’s Spiderman feels like a real teenager way more than either Andrew Garfield or Tobey Macguire did – in part because the movie makes the most of out its science high school setting by giving Holland a secondary cast of other teens to bounce off of, and by making the conflict between his superhero life and his regular life being about high school things generally (making Lego Death Stars, Academic Decathalon meets, detention) instead of just about his romantic relationships.
Second, as other people have noted, Spiderman: Homecoming feels way more New York (more of a neighborhood Spiderman, you could say) than previous Spiderman movies. The Amazing movies’ idea of New York was some abstracted Times Square theme park, and with the best will in the world, even the Raimi films portrayed an extremely white New York that didn’t go beyond Midtown canyons and various landmarks. But Homecoming felt like Queens, from the multicultural student body at Midtown Science to Spiderman and the Prowler (you were great, Donald Glover!) arguing over which bodegas have the best sandwiches, to the jokes about how the outer boroughs aren’t well-stocked with tall buildings to web-swing off of, to Spiderman’s interactions with neighborhood locals who get pissed when would-be superheroes web their hands to their cars or repay subway directions with churros.
Protagonist
So let’s start with Tom Holland. For all that people complain about the Marvel “machine,” one of the things the machine does very well is make sure that their writers and directors nail the main characters, even if that’s at the expense of the plot, because you have to sell the audience on the character to get the audience to care, and because superhero plots are generally pretty secondary anyway. And Homecoming does a really good job of building on the excellent work that Civil War did. To quote myself:
“I buy Tom Holland more than I ever bought Andrew Garfield or Tobey Maguire – Tobey was always a bit too soft and saccharine for me to buy that he was the irreverent snarker behind the mask, whereas Andrew’s performance was way too much of an over-reaction to the backlash against Spiderman III, and came off as way too cool.
That’s the thing about Spiderman/Peter Parker that makes him tricky: he’s a nerd and a bit nebbishy (although he kind of ages out of that a little – there had to be something there that Mary Jane Watson liked), but once he puts the mask on, he gains the confidence to express himself, even if that is as a smart-alecky motor-mouth. There’s a side of Peter Parker that has an ego, a yearning to show the world that he’s not Puny Parker any more – after all, the first thing he did when he got super-powers was to get in front of TV cameras – that makes him prank J. Jonah Jameson to get back at him, or not just fight the Kingpin but relentlessly crack fat jokes at him.
As I’ve said above, it’s really easy to grab one part of that personality and not the other. And one of the things I really like about Tom Holland’s Spiderman is that I feel like you have both…”
So how did Homecoming build on this? First, the nerd side of Peter Parker was nicely contextualized by his high school (which because it’s an elite magnet school is full of nerds) – he’s extremely high-scoring (he’s bullied by Flash because Peter’s constantly showing him up in class, and he’s the lynchpin of the Decathalon team until MJ steps up in his absence) but you get the sense that he feels like he’s maybe too smart for school so he sometimes gets himself in detention and probably hurts his GPA a bit by not doing homework in favor of his own projects; he’s a joiner (Decathalon, band, etc.) because he’s not very socially confident (hence his small friend circle of Ned and MJ, hence his mini-freakouts about Liz’s party and the eponymous dance) BUT he’s also someone who over-extends himself and then quits (holy crap did that one hit close to home), so he’s seen as a bit of a flake.
Second, that nerd side nicely parallels his super-hero side, with the wonderful euphemism of the “Stark internship” (god, no wonder Flash is jealous). Peter is desperate for recognition, to get called up to the big leagues, to the point where he’s constantly biting off more than he can chew (literally taking the training wheels off too early) to prove himself to “Mr. Stark” and then tries desperately to hold everything together or explain his screwups away when it blows up in his face. (Notably, all of the major action setpieces in the movie except the last one involve situations where Peter’s over-enthusiasm has actually created a bigger problem: foiling the bank robbery causes the bodega fire, his investigation of the alien power source causes the damage to the Washington Monument, his web-slinging damages the fission gun that damages the ferry, etc.) At the same time, he’s trying to live up to the image of what he thinks a super-hero ought to be, whether that’s in posing for commuters and doing backflips for hot dog vendors or making quips at bad guys (notably, his smart-alecking always comes off as a mixture of nervous posing and too much energy rather than coming off as mean).
But most importantly, at root Spiderman is a genuinely selfless hero – his first thought is to save the bodega owner and the bodega cat, he gives the ferry rescue everything he’s got even if he comes up short as 98% sucessful, he tells criminals to shoot at him rather than at anyone else, and in the film’s master-stroke, he goes all-out to save Adrian Toombs who’s repeatedly tried to kill him the moment he realizes that his wing-suit has gone unstable, because Spiderman doesn’t want to “instant death” anyone. And he’s utterly determined, as we see in the whole third act where he goes right after Toombs despite getting his ass kicked by the Shocker, then pulls himself out from the rubble Toombs buried him under, then gets himself onto the Quinjet then saves Coney Island from the crashing Quinjet, and on and on….
Antagonist
So…Michael Keaton. While not given a ton of time, Keaton does a great job reframing Adrian Toombs as the voice of blue collar upper-middle-class resentment, justifying theft and murder with his hatred of Tony Stark and the 1% on the one hand and the need to provide for his family on the other, and selling you on how this guy gives more and more reign to his dark side while trying to hang on to his hypocritical moral code. Also, it was an inspired idea to build on the idea of the Vulture being a scavenger by making him both a salvage operator and someone who later makes his money by stealing the aftermath of the Avengers’ battles and turns them into weapons. (BTW, even though the wings were re-done as military high-tech, they still had some personality – the way they draped down feather-like when he was resting on the billboard, the way he used them to pick up Peter and maybe use them as blades.)
Critically, the movie didn’t kill him off. See, Marvel’s villain problem isn’t always about how generic they are (although that was a problem for Malekith and Ronan the Accuser) but that they constantly kill off their villains which means that there’s no opportunity to build up a relationship between hero and villain – Robert Redford’s HYDRA true believer or Ultron would be great recurring villains, except they’re dead now. If Keaton ever wants to reprise his role, it would only take a jailbreak to put him back in the mix gunning for revenge according to his own code.
Also, the movie did a good job seeding future villains. We see the mantle (or rather the gage) of the Shocker get passed on in the film, the Tinkerer seems to get away in the end so is on hand for future movies, we get a great setup for why the Scorpion would go after Spiderman, and we even meet the Prowler who’d make for a great frenemy villain.
Secondary Cast
The kids are more than all right, they’re damn fantastic. Ned was a great audience stand-in as well as a voice of reason, was great as “the chair,” and even got to use the webshooters, Liz Allen nicely avoided a lot of “superhero girlfriend” pitfalls, Flash was a nice alternative to the over-used jock archetype, and Zendaya was a genuinely oddball presence who makes for a very different MJ than we’ve ever seen before (my friend @elanabrooklyn thinks that she’s basically comics Jessica Jones in all but name, which I would be ok with).
Marissa Tomei as Aunt May could have used more screen-time, but what there was, was great, from the ongoing gag that she’s completely oblivious to the fact that pretty much all the men in the service sector she meets are in lorb with her, to her very real mix of showing concern and trying to encourage while giving a teenager room, to her final F-bomb – which thankfully cut short the “Aunt May can’t know” storyline.
RDJ as Tony Stark actually didn’t over-shadow the film as much as people had worried – mostly, he’s there being simultaneously neglectful (answering some text messages, providing some encouragement outside of post-crisis situations, and actually explaining why you’re doing what you’re doing would be a good idea, Tony) and over-bearing (tracking devices and surveillance cameras are not a substitute for communicating, Tony), which is sort of how you’d expect him to handle being a mentor/surrogate father on his first go-round.
Plot
Despite how confident people were about what was going to happen in the movie from the trailers, the film actually did a great job throwing the unexpected at you, whether it’s the suburban lawn-chase sequence that wasn’t in the trailers, or the FBI showing up on the ferry, or the fact that Peter and Ned were directly responsible for the Washington Monument crisis, or why the Vulture and Spiderman were on a plane.
More importantly, the high school plot really really worked and intersected nicely with the superhero plot – Peter’s indecision about using his Spiderman persona to boost his and Ned’s social standing leading into the suburban lawn-chase, the Academic Decathalon giving the Washington Monument rescue real stakes, and best of all, the moment where Adrian Toombs opens the door for his daughter’s date and the commonplace dad/boyfriend tension goes into overdrive.
I like a lot of his work – his creator-owned stuff is great, I love his run on Ultimate Spiderman, and even some of his newer Marvel stuff like All-New X-Men – but I think he’s got some flaws as a writer that become much more visible when he writes a team book or an event.
The first flaw that bothers me is that Bendis has a tendency to escalate the stakes way too fast and too high, rather than giving the status quo a chance to breathe and have its potentials explored. One of these days, I want to write some essays about Comics in Parallel, where I explore two series on the same topic or theme – which was inspired by reading Powers and Gotham Central at the same time. And the thing I really noticed is that Bendis went to Roland Emmerich-levels of city, world, and status quo destruction so quickly that there was nowhere to go from there.
The second flaw that bothers me – and it’s related to the first – is that Bendis is much better at innovative setups than carefully-constructed payoffs. Take All-New X-Men for example: bringing the Original Five from the 60s into the present to confront their adult selves is a great idea, but as the series went on, it became very clear that Bendis hadn’t thought of some big questions when he started. Like, what was the bad thing the X-Men were brought from the past to prevent? Did they actually prevent it? Could they go back, and if not, why?
And you see much the same phenomenon with a lot of Bendis’ events – Secret Wars, House of M, Secret Invasion, Siege, Age of Ultron – which all start with a high-concept idea (what if Nick Fury got us into a quasi-Iraq? What if mutants ruled the world? What if Skrulls were among us? What if super-villains ruled the world) but lose the plot rather quickly and have unintended negative consequences for the status quo of the line or various books in the line.
So while I like much of Bendis’ work, he’s also one of the main reasons why I stopped reading Marvel for a decade.
That’s it? (warning mild spoiler, see here for more extensive spoiler) That’s the big reveal that we all had to be patient and wait for over a year for? You have got to be kidding me. EVERYONE GUESSED THAT ALMOST FROM DAY ONE.
But if Marvel’s going to do RedCap/Blue Cap, EvilCap/Good Cap, I demand that they also plagiarize all of the other goofy Superman event ideas: in other words, I want 90s-Teen Cap, CyborgCap, and Laser-Sunglasses Cap.
Actually, I mostly want 90s-Teen Cap, because that would be AMAZING.
I saw GOTG2 this weekend! It was pretty damn good.
Ego’s pretty good. I mean, he’s no Galactus or Celestial or the Fourth World, but he’s a giant planetface and that’s pretty cool.
So some thoughts on GOTG2:
For a sequel that couldn’t change the status quo too much (because the Guardians are going to be in Avengers: Infinity War), I thought it did a good job telling a smaller, intimate story that’s really more about deepening and examining the psychologies of the individual Guardians and their relationships with one another.
And that’s why I have a problem with people saying it was just a retread of the first film, even if they admit that it was just as funny and colorful and surprisingly sentimental as last time. Because the first Guardians movie didn’t really give Gamora and Nebula much character at all, let alone a really moving examination of two people struggling with an abusive childhood; likewise, Yondu in the first film is mostly just a heavy there to be fooled by Peter, whereas in the second film, you get this deep dive into an unexpectedly complicated and compelling person whose loss hits incredibly hard.
Moreover, GOTG2 did a decent job of expanding the world of Guardians: the Spvereign were a great addition to the weird and wacky cosmic world that Marvel is building (and rather than being a throwaway villain, will continue to be significant through their creation of Adam Warlock), Peter’s heritage got revealed and expanded, the culture of the Ravagers was explored in way more detail than I expected (complete with a new team of possible antagonists or allies for the next film who all come out of the original GOTGs), etc.
Ah, I got slightly confused there – the Mad Bomber is George
Metesky, a real-life supervillain who set off bombs across New York City for sixteen years before he was caught.
Madbomb is special for a lot of reasons. First and foremost, it’s Jack Kirby both writing and drawing one of his signature creations, which means you get amazing visuals like this:
But that’s not all – you also get cameos from Henry Kissinger, a secret 200-year-old Royalist conspiracy to overthrow the U.S government and restore the British Monarchy, Captain America and Sam Wilson having very frank discussions about the linkages between American democracy and slavery, Cap and the Falcon being thrown into the plot of Rollerball (aka “Kill-Derby”), and of course a bomb that can drive people insane.
In other words, it’s high-concept superhero action mixed with pop culture references and cultural anxieties of the 1970s mixed with Jack Kirby’s unique Olmec- and surrealist-inspired art.
I would tell them that the Fantastic Four were the laboratory of Marvel Comics: they came first, the initial experiment in inter-personal dynamics and flawed characters was exported to the rest of the Marvel Universe (indeed, the idea of the Marvel Universe started there), they were the place where you could explore the weirdest corners of the medium (both in terms of writing and art), and finally they were a font of brilliant characters that could be used outside the FF (Doom, Kang, Galactus, etc. etc.).
In terms of their individual characters, they fit pretty easily into the four humors model (although man do people love to argue about who fits where): Johnny is a playboy and a prankster, Ben Grimm is depressed and has a hair-trigger temper, Reed is the A-type scientist/leader/authority figure, and Sue Storm holds the universe together.
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