The second reboot in a five-year span, Sony’s Spider-Man: Homecoming brought Marvel Studios into the creative fold and created a Peter Parker who, rather than being New York’s only hero, more closely matched his dynamic in modern comics: a small-scale player in a larger tapestry. This afforded Sony, Marvel and director Jon Watts the opportunity to craft a Spidey saga with a much younger feel (Tom Holland was only 19 when he appeared in Captain America: Civil War, while Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield first played Spider-Man at 26 and 28, respectively).
The result is much simpler than Sam Raimi’s trilogy and much lighter than Marc Webb’s Amazing Spider-Man films, with a roster of actors who feel plucked from a high-school Disney movie. Its biggest strength is that it lives in-the-moment, coasting on a sense of levity that feels aptly threatened whenever the plot takes serious turns. However, this momentary nature also results in characters that feel malformed, and a story that often remains in stasis.
In our continuing look back at Peter Parker’s cinematic journey, we revisit the character’s solo arrival in the MCU, which has the right vibe on the surface, though it rarely goes deeper than that.
Between its breezy Classic Rock soundtrack and its playful score, Homecoming arrives with a spring in its step, which Tom Holland’s Peter matches as he makes his way to school while anticipating an Avengers call-up from Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.). This world is so much bigger than Peter that his driving personality trait is aspiration, while his behavior in the suit sheds the sarcasm of previous versions, giving way to a Spider-Man who feels constantly overwhelmed — a feeling reflected in his mask, through its enormous, expressive eyes.
He's a bumbling sidekick without an A-hero who swings from scene to scene so that the film can present fun-but-isolated vignettes, like during his chase scene through a suburban neighborhood. When strung together, they make for a mostly enjoyable watch, and they seem to open up a minor corner of an ongoing cinematic universe that was, at the time, more concerned with the cosmic and the apocalyptic. However, while Holland’s Peter is the pitch-perfect focal point for a movie with this tone — his wide-eyed, good-natured performance is infectious — few characters in the movie seem to exist outside of his orbit, despite the equally radiant performances that bring them to life.
Each of his high-school classmates plays a distinct type, from Jacob Batalon’s excitably nerdy Ned, to Laura Harrier’s outgoing, assertive Liz, to Zendaya’s disaffected loner Michelle to Tony Revolori’s insecure bully Flash, though few of the film’s supporting players feel like they have lives outside of their interactions with Peter, or like they exist outside of a given shot in which their dialogue plays out. When Peter returns to the school debate team, the ensuing exchanges are quick-witted, but in group scenes such as this characters often appear to stand around until the actors have their cue. They wait their turn to enter the scene and speak, rather than being distracted with something else — an issue that extends outside the school setting as well.
This world is so much bigger than Peter that his driving personality trait is aspiration.
The camera often captures wide spaces and the infrastructure of urban Queens, following Peter down the stairs of overground subway platforms, but it rarely captures its people in any realistic sense. Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2 were littered with minor characters whose daily lives could be discerned from their behavior, whose interactions with Peter spoke to the way life kept grinding him down, and whose opinions on Spider-Man (positive or not) were undercut with a sense of weary preoccupation. It made New York feel alive.
The New York of Homecoming, while pleasant and non-confrontational in a way that works for the movie’s inoffensive tone, feels more like a red carpet laid out for Peter Parker. The local deli worker for instance, Mr. Delmar (Hemky Madera), engages in amusing banter with Peter, but like Peter’s classmates, he lies in wait. The camera cuts to him only in anticipation of Peter, whose arrival endows him with a sense of character and lived reality specific to Peter, and Peter alone. Delmar, and his mostly empty store, feel as if they exist for Peter and no one else (an extra even watches Peter enter and promptly moves away from the counter).
These sort of blinkered, hyper-focused interactions might work for the villainous Vulture (Michael Keaton), whose scenes are mostly plot-focused and whose henchmen bow to his will — lest they end up disintegrated — but they make Peter the center of the film’s universe, even within its fiction, despite him being a nobody to the people around him. While this approach to the extras and supporting characters may not hamper the movie at large, it also extends to several aesthetic and thematic elements in a way that knee-caps its story about class, and about a central antagonist whose frustrations are with Peter’s billionaire mentor.
The first two of the film’s three prologues focus on the Vulture and his gripe with Tony Stark, while the third — Peter’s tongue-in-cheek home movie re-capping his role in Civil War — establishes Stark’s physical presence. Peter, though he may be the protagonist, is trapped in a story defined by these two characters, which the Vulture elucidates during his eventual confrontation with Spider-Man. He tells him: “Those people up there, the rich and the powerful, they do whatever they want. Guys like us, like you and me... they don't care about us.”
However, despite its musings about inequality, Homecoming isn’t the kind of film from which you can discern much about Spider-Man’s circumstances (much of relevance, at least), which is especially odd given how central class has been to his stories over the years. Peter’s brief introduction in Civil War placed him in a fairly nondescript and well-furnished apartment with a modern finish, a space that’s even less visually present in Homecoming, and one that doesn’t offer the slightest insight into his life. It’s smaller than the Vulture’s home and Stark’s tower, but that’s about it — its production design doesn’t have enough personality to say anything of note about the Parkers.
Like several other characters, Aunt May (Marissa Tomei) barely exists outside of her snappy interactions with Peter. She’s offered so little interiority that we have no sense of what, if anything, she actually does for a living. Where both prior versions of May (played by Rosemary Harris and Sally Field) were pivotal to understanding not only Peter’s morality, but his economic surroundings, the version in Homecoming is reduced to little more than a textural element, one as vital to exploring Peter’s character as his bunk bed (which is to say, not all that much). If anything, all that we can extrapolate from May’s role in the film is that if she happens to mess up while cooking dinner, she can choose to take Peter out to a restaurant without a second thought, a scenario that offers neither one of them the opportunity to express any perspective on money. When presented the opportunity to discuss it in the context of Peter’s billionaire boss, the topic never comes up.
Even outside of the mildly unsavory optics of the third act, which revolves around Spider-Man protecting a billionaire’s belongings (there are enough in-world explanations to hand-wave this as being problematic), the lack of any economic reality for Peter, let alone a difficult one, is a strange narrative misstep that makes his alignment with Stark — and his alignment against the Vulture — far too easy. Regardless of which side he comes down on or why, he isn’t challenged by his own villain’s ideology. He’s never made to question his allegiances or his motivations, leading to a distinct lack of outlook with regards to the film’s own themes, and to a series of choices that all feel pre-ordained.
Regardless of which side he comes down on or why, he isn’t challenged by his own villain’s ideology.
On one hand, this makes Marvel’s version of Peter Parker reliable, and comfortable. On the other hand, it fits awkwardly with the film’s overarching narrative about what Peter wants and what he eventually gives up — a story that appears to be about choice on the surface, but ends up featuring few meaningful decisions.
Like in The Amazing Spider-Man, Peter’s introduction in Civil War features a wordier and less elegant version of the “With great power comes great responsibility” speech — “When you can do the things that I can, but you don’t, and then the bad things happen, they happen because of you,” he tells Stark — but it firmly establishes Peter’s commitment to heroism, since the words come straight from him. When Homecoming begins, Peter wants to be an Avenger. By the end, he foregoes this desire and chooses to keep being a hero in Queens. However, this climactic decision doesn’t actually represent Peter sacrificing anything in the name of responsibility, because the film’s two forms of heroism aren’t presented at odds, and none of Peter’s choices have ever veered from a singular, linear path despite each one having consequences (including near-death ones, like when the alien tech he steals puts his friends in danger and his actions on the Staten Island Ferry turn calamitous).
Each time Peter chases down the Vulture or his henchmen, he’s reprimanded by Stark in some fashion after he screws up, and he’s even stripped of his power — which is to say, his hi-tech suit — but in order to win it back, he makes the same exact decision as what got him into trouble in the first place, and chases down the Vulture unsupervised once again. It is, ostensibly, the morally correct decision, since he ends up saving the day, but it is not a difficult decision, because the two paths the film lays out in front of Peter aren’t in any ethical or psychological conflict; he’s either Spider-Man in one location, or Spider-Man in another, and the actual transition between the two isn’t up to him, but up to the whims of Tony Stark.
In comparison, Raimi’s first Spider-Man film ends on a similarly sacrificial note, with Peter giving up the life he always wanted with Mary Jane and choosing the responsibility of being Spider-Man instead, but these two alternatives represented conflicting desires that could not be reconciled, which is what made them dramatically engaging. They made Peter’s choice emotionally difficult. Even Peter’s suit in the first film was born from this conflict (its red and blue color scheme was inspired by Mary Jane’s red hair and blue eyes), and while Homecoming accurately transposes this through line onto its own story — his suit is now handed to him by Stark, whose approval he similarly chases — at no point do Peter’s mistakes or their fallout convince him to change his behavior, or affect his central desire to be a hero. They only strengthen his resolve. His decision to refuse Stark’s eventual offer is, instead, a momentary one that remains disconnected from his own actions up until that point, a decision rendered all the more meaningless when his advanced suit is returned to him regardless (with another upgrade and “Avenger” status conferred on him by Stark almost immediately in his next appearance, Avengers: Infinity War).
The idea of choice, in Spider-Man: Homecoming, ends up being an illusion, despite it being central to Peter’s story. In a universe of heroes who regularly kill their villains, one who ends the movie by saving his (and who balks at the idea of his suit’s “instant kill”) is a refreshing change, even if it’s no different than what he would have done at the start of the film. However, while saving the Vulture may be noble, saving him and stopping him end up being the exact same thing — he needs to prevent him from flying away with Stark’s weapons before his jetpack explodes — so it ends up being the easiest choice in the world.
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The result is much simpler than Sam Raimi’s trilogy and much lighter than Marc Webb’s Amazing Spider-Man films, with a roster of actors who feel plucked from a high-school Disney movie. Its biggest strength is that it lives in-the-moment, coasting on a sense of levity that feels aptly threatened whenever the plot takes serious turns. However, this momentary nature also results in characters that feel malformed, and a story that often remains in stasis.
In our continuing look back at Peter Parker’s cinematic journey, we revisit the character’s solo arrival in the MCU, which has the right vibe on the surface, though it rarely goes deeper than that.
People and Places
Between its breezy Classic Rock soundtrack and its playful score, Homecoming arrives with a spring in its step, which Tom Holland’s Peter matches as he makes his way to school while anticipating an Avengers call-up from Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.). This world is so much bigger than Peter that his driving personality trait is aspiration, while his behavior in the suit sheds the sarcasm of previous versions, giving way to a Spider-Man who feels constantly overwhelmed — a feeling reflected in his mask, through its enormous, expressive eyes.
More From The Spidey Saga
- Day 1: Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man and Choosing Responsibility
- Day 2: Spider-Man 2 and Choosing a Suit
- Day 3: Spider-Man 3 Is Both Better and Messier Than You Remember
- Day 4: The Amazing Spider-Man Goes Through the Origin Story Motions
- Day 5: The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and the Spider-Man Who Ran Out of Time
- Day 6: Spider-Man: Homecoming Lives in the Moment, For Better and For Worse
He's a bumbling sidekick without an A-hero who swings from scene to scene so that the film can present fun-but-isolated vignettes, like during his chase scene through a suburban neighborhood. When strung together, they make for a mostly enjoyable watch, and they seem to open up a minor corner of an ongoing cinematic universe that was, at the time, more concerned with the cosmic and the apocalyptic. However, while Holland’s Peter is the pitch-perfect focal point for a movie with this tone — his wide-eyed, good-natured performance is infectious — few characters in the movie seem to exist outside of his orbit, despite the equally radiant performances that bring them to life.
Each of his high-school classmates plays a distinct type, from Jacob Batalon’s excitably nerdy Ned, to Laura Harrier’s outgoing, assertive Liz, to Zendaya’s disaffected loner Michelle to Tony Revolori’s insecure bully Flash, though few of the film’s supporting players feel like they have lives outside of their interactions with Peter, or like they exist outside of a given shot in which their dialogue plays out. When Peter returns to the school debate team, the ensuing exchanges are quick-witted, but in group scenes such as this characters often appear to stand around until the actors have their cue. They wait their turn to enter the scene and speak, rather than being distracted with something else — an issue that extends outside the school setting as well.
This world is so much bigger than Peter that his driving personality trait is aspiration.
The camera often captures wide spaces and the infrastructure of urban Queens, following Peter down the stairs of overground subway platforms, but it rarely captures its people in any realistic sense. Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2 were littered with minor characters whose daily lives could be discerned from their behavior, whose interactions with Peter spoke to the way life kept grinding him down, and whose opinions on Spider-Man (positive or not) were undercut with a sense of weary preoccupation. It made New York feel alive.
The New York of Homecoming, while pleasant and non-confrontational in a way that works for the movie’s inoffensive tone, feels more like a red carpet laid out for Peter Parker. The local deli worker for instance, Mr. Delmar (Hemky Madera), engages in amusing banter with Peter, but like Peter’s classmates, he lies in wait. The camera cuts to him only in anticipation of Peter, whose arrival endows him with a sense of character and lived reality specific to Peter, and Peter alone. Delmar, and his mostly empty store, feel as if they exist for Peter and no one else (an extra even watches Peter enter and promptly moves away from the counter).
These sort of blinkered, hyper-focused interactions might work for the villainous Vulture (Michael Keaton), whose scenes are mostly plot-focused and whose henchmen bow to his will — lest they end up disintegrated — but they make Peter the center of the film’s universe, even within its fiction, despite him being a nobody to the people around him. While this approach to the extras and supporting characters may not hamper the movie at large, it also extends to several aesthetic and thematic elements in a way that knee-caps its story about class, and about a central antagonist whose frustrations are with Peter’s billionaire mentor.
A Classless Clash
The first two of the film’s three prologues focus on the Vulture and his gripe with Tony Stark, while the third — Peter’s tongue-in-cheek home movie re-capping his role in Civil War — establishes Stark’s physical presence. Peter, though he may be the protagonist, is trapped in a story defined by these two characters, which the Vulture elucidates during his eventual confrontation with Spider-Man. He tells him: “Those people up there, the rich and the powerful, they do whatever they want. Guys like us, like you and me... they don't care about us.”
However, despite its musings about inequality, Homecoming isn’t the kind of film from which you can discern much about Spider-Man’s circumstances (much of relevance, at least), which is especially odd given how central class has been to his stories over the years. Peter’s brief introduction in Civil War placed him in a fairly nondescript and well-furnished apartment with a modern finish, a space that’s even less visually present in Homecoming, and one that doesn’t offer the slightest insight into his life. It’s smaller than the Vulture’s home and Stark’s tower, but that’s about it — its production design doesn’t have enough personality to say anything of note about the Parkers.
Like several other characters, Aunt May (Marissa Tomei) barely exists outside of her snappy interactions with Peter. She’s offered so little interiority that we have no sense of what, if anything, she actually does for a living. Where both prior versions of May (played by Rosemary Harris and Sally Field) were pivotal to understanding not only Peter’s morality, but his economic surroundings, the version in Homecoming is reduced to little more than a textural element, one as vital to exploring Peter’s character as his bunk bed (which is to say, not all that much). If anything, all that we can extrapolate from May’s role in the film is that if she happens to mess up while cooking dinner, she can choose to take Peter out to a restaurant without a second thought, a scenario that offers neither one of them the opportunity to express any perspective on money. When presented the opportunity to discuss it in the context of Peter’s billionaire boss, the topic never comes up.
Even outside of the mildly unsavory optics of the third act, which revolves around Spider-Man protecting a billionaire’s belongings (there are enough in-world explanations to hand-wave this as being problematic), the lack of any economic reality for Peter, let alone a difficult one, is a strange narrative misstep that makes his alignment with Stark — and his alignment against the Vulture — far too easy. Regardless of which side he comes down on or why, he isn’t challenged by his own villain’s ideology. He’s never made to question his allegiances or his motivations, leading to a distinct lack of outlook with regards to the film’s own themes, and to a series of choices that all feel pre-ordained.
Regardless of which side he comes down on or why, he isn’t challenged by his own villain’s ideology.
On one hand, this makes Marvel’s version of Peter Parker reliable, and comfortable. On the other hand, it fits awkwardly with the film’s overarching narrative about what Peter wants and what he eventually gives up — a story that appears to be about choice on the surface, but ends up featuring few meaningful decisions.
Power, Responsibility and Choices
Like in The Amazing Spider-Man, Peter’s introduction in Civil War features a wordier and less elegant version of the “With great power comes great responsibility” speech — “When you can do the things that I can, but you don’t, and then the bad things happen, they happen because of you,” he tells Stark — but it firmly establishes Peter’s commitment to heroism, since the words come straight from him. When Homecoming begins, Peter wants to be an Avenger. By the end, he foregoes this desire and chooses to keep being a hero in Queens. However, this climactic decision doesn’t actually represent Peter sacrificing anything in the name of responsibility, because the film’s two forms of heroism aren’t presented at odds, and none of Peter’s choices have ever veered from a singular, linear path despite each one having consequences (including near-death ones, like when the alien tech he steals puts his friends in danger and his actions on the Staten Island Ferry turn calamitous).
Each time Peter chases down the Vulture or his henchmen, he’s reprimanded by Stark in some fashion after he screws up, and he’s even stripped of his power — which is to say, his hi-tech suit — but in order to win it back, he makes the same exact decision as what got him into trouble in the first place, and chases down the Vulture unsupervised once again. It is, ostensibly, the morally correct decision, since he ends up saving the day, but it is not a difficult decision, because the two paths the film lays out in front of Peter aren’t in any ethical or psychological conflict; he’s either Spider-Man in one location, or Spider-Man in another, and the actual transition between the two isn’t up to him, but up to the whims of Tony Stark.
In comparison, Raimi’s first Spider-Man film ends on a similarly sacrificial note, with Peter giving up the life he always wanted with Mary Jane and choosing the responsibility of being Spider-Man instead, but these two alternatives represented conflicting desires that could not be reconciled, which is what made them dramatically engaging. They made Peter’s choice emotionally difficult. Even Peter’s suit in the first film was born from this conflict (its red and blue color scheme was inspired by Mary Jane’s red hair and blue eyes), and while Homecoming accurately transposes this through line onto its own story — his suit is now handed to him by Stark, whose approval he similarly chases — at no point do Peter’s mistakes or their fallout convince him to change his behavior, or affect his central desire to be a hero. They only strengthen his resolve. His decision to refuse Stark’s eventual offer is, instead, a momentary one that remains disconnected from his own actions up until that point, a decision rendered all the more meaningless when his advanced suit is returned to him regardless (with another upgrade and “Avenger” status conferred on him by Stark almost immediately in his next appearance, Avengers: Infinity War).
The idea of choice, in Spider-Man: Homecoming, ends up being an illusion, despite it being central to Peter’s story. In a universe of heroes who regularly kill their villains, one who ends the movie by saving his (and who balks at the idea of his suit’s “instant kill”) is a refreshing change, even if it’s no different than what he would have done at the start of the film. However, while saving the Vulture may be noble, saving him and stopping him end up being the exact same thing — he needs to prevent him from flying away with Stark’s weapons before his jetpack explodes — so it ends up being the easiest choice in the world.
Continue reading...