Anticipating Spider-Man: Homecoming (and then presumably Spider-Man: Prom)

Guys why does he get superpowers after being bit by a radioactive spider? Wouldn't he die?

Also wouldn't Iron Man use contact lens tech instead of glasses?

Also....

haha to be clear i continue to enjoy these movies! this one is not a patch on Spider-Verse, but in the top quartile of MCU movies, i'd say.

I will say I find it interesting that these films play up his awkwardness and innocence, but downplay his scientific brilliance. This one has that throw away line about not being embarrassed to be the smartest one in the room, but for an apparent genius (he built his own web shooters!) he rarely says or does anything particularly intelligent.

Didn't Homecoming have a scene with him crushing the knowledge bowl practice rounds? Also, rather realistically he's not often in situations in these movies where he would get the chance to flex his book smarts, plus he IS still a kid. I think a lot of his intelligence comes through in his physicality, how he chooses to fight/avoid things and how he used his powers to support Mysterio since they were wholly unsuited to fight the enemies they were facing by themselves.

(Setting aside the aforementioned "smartest person in the room" scene plus how quickly he figured out the interface to Stark's costume creation machine from this movie; I don't think the movie has to bang us over the head with Peter audibly calculating the physics behind his actions in order for him to come across as a smarter-than-average teenager.)

yeah i think between the web-shooters and the costume-making scene, he's coming across as plenty technologically-savvy. i do still think the earlier films were right to make the webs just be part of his powers. but in a comic book world with repulsor rays and arc reactors, i can sort of buy that a low-level genius, with the resources of an upscale science-oriented high school, could come up with this one staggeringly useful and valuable invention.

I wonder if they CGd mysterio costume to look more like a mocap suit than the actual mocap suit the actor wore to get CGd

a low-level genius

Isn’t one of the cool things about Peter that his youth means he has unrealized and yet-unknown potential? So we don’t really know his ceiling yet? So he might be a future Reed Richards or whatever.

a lot of his intelligence comes through in his physicality, how he chooses to fight/avoid things

extremely otm.

on the other hand there's a scene where he's wearing a t-shirt of i think literally the pythagorean theorem and my son's like "dad look at his shirt, he's a geek"

One of the things I like about the Marvel heroes is that so many of them are just flat-out science nerds who get their powers as a side-effect of nerding out to the extreme. I think it's the scene on the Helicarrier in the first Avengers movie where Stark and Banner have the argument about who has more PhDs? I love that shit.

I guess for me the appeal of Spider-Man never required him to be a Richards-level genius - much more into the "regular guy" aspects. He really only needs to be just enough of a nerd to be the kind of guy who goes and attends radioactive science demonstrations. But the webshooters always worked against that so yeah, I think kinda any version of it's fine.

One unlikely but imo cool way to rescue the "successor to Tony Stark" angle, and all the military interventionist stuff, would be if eventually Peter's different sense of what responsibility means leads him to deploy or share Stark's technology (and his own future super-genius inventions) in a different way. Like maybe in two movies Peter could time-travel thirty years in the future (future Peter needs the Hulk to fight the Maestro, but accidentally gets his younger self too)... and for once we could see a world where shit is actually *different* due to all these wild inventions being used by different actors or for different purposes.

I was thinking/complaining about the movies downplaying his smarts via his relationship with Stark. So much of Spider-man in the MCU is him figuring out new Stark "tech" rather than actually solving problems or coming up with stuff himself. Tbh, the learning curve for Stark (and other) stuff doesn't seem to be too steep in the MCU. War Machine can do it, Falcon can figure it out, Pepper can figure it out, Ant-man (who is a doofus) can deal with quantum physics, etc. Stark, as portrayed in the movies, is a genius who has figured out a way, it seems, to automate and outsource his genius via AI and whatnot, and as a primary beneficiary in these movies a lot of Peter's iconic "powers" are sort of back-burnered. For example, he makes a quip in this one that "he is really strong and can stick to things," but the Stark super-suit stuff sometimes threatens to overshadow his innate gifts. I mean, the movie is literally about getting back a pair of all-powerful high-tech sunglasses.

okay so re: surveillance - - - - Some of it's inherent to "this technology is good in *my* hands but if it fell into the WRONG hands..." stories, which were the basis of all three Iron Man solo films. But in terms of really critiquing it, I agree that the material's there, but imho the films have hedged, maybe due to a mix of ideological blinders and an unwillingness to accept that the Tony Stark they've written post-IM3 has actually been Earth's greatest supervillain. If the films ever really acknowledged the events and conflicts laid out in previous entries, they could have written a Tony arc where his final actions in Endgame are a quest for redemption for all the above. As it is, he goes to his grave confident in his righteousness, and then is lionized as a savior of humanity.

* In Winter Soldier, the terrifying control system does niggle at Cap when he first hears about it. But it's the system's hijacking by HYDRA that becomes the real problem, keeping us from having Cap decide the US security state and drone assassination *in itself* is something to go rogue and destroy the super-helicarriers over. Black Widow does release all of SHIELD's files, and Fury is sort of out of a job, but it still feels like a dodge, especially since Cap never mentions all this again, which you'd think he would if it were a major turning point in his values or his loyalties. IIRC the later films never have a scene of anybody else ever giving Fury shit about it either.

* Ultron, yes, is obviously Tony's fault and this does piss everybody off. The world is spared instant devastation only because Ultron can't reach the nuclear launch systems, and in hindsight, because nobody has been stupid enough to create a global network of death drone satellites. And then he comes up with a second, more powerful Ultron as a solution; some characters can't believe he's doing the same thing again, but he does it anyway and it works out. At the end, Tony is a hero and not a worldwide pariah for the Sokovian blood on his hands, and Vision is just walking around with, I think, all of Ultron's same abilities (?).

* In Civil War, with Tony now advocating for a superhero strike force to act under orders, Cap objects, but mainly because of the possibility that William Hurt might send them to do something they personally don't want to do, not because the countries where they're sent might object to the incursion. He oddly does not bring up either of the above plotlines as examples of how this kind of thing could go wrong. Logically speaking the first of the "Sokovia Accords" should have been to jail Tony Stark and separate him from all his extinction-level-event technology! But the film has no faith in this stuff as the basis for a conflict between a techno-militaristic Stark and a newly radicalized Cap, and instead the fight is sustained by Bucky having a retconned connection to Tony's backstory.

* In Homecoming, there's no security state as such, but again rather oddly Tony creates all the problems without ever being confronted about it; his imperious (and realistically, politically-suicidal) deployment of Damage Control is what spurs Michael Keaton's criminal career and all the destruction that wreaks. The best the film musters is him sort-of but not-really admitting that if he'd listened more promptly to Spider-Man's intel, some of the collateral destruction could have been avoided.

* In Far From Home, Spider-Man is overwhelmed at the great power/responsibility of wielding Tony's EDITH system, and horrified at it falling into the hands of a villain, but doesn't question the existence of the thing in the first place, or try to destroy it. By this point, omni-hacking space drone systems are the new "blue laser in the sky that will turn the whole city into (blank)" and the audience is more bored than horrified when the apparatus is unveiled.

The films have hedged on the cultural commentary you seek because they are made in Capitalist USA where “this technology is good in *my* hands but if it fell into the WRONG hands...” is probably inscribed in Latin on a wall in the Pentagon somewhere.

lol Doc's complaints about the moral inconsistency of MCU are cuet

like holy moly of course this convoluted garbage doesn't make any sense

Did you bring Morbs with you by any chance

Ant-man (who is a doofus) can deal with quantum physics, etc.

You know Ant Man is an electrical engineer, right? In the comics, he used to work for Stark and it’s stated the movies that he went to jail for stealing damaging info from his employer so he could be a whistleblower.

Doc C: Why do you need all of the characters to turn to the screen and say in unison “AND THAT IS WHY TONY STARK WAS WRONG” in order for the movies to be a critique of Tony Stark?

No, I did not know he was an "electrical engineer," but whether or not that qualifies him for handling next-level quantum theory, in the MCU he is undoubtedly a doofus.

Which says nothing about whether he's dumb or not.

Dude is portrayed as being goofy, but not a complete idiot. He's also not portrayed as being as smart as Banner and Stark; this doesn't make him dumb! The only actually dumb characters they have in the movies are Thor and half of the Guardians.

Intelligence: not actually a generic quality rated on a scale from 3 to 18

There are def. degrees of smartness in this movie, from so smart they can literally invent anything (Stark, Banner, Rocket?) to gotta be pretty smart (Loki, Black Widow, Spider-man), to dunno/doesn't matter (Captain Marvel, Hawkeye, Scarlet Witch - what does she even do?) to dumb (Star Lord, Drax, Thor). The broader question is if there's anyone in the MCU too stupid to figure out Stark's state of the art automated technology.

(these movies, not this movie specifically)

If the contention is that P Parker's science geek chops feel tacked-on in this movie that seems fair to me

I mean Pythagorean Theorem? really?

re: Ant-Man: I think his coming up with the time-travel idea is fine. He doesn't have any idea how to build a time machine, he just observes that his time in the quantum realm passed differently than it did for everyone else. Michelle Pfeiffer may have gone through something similar and shared it with him off-camera in AM&TW. So he comes to the Avengers and says hey, I've got these quantum gadgets and they have something to do with time; you guys think we could build a time machine? Seems viable. The only gap is that we don't have Reed Richards here, so Banner and Stark are having to do a level of Impossible Science that I don't normally associate with either of them, but ehhh, hey.

re: Tony Stark: I definitely don't need what you think I need, DJP! I just think in a spree of movies where the most popular character is always building murder robots, for nobody to ever tell him "it's wrong to murder people with robots" is striking, given that there are many times characters have long drag-out fights with him over every other problem save that one. I'm not looking for a Greek chorus condemning him - I'm looking for a screenplay to a passable 100-minute techno-thriller that has these issues on its mind. Even The Dark Knight's surveillance-state business, which certainly tips into "DO YOU SEE?" territory, does manage to spell this out as a conflict: Freeman thinks it's wrong, Bale thinks the ends justify the means, and Bale going down that path is cast as one of many sacrifices he's made towards stopping the Joker. Perhaps a bit pat and convenient, but the audience is meant to understand this as one of the moral conflicts between the characters. If it was a Marvel movie, Freeman would have beheld the surveillance gizmo and started arguing with Bale about what if it falls into the wrong hands. Or over a sudden revelation that Thomas Wayne ran over his dog.

IMHO the screenwriters didn't have to have Tony invent all these terrifying drone systems. They chose to do that and then to duck the implications. I think this is because the filmmakers ultimately think these gadgets are not in themselves terrifying, but really cool (in the right hands), for reasons Tombot succinctly sketched above. Far From Home's plot hinges on Spider-Man discovering the incredible, omnipotent death powers he wields; his response is not to say "Happy, I don't think what Tony built is right - let's shut it off" or even "We need to go public with this - it doesn't feel right that people don't know this thing is up there." Rather, his relationship to the gizmo is through a Spider-Man character arc concerning who should wield it: first he doesn't believe he's worthy of the great power and great responsibility, then later he determines that he is. It's something that disappoints me in these movies, which again I have otherwise enjoyed, mostly.

btw have we discussed the elephant in the room?

https://youtu.be/U_wDGbQYlK8

Waiting for the Night Monkey spinoff.

xpost That is sort of what I was getting at. When the character and the superpower are inextricable, That's where we get a lot of the conflicts between power and responsibility. But these movies have been promoting Tony Stark technology as the peak of power, equalling or even trumping even superpowers, and they continually fall into the wrong hands, so you would think that would be greater moral and ethical questions. Vs, I dunno, Spider-Man, who is given these powers he can't turn off and has to decide what to do with them.

night monkey ruled!

tho for a moment yesterday talking about peter's science gifts, i entertained the idea that it'd be cool if he was a fashion geek (going to like a "design" high school.... y'know everybody's booking time on the MakerBots etc.) and that his main non-super-powered addition to spider-man would simply have been the design of the costume. a cute reversal of the idea that the first, home-made costume must necessarily be kinda goofy and bad.

(oh and IOW: that he would have his own backup costume designed to make him look like some other themed hero entirely. feel like the comics have done this at some point, but i might just be thinking of Hawkeye being Ronin or Cap becoming Nomad.)

oh and another thing i thought verged RIGHT on the edge of being too winky-winky but was actually very delightful and got applause: the montage "toast" sequence laying out mysterio's origin. are we in spoilers?

next movie is the REAL night monkey getting revenge for spider-man stealing his or her shtick
night monkey is probably french or belgian

Would be funny if instead of Venom his black suit nemesis was Night Monkey.

in this universe, his black suit nemesis will be a dumb techno-costume tony built for him that gets a mind of its own when it falls into the hands of, let's say the Ringmaster (played by Elijah Wood)

I've got to hand it to Spider-Man, though: after a lot of fumbling and lack of confidence, he really took those drone things down hardcore in the last act

The nemeses will be college apps. If he has six top choices and they are all sinister...

alternatively, "the sinister six" could be the marvel universe nickname for the Ivy League. anything is possible!

on the other hand there's a scene where he's wearing a t-shirt of i think literally the pythagorean theorem and my son's like "dad look at his shirt, he's a geek"

― Li'l Brexit (Tracer Hand), Monday, July 8, 2019 1:59 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

it's a meme-y tshirt of a geometry question that asks you to "find x" and then the x is circled

ahh that makes much more sense

lol Tracer I didn't realize THAT is the shirt you were talking about

IMHO the screenwriters didn't have to have Tony invent all these terrifying drone systems.

I feel like this fundamentally goes against decades of established characterization.

I also should rewatch all of these movies before commenting on them but I feel like the objections you're raising are... all expressed in the movie, just via subtext rather than overtly?

I had only had dim memories of Homecoming - I think I had only seen it on a plane prior, so I watched it last night- Keaton was great in it. The two movies are probably about as good as one another on balance.

Like, the entire throughline of the "wrong hands" argument is that certain things shouldn't be done because the potential for abuse is too great; sure I might trust you not to go too far with it but do I trust your successor? And the movies show what happens and reinforce the idea through storytelling that these things aren't the wonderful ideas they may look like at first blush, and the characters deal with the fallout, both good and bad (the objection to Vision I find interesting considering that he couldn't exist as a sentient character without that arc, which is adapted from the comics so that Stark is responsible for his creation rather than Pym; you're making the argument that Age of Ultron should have ended with them murdering an ally).

I also think that the villains in these movies being directly motivated/created by Stark isn't accidental. Tony and his methods brought as much harm upon the world as they did good, which is partially why he's so reluctant to jump back into the fray in Endgame and why his actions at the end have so much resonance. You say "they missed the opportunity to do this as a redemption arc for Tony Stark when, IMO, that is exactly what they did.

(And one of the side-effects of a redemption arc is rose-colored glasses get directed upon your faults, which is why the public perception in Far From Home is so fawning and why Beck's connection to Stark is important in underlining how Stark's M.O. had profound negative consequences.)

His MO of farty acronyms? Hm... maybe next Tony inspired villain will be MODOK : Malignant Odor Designed Only for Kvetching

See, to me, "this can't fall into the wrong hands" is different from "certain things shouldn't be done because the potential for abuse is too great." To you, one implies the other, but in simplistic action movies it's easy to resolve "wrong hands" by getting it back into "the right hands," and that's that. Indeed this is precisely the resolution of Spider-Man: Far From Home: it was bad that the bad guy got the glasses. Thank goodness, Peter realizes that he was good enough to wield the glasses all along, and then, thank goodness, he gets them back. Order is restored. It's a little like "the wicked brother has usurped the throne" stories for children: we celebrate when the true, good king returns. If I said "this basically endorses the notion of monarchy and rule by divine or blood right," would you say "what are you talking about - the film shows that it's bad when a bad king is on the throne so clearly it's in the subtext that throne-based government is no good"?

To me what it comes down to is that the nature of the objections to the drone murder systems is never "there shouldn't be a drone murder system." It's always some adjacent or even parallel problem: you went off and built it without consulting us, you wouldn't listen to me when I said Bucky was innocent, etc. In a universe with like two hundred characters and ~supposedly~ able to tell all kinds of varied stories, in which everyone is constantly mad at Tony for all kinds of other things, in which Tony's origin story is that he ostensibly decides to no longer make weapons, it's conspicuous that nobody is raising this point.

Re: Ultron and Vision, I'm definitely not arguing that they should have murdered an ally! I'm arguing that the movie should have been written differently. If you're saddling me with all but the last ten minutes and saying "okay, all this stuff can't be changed, now end this story," is that really fair? Similarly, it doesn't really matter what decades of Tony's established characterization are. Tomei's Aunt May is more or less the opposite of the comic book character, who is defined by hating Spider-Man, not knowing his identity, and being one thousand years old. Tbh I haven't read a lot of Iron Man comics - are spy-and-execute satellites really that big a thing for him? The only big character things I can immediately think of for comics Tony are him being an alcoholic (something the movies dispensed with in one and a half scenes) and him being a high-handed establishment authority figure (something the movies garbled by making him a wise-ass rebel executive, meaning that when they get to Civil War, making him The Man versus rebel Cap is a serious screenwriting Hail Mary).

re: Tony's arc and the implication/subtext that he's really been a real problem - I'm open to this but it's something we have to read into the films, not something that's there. Okay: not everything has to be spelled out! But these are superhero movies that spell tons of other things out (witness the nightmarish scene in GOTG with Kurt Russell going line by line through "Brandy"). As well, one of the great accomplishments is supposed to be that they feel like an interconnected tapestry - so why can't characters call out things from previous films so that it feels more like an intentional downward-then-upward long-term arc? If they really intended Tony to be an asshole, it would not have been hard, or make the films be painfully literal and dumbed-down, to toss this into AoU:

STEVE: "Tony, you can't appoint yourself the guardian of the world. No man can."
TONY: "Couldn't agree more. That's why I'm putting it in the hands of an AI. A good AI. Programmed to look out for us. To fight the fights we might not be around for."
STEVE: "I've heard that before - from Fury. His system was supposed to make us safe, but HYDRA almost used it to murder millions of people. And after that, I realized something. It's not just WHO has the power ----"
TONY: "You mean 'what.' Not who. AI? Computers? I know you know what computers are by now."
STEVE: "I'm serious, Stark! It's that nobody SHOULD have the power. This --- this thing you've created, this power to invade people's lives, to kill people because you've decided to create this without consulting the world you're trying to protect ---- it's all wrong!"
TONY: "Oh okay, I get it. I'm arrogant for wanting to detect threats and stop them, by whatever it takes. But us deciding to put on custom suits and go punch the bad guys? That's A-OK with you? What I think is, I'm a realist, and there are threats out there, and if Ultron can stop them, we need Ultron. Get out of my way, Steve. I'm turning it on."

(FIGHT ENSUES. TONY SUBDUES STEVE AND ACTIVATES ULTRON. FROM THIS POINT ON, TONY IS AN EVIL VILLAIN UNTIL HIS REDEMPTION ARC STARTS, BECAUSE DOING WHAT TONY IS DOING IS ACTUALLY *BAD* AND NOT JUST A BIG MISUNDERSTANDING THAT ALLOWS ALL SIDES TO COME OUT UNSCATHED AS DESIRABLE HEROIC ACTION FIGURES.)

on reflection it is possible i have become the Vision, only instead of Jarvis and Ultron, i am the fusion of Morbs and Tuomas

Doc OTM on this one IMO, I hate all this military drone techno-thriller stuff in Spider-Man

fun movie though despite that

also - isn't Spider-Man the wisecrackin' hero? Does he make one quip this whole movie?