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

this was really fun, love all the teen stuff, glad someone is making fun colorful teen movies --- kinda old-fashioned in a way, like we arrive in different world cities and get little travelogue shots of them, instead of just an aerial shot and a typewriter font announcing "PRAGUE.". all the supporting players are good, the jokes are frequent and funny, and it moves along pretty quick.

however i hated all the nick fury stuff, and about 50% of the references to "tony." also this is like the eighth one of these movies about a super-powerful spy-on-anyone, kill-anyone-on-earth drone system. did tony not get around to watching The Winter Soldier, or what? anyway spider-man going overseas should be a great excuse to get away from all that and just let him be spider-man doing spider-man stuff. the concluding scenes worsen this dramatically imo - no spoilers but the status quo being set up for the next one seems to really close off a down-the-middle spider-man movie. maybe we'll have to just count on a miles morales sequel for that.

also "the blip" explanation for what happened in Endgame made noooo sense to me...not that i want this to feel even more burdened by the other movies but it was distractingly confusing. i guess they're just never going to really deal in any way with how weird that situation was/is. even in Endgame it was like one scene of paul rudd visiting a memorial, and next thing we see it's hulk signing autographs for happy children in a diner, like.... there was still a functioning economy....? they still have diners?? such a great bizarre scifi premise, or even a classic comic book way to create an alternate timeline and meet alternate versions of characters or w/e, just totally jerked around for plot purposes and disposed of.

The blip stuff made no sense to me and was barely explored, to the extent that they didn't really need to bring it up at all.

What I loved about this movie is a) the villain's crazy explanation for who he is and where he's come from is totally accepted as fact, because at this point in this world of time travel and alien invasions and Spider-man multi-verses, why not? and b) even though everyone expects the villain to be a/the villain, this movie had some serious misdirection mojo working, in that at least to me the villain's reveal as a villain *still* came as something of a surprise.

And as far as "huh?" questions for me go, I don't have many for this one! Except this: the EDITH glasses are so attuned they even know what his classmates are texting to one another in real time, you'd think they'd have an alert for "danger: disgruntled unstable former Stark employee who helped design my tech!"

Mysterio was one of the better baddies they've had in a while...

anyone with any knowledge of spiderman comics already knows this.

Fun flick, saw it today. BETTER THAN THE FIRST

That's what I was saying, even though everybody knows who the villain is I thought they still handled it well.

It’s really interesting to me that both of the MCU Spider-Man movies have Peter dealing with his own shortcomings while dealing with the results of Stark’s shortcomings. Stark is such a big shot he has no time to notice all the supervillains he enables in his wake, and Parker is a fucking teenager compelled to fight them, more or less a draftee.

You could probably write a good length piece on how both of these movies are really about the unavoidable collateral damage that results from every arms race in human history.

I mean, when he says “Avengers-level” He literally means “hundreds of people are dying all over the place rn”

You could probably write a good length piece on how both of these movies are really about the unavoidable collateral damage that results from every arms race in human history.

Or maybe the psychology of *being* the weapon.

Or how I only post stuff like that after four of those really good IPAs that look like pulp-free orange juice

NEIPAs?

NEIPAs should be the hero *and* villain of the next Spider-man movie.

_Spider-Man: Frat Beer Bust_

Maybe he can “blip” to 21 and discover getting smashed as his big second-act fuckup

anyone with any knowledge of spiderman comics already knows this.

once again, really impressed with how they make a goofy-ass Sinister Six villain both both legitimately threatening and also credibly-motivated to e.g. put a fishbowl on his head

what makes these great teen movies: NEVER trust the adults

I'm tired of Spider-Man being beholden to the MCU Iron Man legacy junk but I did chortle when they revealed what the acronym EDITH stood for

That was my favorite joke in the movie

I'm tired of Spider-Man being beholden to the MCU Iron Man legacy junk

Oh, I'm fine with the MCU stuff, just him being Iron Man's little buddy/surrogate/heir thing is what I was finding tiring

spoiler zone here, but having yet another major character be directly linked to Tony Stark was a little much

I thought it was a little OTT in this movie too, but I mean they basically made Tony the MCU starting point from his first movie one... so it's not terribly surprising.

Loved this one though, so glad I'm able to see these in the theater with my 7 year-old now, he had a blast with it.

MCU is all about dad problems so it makes sense

Also, re: Avengers-level problem - I hope the post credit-scene is a hint to where the remaining heavy hitters are (Thor we know is in space with the Asgardians of the Galaxy, but what about everybody else that survived Endgame?)

it's just kinda weird since movies like GOTG have more than proved that you don't need the almighty Tony for people to buy into a Marvel movie, and the Raimi movies more than proved that people love Spider-Man as a standalone character doing whatever a spider can. also, the specific stuff they're saddling Spider-Man with by this route is exactly what everyone agreed was the worst part of Civil War (the comic book event, not the movie).

meanwhile i'm just so tired of the word "tech" getting thrown around in these movies. michael douglas having to say "he wanted my tech" or w/e in the first Ant-Man was clearly the jumping the shark moment for this shit. it's not like these movies even offer a beautiful or compelling or mind-expanding aesthetic of the tech imaginary outside of Wakanda --- it's all kinda blah and samey and TV ready (that awful upstate avengers campus is the apex of this).... an ideological expression of confidence in the high-tech surveillance state and its shining blah bureaucratic objects and locales. it would be nice if someone in-movie would point this out tbh - Saint Tony has 2-3 totally objectionable world-domination and total-control infrastructures to his name, maybe spy satellites and killer drones are bad things not good things? zendaya's MJ would be great for this and that could create interesting conflicts for peter parker. in homecoming she had that great line abt the washington monument being built by slaves: a woke teen character for our moment, cool! but now in the new one, the idea is that she's like a dark teen who's into weird conspiracy stories about world monuments, a pretty shameless neutering given all the other things the eiffel tower could prompt her to say.

an ideological expression of confidence in the high-tech surveillance state and its shining blah bureaucratic objects and locales wait wasn't the whole point of Winter Soldier against this, also them bringing back Nick Fury for this seemed a deliberate callback to the same theme?
also the avengers movies have consistently shown Tony as an arrogant technocratic asshole. Age of Ultron was all his fault!

The post-credit scene no doubt sets up the post-S.H.I.E.L.D. shift to S.W.O.R.D., no?

^^^

They're going to bring the X-Men into the fold by introducing Abigail Brand and her mutant boyfriend, Hank McCoy

Exactly what I was thinking while I walked out.

Re: the goodness/badness of high-tech surveillance drones with lots of weaponry, I don't think it's fair or particularly sensible to come away with the impression that the movie was in favor of them given what they were used for all throughout the second act; like, the actual plot is an example of Why These Things Are Bad And We Shouldn't Do Them.

even on the bus Peter is battling against Stark's drone

never understood how the photo got wiped from Brad's phone though. my son said "they must have deleted that scene" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

hrm I have this long-ass subway ride reply but the flagging app keeps failing when I try to post it

Eh, it was sort of implied that that function of EDITH was actually pretty simple, he just got distracted by targeting the dude with a drone. Or at least it's easy enough to believe he just did it after he dealt with the drone. Or was the picture deleted immediately after that scene? Anyway, not important. I still want to know why the glasses were not flashing red when Bad Guy put them on.

well of course, you fill in the blanks, but it was odd to me that they never showed EDITH actually accomplishing what peter wanted, given that farce of the whole scene is predicated on EDITH not doing what he wanted.

his directions were very unclear!
also the entire bit where she asks if he wants to "take him out" was referencing his fumbling around in Homecoming where he ends up turning on lethal mode by accident

these voice-controlled systems are tricky

Also everything Tony Stark builds is a deadly weapon first and a set-up for a gag second

it makes spider-man seem like a total dumbass who hasn't learned anything from anything and has to go through the same arc each movie. kind of a harry potter thing. or an iron man thing for that matter.

seems very true to being a high school kid

I’m genuinely surprised at Casino having such wrong-ass takes about these movies

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.

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"