Thrilled by his experience with the Avengers, young Peter Parker returns home to live with his Aunt May. Under the watchful eye of mentor Tony Stark, Parker starts to embrace his newfound identity as Spider-Man. He also tries to return to his normal daily routine — distracted by thoughts of proving himself to be more than just a friendly neighborhood superhero. Peter must soon put his powers to the test when the evil Vulture emerges to threaten everything that he holds dear.

Prime time Summer blockbuster season is in effect. Nothing on TV besides baseball. Everyone’s going back to work from their 4th of July weekend. We’re in the dog days of summer which means everyone should sit in a nice cool movie theater to burn off a couple of hours to escape the heat and no better way to do that than to peep Spiderman: Homecoming.

At this point if you’ve been keeping up about the movie you know people are saying its the best Spiderman film to date. Honestly I have nothing to say otherwise. I never hated the Tobey or Andrew Garfield Spiderman’s but I certainly didn’t love them. There was the awkward scene from Spider-man 1 with him and Green Goblin with no facial movements and all dialogue.

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Such a dumb look to have the very expressive movements with no actual mouth movements. And then there was the stiff statue swing scene where He rescues MJ and it was just her holding onto a dummy behind a green screen. A dummy that was as stiff as Tobey’s acting in the rest of the movie. Is it petty that those 2 things make me hate the movie that has way more flaws than just that? I don’t care. Now many people argue that Spider-man 2 was one of the best super hero movies of all time and while I don’t have anything bad to say about it, I enjoyed Homecoming much more. And Spider-man 3? That movie stunk to high heavens.

The Amazing Spiderman tried to hearken back to some comic book material with Gwen Stacy and his own brains coming up with the webbing but still tried to do the same old origin story format which means the movie will spend up to 45 minutes of screen time watching him get the spider bite and watching his uncle die again and again.

If they made another Spiderman origin movie, it probably would’ve been okay, would’ve made a bunch of money and go through the love and hate cycles of most movies, but this time they tried to do everything different. When Batman V. Superman came out the 1st 15 minutes is watching Batman’s parents get killed again. Been there done that. Not interested. This Spiderman is younger and we get to ignore poor Uncle Ben get lit up in the streets of New York. Thank god. You didn’t go see Titanic to watch a big ass boat sink into the ice, you watched it for love and the nude scene. We’ll you don’t go watch Spiderman just to watch some old white guy get shot and killed. Comic book movies are for kids and the inner kids inside us and the last thing our inner kid wants to do is watch a funeral scene get in the way of watching Super hero stuff.

We knew since Civil War they wanted to have a fresh start and avoid the cliche marks of the Spiderman story and they do a good job of it in Homecoming. Besides the whole “Uncle Ben I’m shot and dead but do the right thing” scene, Homecoming is just refreshing to see with the different things going on. It takes place a substantial amount outside of Manhattan. Crazy to think that location can play that much but we’re so use to seeing Peter swing around NYC. This one we got locations in DC, the Suburbs and in 40,000 fucking feet in the sky. It just all feels so new and different just from the look of the setting to the cast of characters that are different. We don’t get the super aggressive Flash who always seems like is going to end up a wife beater that somehow made it to a school for nerds. Seriously, in The Amazing Spiderman he was about to beat up a kid just for existing and made it seem like he was suppose to be a highly recruited D1 athlete that is also a nerd because he goes to a fancy school. Guy was suppose to be a Ryan Fitzpatrick type with tendencies to dabble into physical domestic abuse. In this one we actually see Spiderman have a friend. I know Spider-man 1 he had Harry but lets be real, guy fucked MJ in that one. At that moment, he’s no friend of Spidey’s at all.

Another thing I like is just the little nuances that Spiderman has that just seem to add to his character’s believability. First off we get an awesome suit. Again, the old one’s were fine but inconceivable that they come up with and tailor make a stream line suit that was fit for combat. Well here, simple. It takes place in the MCU so Stark and his billions of dollars just fabricates one. That just opens the door to so much more. What I like about the 3rd Iron man movie and Age of Ultron was to see the different interactions with the suit. Iron man 3 had a modular suit with prehensile capabilities that let him just wear pieces of the suit. In AoU you see it in parts on Tony where chest and back pieces just fly onto him. Those kind of interactions just add to the magic of film, despite those not being the favorite among their own series. If you slow down AoU you can actually see him close in his hand when he summons the hand/arm gauntlet just so it can fit over and wrap around his arm. Well in this we actually see a very reasonable technique for Peter to put on the suit. It just vacuum seals onto him. Where the other suits look like they need to be painted on. And then there’s just things like watching him use the web shooters. The old movies the web shooting ability was more of a vehicle for him to travel but in this one it just feels like he utilizes it more as a weapon than previous versions. At one point he fights The Vulture and you see him connecting the web together and slapping his hands down to connect it to the ferry and various uses of the web to take out bad guys. Just little details like that that make me wonder if there was in fact a teenage boy in New York that can do all of this, this is how he would specifically do it.

We’d be remiss if we didn’t mention Michael Keaton’s performance. Honestly guy knocks it out of the park. I need to buy one of those Aviator jackets ASAP because even though I probably would look like an asshole wearing it in Florida, it looks bad ass. And the Vulture winged suit itself was awesome. When the word started trickling out that the bad guy was going to the the Vulture, I immediately looked it up and you got a guy that looked like a bald Izzy Mandelbaum in green spandex with feathers. Going from that idea to what we got with this jet fighter hover wing suit was a total 180. The fighter pilot look was bad ass since Top Gun, well add that and giant alien powered metal wing jets that lets you roam around New York City. Even his character outside of the bird suit was pretty menacing. I think the MCU has gotten a lot of unfair criticism that their bad guy’s suck. Well in the story line of the movie, I think The Vulture and Spiderman are on a very stream line path towards each other that when they finally go head to head in the 3rd act, you are very on the edge of your seat ready to see what happens.

Aside from that a little notes here and there, I really didn’t know what to expect from Zendaya’s role. She had a large part of the promotion of the movie so I figured she would have a much larger role than what she had but keep in mind that this is a movie universe and I think they set her up for much more in the future, and by far one of my favorite scenes in the movie was Peter walking into his Homecoming dance and he sees her and she just waives and gives him the finger. Delivery was hilarious. And besides that a lot of people were saying that this was like an Iron man film with some Spiderman. Honestly he doesn’t over shadow the movie at all. He just plays the role of a mentor and pops in here and there but besides what you see in the trailers and to help set up the time line but not much more than that. Who I wish had a larger role was Marisa Tomei. Honestly didn’t think she had enough screen time but what little scenes she was in, she did a good job just playing the fun aunt. Always thought it was wild knowing that it was suppose to be an Aunt and from Spiderman 1 they give us a frail old lady who was suppose to be the same age as Peter’s mom.

When the news first came out, I remember them saying they wanted to treat it like a John Hughes film and they even make a little homage cameo to Farris Bueller’s Day Off. It goes along with the new approach to Super hero movies that are geared more as a genre film. Winter Soldier a Spy thriller, Ant Man a heist movie, Ragnarok is suppose to be like a buddy road trip film. Well I think Homecoming does a decent enough job in making me care about the teenage drama side of being Peter Parker as much as I want to see the Spiderman side. I like how the director, John Watts said that at that age everything is hard from passing in school, to talking to girls, to being a super hero taking on villains. Now can I relate to that last part? No. But I think the film does a decent job in the balance between Peter Parker as the kid and Peter Parker as Spiderman and the transitional periods in between and that ,in the end, is the conflict and the center of any Spiderman movie and this movie does a decent job in highlighting that.  Its a fresh take on a Spiderman movie, and a Super hero movie, and another addition to the MCU. Solid 8/10. Enjoyable Summer movie and the best version of Spiderman so far.

 

Other Notes For The MCU

 

Nebula the Patricide

I don’t know if I said this at the time when I wrote the Post for GotG Vol. 2 but I have a sneaky feeling that Nebula is going to be the one to put the dagger in Thanos. No one else has the distinct motive to kill Thanos. Like Tony Stark doesn’t even know the guy exist right now. But after re-watching GotG Vol. 2, first off that scene where Nebula and and Gomora talk and says Thanos pulled her eye from her head and her brain from her skull and arm from her body and how she always just wanted a sister was one of the most heart wrenching moments I’ve ever seen. By far one of the best lines given in the entire MCU, but that has to make her the one to kill Thanos. Sure one of the 60 other characters in the Marvel world are gonna help in doing that, but I need Nebula to be the one to pull the trigger, one, because I have that theory out now a year before the movie comes out, and two, because she is the most justified in doing so.

 

 

Russo Brother’s Tweet

Now a tweet before this….

was obviously a screen shot of the cage door that opens up to reveal the Infinity Gauntlet. So the big question is wtf is that thing now they’re tweeting out that’s gonna make the nerds scratch their head as they try to figure out what it is. Some people are saying some special Arc Reactor for stark? Some Portal thing? Me personally, I think Stark knows he’s going to need Caps help in Infinity Wars and they’re going to get the squad back together and after he saw that the current shield has Black Panther claw marks in it, he decides to rebuild a super shield of sorts. I mean the outside kind of looks like the shield for one, and two, we’ve seen that in Iron Man 2, there is more to it than just a thin layer of vibranium that went into the original prototype, and three, im pretty sure they mention a new shield for cap at one point in Homecoming so Looks like i might be right.