Far and
away, the best thing about the new Spider-Man
movie was Spidey himself, and even though I’ve already done a Favorite Characters post on the web-crawler (the Andrew Garfield version, who I still
enjoyed a lot,) I love basically everything about this Spidey, so I need to
talk about him again. It wouldn’t be the
first time I’ve done two write-ups on the same character – there were X-Men and The Avengers’s dueling Quicksilvers, and I even did separate
write-ups for the same character played by the same actor in two movies that
only came out four years apart (Chow Mo-wan in In the Mood for Love and 2046.) Anyway, Peter’s in good company (a few
spoilers for Spider-Man: Homecoming.)
As I said
in my review for Homecoming, actor
Tom Holland’s youth is one of the film’s biggest assets. He’s much younger than any other onscreen
Spider-Man and looks it, and that brings his adolescence to life in the most
immediate ways. His awkward teenage
problems, like running into his crush in the hallway or getting himself stuck
in detention, feel genuine, as does his dorky enthusiasm at all the cool
superhero stuff he can do – I love the moments where he’s geeking out with Ned
over himself. This Spidey is every inch a teenager,
and that’s reflected in how he agonizes over whether he should investigate bad
guys or hang out with a cute girl. How
he makes lame excuses to his aunt and talks himself into doing really
ill-advised things. How he debates the
merits of using the suit to impress girls.
How he races into things without thinking and then suddenly realizes
he’s going to need a plan when he gets there.
This is a
Spider-Man who’s still rough around the edges.
He gets himself in over his head, he sometimes blunders into situations
where he doesn’t belong, and he has no idea what to do when he’s in the suburbs
and doesn’t have any tall buildings to attach webs to. That isn’t to say he’s not awesome, because
he is – he both helps and saves a lot of people, and over the course of the
film, he has to dig deep to find strength in himself that he’s not sure he has
until the chips are really down and he needs it more than ever. He has all the speed, dexterity, strength,
and fancy web-shooting we’ve come to expect from our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. But the whole point is that he’s a
virtually-unsupervised teenager with superpowers (Tony is keeping tabs on him,
but to Peter, it largely feels like he’s on his own.) And that means he screws up a lot. Whether it’s from overconfidence, a bad
judgment call, or simply not knowing the full potential of his powers (and his
suit, which comes care of Stark Industries and is thus heavy-laden with toys
that pack a punch,) he’s going to get it wrong at least as often as he gets it
right. What he strives for is getting it
right when it really counts.
To end on
a handful of random notes, I like how Peter is a geek but not a complete
“outcast loser” archetype – placing him in a MAGNET-type school where
everyone’s smart helps with that perception, but just in general, he’s awkward
and self-deprecating while still having friends. His relationship with the computer interface
on his suit, whom he dubs Karen, is continually awesome and hilarious; most of
my biggest laughs came from their back-and-forth. I love watching him making webbing on the sly
during chemistry class and tinker with an alien power source in shop
class. And seeing his secret video diary
of the events of Civil War at the start
of the film, it struck me that posting Spider-Man videos on YouTube is the 21st-century
equivalent of Peter selling photographs to the newspaper. Nice update there.
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