Spider-bite induced fatigue: Spider-Man Homecoming worsens your high-school experience

by Sam Harris

“Can’t you just be a friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man?”, a weary-eyed Tony Stark asks Homecoming‘s “new and improved” Peter Parker. Unbeknownst to him, Stark echoes a sentiment I’ve carried since the announcement that Andrew Garfield was stepping into the well-worn shoes of everyone’s favourite web-slinging delivery boy. Why can’t you just be like the old Spider-Man: dorky, well beyond your believable teenage years and — in some instances — with hair dyed black and the need to walk the streets incessantly pointing finger guns at your fellow citizens? I miss the old Spider-Man, straight from the go Spider-Man. 2017’s Homecoming flicks the reset button once again, with new blood in all the old roles.

Tom Holland — immediate sensation — gives the titular role all he’s got — and he’s clearly got a lot. His charm is undeniable, and in this iteration they’ve managed to find someone that is able to sell the idea that Peter Parker is an actual kid. Tobey “deer-in-the-headlights” Maguire may hold a spot in my heart with all his inherent cheesiness, but Holland imbues the character a whole new energy, brimming with allure. It’s taken ten years, but the deed is finally done — we have our Spider-Man.

As Homecoming’s success balances on its casting and comedy, the landscape of the American high school also benefits from an authentic representation. This is an environment that, through all its studio-workshopped, committee-drafted construction, feels genuine and inviting, more at home to adolescence than previous iterations. As a group, they work as a diverse bunch of Queens kids, but breaking them down character by character shows truly how one-note their personalities are: Michelle (Zendaya) brings an attitude that complements the film’s aggressively upbeat nature, but every quip they force out of her mouth feels drawn from some distant spot on the internet where jokes no longer exist; Liz (Laura Harrier) is so far underdeveloped that she feels more like a background character than a love interest; and Flash (Tony Revolori) is rewritten as the type of kid that thinks airhorn memes are genuinely funny.

The one saving grace among this ragtag group of high school kids is Ned (Jacob Batalon), Peter’s second-in-command, his “guy in the chair”. Batalon’s pitch-perfect delivery of moments of genuine humor craft a worthy antithesis to the constant quipping between Avengers that plagues a film like Civil War, and he is a personality truly worth sharing the spotlight with Holland. Even then, his existence is grounded purely in comic relief, there to stand behind Peter and shout “he did that!”. Despite their diversity, at no point do these characters feel united in the teen-movie fashion that the film’s marketing team pushed so violently to maintain; shells of archetypes with all depth scooped out and trashed. None of the chemistry that radiates between characters in any given John Hughes film ever surfaces here. Dialogue is either exposition or another chance for a punchline, and the characters never move beyond the feeling that they’re at an arm’s length away from each other.

Sure, you can flag your film as a teen movie as forcefully as you want, but just because you (patronisingly) manage to graphic-match a scene from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off doesn’t mean that it is one. Homecoming is not a film that belongs in any history book alongside Clueless or Heathers. Beyond Holland’s energy, there’s not a lot going on under the hood to back up its teen film-focused marketing; no worthy idiosyncrasies attempting to step outside the safe markings that the entire MCU operates in. Some creative decisions were clearly made for the opening scene in which Peter is introduced as a YouTube vlogger-like kid: surely exciting to the online cult of children that worship Jake and Logan Paul like gods, but depressing to anyone who finds their exploitative schtick being regurgitated here utterly dismal to the future of Hollywood. If a bunch of self-indulgent rich kids responsible for polluting the internet with beyond-low-quality content have influence on a hundred million-dollar production like this, what hope do we have left?

Like Guardians of the Galaxy before it, Homecoming cloaks its sameness with 80s nostalgia and pop cultural “references”; practically a crowd of people shouting “it’s like the 80s!” until you’re deaf (I’ll reserve my judgement for Thor: Ragnarok until release, but given the promos it’s evident that the 80s is undergoing a revival in the marketing dept. of Marvel Studios). Beneath all the retro posturing, it falls into all the same traps as its predecessors, all blue-grey empty spectacle, nothing formally different from any of the other overtly fan-driven junk the studio doles out. It’s ultimately another piece of sanitised, committee-driven TV comedy operating under the guise of being something different, too concerned with flagging its ‘teen movie-ness’ to actually try do anything worth the title. We get it: you got Martin Starr as a homage to Freaks and Geeks, you remade some Breakfast Club posters with the characters’ faces on it, and there’s a homecoming dance and Spidey’s invited, but they’re small additions that barely keep the film afloat. If this is a teen movie, it’s a sticky-taped projection of what was left on the cutting room floor at the end of the ’90s.

My knowledge of the Spider-Man universe is limited to what I’ve seen on screens and absorbed through cultural osmosis, but there are moments in this that stage a betrayal of Spider-Man’s iconography; the heart of the character. Sure, we all love Iron Man to a point but when he begins to overwrite the abilities of other characters, do we really love him anymore? Do we really want Tony Stark hovering over us at every junction? Alas, the decision to turn Spider-Man’s suit into Iron Man-lite, full of unnecessary computer-regulated powers, is bold and brash (and belongs in the trash) and takes away from the character that lives beneath the suit. Instead of any “up, up and away web!” magic that defined Peter’s dorkiness in the 00s, we get “Hey Karen, give me an introduction to all the abilities that I now have. Thanks, Karen, you’re the best.” In a sense, it’s the epitome of Marvel’s future mythos: machine overriding man. Reel back the characters’ agency and turn them into robots. Give an explanation to everything. My spidey-senses haven’t just stopped tingling, they’ve been completely dissolved and replaced with AI.

Homecoming‘s sheer basicness can’t complement Holland’s livid energy. For a kid who so obviously enjoys the role, it’s a shame to see his talents wasted by a studio that rejects the creativity of directors for the sake of shoehorning their characters into one singular universe (where they can now make terrible jokes in the company of each other!). It’s another formally low-risk film, devout in giving the fans more of “what they want”. It’s sorely lacking the booming Danny Elfman score during the webbed opening credits, the punchiness of Sam Raimi’s direction in the action, the focused scripting of David Koepp — everything that made the original trilogy so special. It subtracts emotion and leaves nothing in its place. Hey, that momentous revelation to Aunt May that you’re Spider-Man? Let’s treat it as a punchline. That incredible, horror-inspired birthing of Doc Ock’s powers? Let’s give the villain a gun that instantly evaporates people. If nothing else, Homecoming is another in a long line of reminders that Raimi did it both first and best. At the end of the day, this generic piece of Marvel junk made in service of furthering the storylines of long-fought studio-acquired characters, and infinitely aggravating disaster of a TV movie turns Spider-Man 3 from a misfire to a complete hit.

Leave Peter Parker alone.