Note: Spoilers rampant.
The latest comic book movie, Spider-man: Homecoming (2017), is strongly laced with the current experiment in mixing superheroes with reality. This has been going on since at least The Incredibles (2004), and in this case we’re talking about a 14 year old Peter Parker, faced with his newly acquired powers, his high intelligence, and the hormones which come with puberty. The result is a graceless superhero, flailing through the air, falling victim to tricks, and really excessively verbal. At first, it’s fun, but after a while it wears on the audience.
Fortunately, the movie has other pluses going for it. The story is competent, if dependent on the unlikely coincidence that the woman of his dreams happens to have a super-criminal father, as Dad has been gathering up alien technology following the events of Captain America: Civil War (2016). But the plot’s events are not just random occurrences, but in testing Spiderman’s capabilities, they also force him grow and to think in modes that differ from the norm.
And that’s a good thing for any story. By letting us see how Peter grows from being fairly self-centered to understanding that, as society provided for him when he was younger, he should now provide for it, we can see how there’s more to life than accumulating stuff.
And the super-criminal, for all that he claims he’s indulging in crime for the sake of his family, gives that the lie through his own savagery towards his own kind. The story-tellers carry through on the story of growth right to the end, where Peter, for all his desire to become part of the larger world of Avengers, declines the opportunity in the end, realizing he still has growth to achieve before he can become a reliable member of the club.
I shan’t recommend the movie, but on a lazy summer evening you could do far worse than this movie, especially if you have teenagers to entertain.
