Review of Spider-Man: Homecoming, directed by Jon Watts

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

I feel like a lot of my blog introductions, especially when it comes to movies, have been lamenting on the fact I don’t have a ton of time lately. I used to work as a film critic (which, in fact, was so incredibly underpaid that I now make more off of this blog’s display ads than I ever did publishing anywhere else), and then when I was in graduate school I was writing a lot about film, so I used to watch so many movies.

But now I work an 8-5, come home, and then doom scroll my evenings away instead of watching the movies I used to love so dearly. And recently I realized I want to stop doing that, so I’ve set limits on my phone and am fully prepared to sit back and watch more movies and read more books in order to feed my brain.

And sometimes those movies don’t have to be high art or super intellectual. I think when I worked as a critic I often saw a lot of movies I needed to analyze deeply, but nowadays I just go for whatever interests me in the moment. That’s how I ended up one day opening up Netflix, seeing Spider-Man: Homecoming was added to the platform, and then I pressed play.

Let’s get into the review! Don’t want to ramble too much in the introduction.

After meeting the Avengers, Peter Parker tackles a new threat in the city while balancing his high school life.

Spider-Man: Homecoming takes place during and after the events of Captain America: Civil War, which means Peter Parker is fresh off of appearing with the Avengers to stop Captain America and his crew. Before that, though, in 2012 Adrian Toomes’ salvaging company is fired from a gig after Tony Stark and the US government created the Department of Damage Control. Toomes is livid over this and steals some of the Chitauri technology they found on site, which his crew then uses to create weapons.

Eight years later is the present day, where Peter Parker continues going to school and begs Tony Stark to let him do more missions with the Avengers. Stark tells him no, then Peter ends up quitting his decathlon team in order to try and chase more bad guys on the street. As this continues to interfere with his school and regular life, his best friend Ned, wanting to build a Lego, discovers Peter is Spider-Man when he comes back one night in the suit.

It’s during a house party, where Peter’s crush Liz is at, that Peter flees in order to chase after Shocker and Herman Schultz, who works for Toomes. Peter drops in and saves the guy they’re selling the weapons to, but then Toomes shows up and ends up fighting with Peter. He’s dropped into the lake and almost drowns, but Stark, having sent a double to chase after him, rescues him and gives a warning about pursuing these guys further.

Toomes is pissed off about the interference and kills the Shocker, then makes Schultz into the new Shocker. Peter brings back one of the weapons abandoned in the last night, removing its power core to study it further. Peter then sees that his tracking device is showing that the group is moving to Maryland, which is pretty convenient: the decathlon team is going to a competition in DC.

He comes with the team to DC, with Ned and he unlocking the more advanced features of the suit, but then misses the tournament when he gets trapped inside the DODC compound while chasing Toomes. It’s in there that he realizes the core that Ned and he had removed is a grenade. He runs to the Washington Monument after freeing himself, but it’s too late: the power core explodes in Ned’s backpack.

Peter ends up saving everyone in the elevator and Tony ends up praising him for his work there, but gives him a word of caution again. Not even a week later Peter goes after the latest buyer of the weapons on the Staten Island Ferry. Toomes flees while the ferry splits in half, but Peter can’t save everyone alone.

Tony shows up to help him, but then he takes away Peter’s suit. He goes back to his regular high school life and asks Liz to come with him to the homecoming dance, but then realizes her father is Toomes. When Liz elaborates too much on Peter’s life details, Toomes acknowledges Peter is Spider-Man, then threatens him when Liz is out of the car.

Peter comes to terms with the fact that Toomes’ enxt step is to hijack a plane with weapons and run it into the new Avengers headquarters. He leaves Liz behind at the dance, puts on his homemade Spider-Man suit, then stops Schultz in the parking lot. Peter arrives at Toomes’ location, where they fight, but then Peter, after almost getting beat in the fight, gets up and stops the plane.

It crashes on Coney Island, and they fight again. Peter stops and saves Toomes though when the suit explodes, leaving him behind for the police when they arrive. Tony ends up inviting Peter into the Avengers after that, which he denies, and when he heads home, Aunt May walks in after he dons the suit.

Overall Thoughts

I remember clear as day when this movie first came out, and I’m shocked that it literally took me nine years to watch the movie. That said, I find that this might be better, as I’m not looking at things through rosy glasses. I think this is a solid superhero movie, and that Tom Holland’s Spider-Man is fairly refreshing in the grand scheme of things. Will he be playing a high schooler forever? Guess we’ll find out!

That said, I don’t find this movie to be groundbreaking. It’s a nice change of pace compared to the rest of the Marvel movies, especially because he has this double life and is a high schooler, and it’s done well. I just don’t find this to be particularly revolutionary, and some of the pacing in the movie felt a little off.

In the end though I was pretty entertained! Go see this one if you haven’t already. I think it’s worth watching at least once.

Follow me below on Instagram, Letterboxd, and Goodreads for more.