Krishna
This is another reboot on Spiderman. This takes a completely different tack. If you have read the comics, you will know that the Spiderman comics always has a different feel to it than Superman, Batman, or almost any other comic.
Spiderman comics always has some humour flowing right through it, with the self-deprecating Peter Parker kind of humble and even gauche in his own way unlike the supremely confident Iron Man or Batman or any other superhero really. This movie brings out the humour in loads. It also overdoes it, a little bit.
There is a deadly twist in this movie too, like Hollywood does in almost all of the fantasy movies (Be it fairy-tale told differently a la Maleficent, or even the famous Frozen, which is a great movie but so twisted from the original that someone had to tell me that it is basically the story of the Snow Queen!) And I think it is a good development because it makes the story that much more interesting; otherwise, however well done, it will be all gadgetry and special effects and not much more.
The story is about the boy Peter Parker (done well by Tom Holland – I don’t mean to be unkind but so much better than Toby McGuire indeed). And here is the other thing; they skip over the part where Peter Parker (in the original comic book) got his powers by being bitten by a rare (genetically engineered? I don’t remember) spider. He simply is an apprentice of the Iron Man. Was this the case in the comics? With so much improvisation, I can hardly tell anymore.
The story takes off from the Captain America : Civil War where Tom Holland plays Spiderman too. Sidelined after the action, Peter Parker decides to go solo solving crimes, against the advice of his mentor Iron Man (reprised by Robert Downey Jr who has a sense of comic timing that keeps him famous in that role). After a few unintentional disasters when he was trying to do ‘the right thing’ he wants to stop. In the meanwhile his close friend Nat discovers his secret.
He tries to put it away but when he realizes that Liz, a girl in his school whom he has a great crush on (and refreshingly from a different race in conformance with the times), has a crush on Spiderman, he is conned into wearing the suit again, as Nat blabs that Peter ‘knows Spiderman well’. A lot of scenes are hilarious like the one where he finds that the web making fluid has run out and he has to literally run to catch up with a moving van instead of jauntily swinging from conveniently placed objects as he is wont to do usually.
The supervillain in this movie is Vulture, who hates Iron Man for costing him his job and also halting his research. He goes rogue with the superhuman technology that he has managed to smuggle out (Yes, this is a supehero movie; many people routinely invent/ come across/ inherit technology that can ‘wipe out the world’ or at least a small part of it.)
After some extremely spectacular stunts where Peter is saved by the timely arrival of Iron Man in some cases and making very mature choices to stand on the side of justice in spite of the fact that it hurts, Peter is finally acknowledged as a super hero inside as well as outside by Tony Stark, the Iron Man.
Nice story and nice twists and great visuals and action. (Not the jerking motion of camera in some of the older action movies that leave you confused and with some headache). But with all the hype, if your expectations are raised to the level that mine were, also mildly disappointing.
7/10
– – Krishna (Dec 2017)