Ixmucane2 wrote:Spiderman: Homecoming
Even better than Big Hero 6; it makes Avengers: Civil War (of which it represents a chronologically overlapping sequel/side story) slightly less bad in retrospect.
Typical Spiderman situations and clichés are treated without the traditional excessive drama, boldly leaving out the "proper" origin story (in particular, the "before and after" comparison) to focus on Peter Parker's friends and on Peter's transition from amateur to Avenger. The protagonist is less lonely and far more realistic than usual; the enemy is also far more normal, at all levels (psychological, physical, moral...), than the traditional tragic, doomed, desperate monsters. Not by chance, many more characters than usual end up knowing Peter's secret identity (and of course he doesn't make a particularly big deal of the situation).
The semi-realistic and low-key treatment of Spiderman is not only very consistent and well-made, but it shows a promising way to adapt comics to good stories and get rid of thick encrustations of melodrama. Moreover, these achievements don't interfere with subtle and unsubtle references, jokes and general fanservice (for example, the last post-credits scene is both philosophically and thematically important and more genuinely silly than the whole of Deadpool).
I was also pleasantly surprised for the same reason. I guess it finally hit the Marvel Studios production committee that there's only so many sequels you can milk if every movie is about preventing a world-wide catastrophe in New York by punching bad guys and protagonists going from zero to hero in every single sequel over and over, so the better option is to take it slowly in terms of character progression and to focus on small-time crooks every now and then. There's no three-minute long training montages where Peter goes from bumbling buffoon to flawless master web-slinging athlete, here he still keeps making rookie mistakes as he's adjusting to the big time superhero business. Tony Stark acting like his mentor/father-figure was an entertaining setup, even if they pushed the whole 'Peter is still immature and wants to impress Tony in order prove he's a real Avenger' way too far. I even liked how it even made fun of your usual Spiderman clichés where Peter is mostly running through suburban neighborhoods instead of slinging around skyscrapers as usual. Like your friendly neighborhood Spiderman, so to speak.
It was also actually funny at times, the one moment I remember the most is the bank robbery by four gangsters wearing masks of The Avengers as Spidey casually intrudes, while in the background there was a poster advertising insurance against identity theft. It's something one can easily miss, but it did make the whole scene stand out to me a lot more. Though the movie does suffer when it comes to the memorability of the action scenes, the yacht scene had me mostly thinking about stopping the train in Spiderman 2 and how similar that was. The other stooges aside from The Vulture were forgettable, sadly.
There was also a post-credits scene where another one of those Captain America PSA videos starts playing, as Captain America starts lecturing the audience about the dangers of racemixing by using the movie itself as an example for how a dystopian America would look like. I thought it was rather weird and out of place, but it didn't detract from the movie too much.
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