Braved a fecking plague pit to see this tonight because my Mrs loves Spiderman films and I’m a good partner/massive sucker/lin desperate need of danger to feel alive… and, hey… it’s a very good achievement for what it is.
I’m closer to home base than not on the Scorsese Cinematic spectrum, so I didn’t feel as squiggly about it as the person sobbing covid droplets behind me in Clapham Picturehouse did.., but before
@Sweet Square @R.N7 and
@Rooney in Paris swing in here to rescue me from praising a Marvel movie (I’ve probably praised loads of them tbf, it’s hard to remember at this point, there are just so, so many…) I have to Kermode this, and judge every film, however arty or Asian, by what it’s trying to be… and this was as impressive a feat of screenwriting engineering for Superhero stuff as any of these things since the first Avengers have been.
You can interpret that as cynically or complimentary as you like (and it is both) but tbf if you think any of your favourite ‘proper films’ weren’t also as painstakingly engineered, with a lot less parts to fit, rather than simply farted fully formed out of the great Criterion arse, then you’ve never tried to write a script … So whatever you think about it’s artistic merit, it IS impressively assembled. It pays off what it sets up (unlike all that Infinity-Endgame bollocks) and still gives its lead more acting to do than any James Cameron film - who I gather from the “Marvel is lame” thread is now the true arbiter of ‘cinema’ I guess?….The guy that made Arnold Schwarzenegger a movie star, and Avatar… that’s where the discourse is at, apparently?
So anywho… eh… it’s a big blurry brown melange of silly Marvel nonsense… but the fact they did all the many silly nonsense things they were expected to do, and paid off all the many silly nonsense arcs they set up, as proficiently as they could’ve possibly done within the silly blurry brown Marvel nonsense world, is certainly an achievement….
It is unquestionably better than Terrance Malick’s Knight of Cups…. Or any Star Wars.
Roll on the next 17 of these, I guess…