Welcome to the Marvelverse

Rating: 8/10 (12 July 2017)

It looks as if we now have now come to the third iteration of the Spiderman movies, which is about time since we are now bringing him into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I have to admit that this was much better than the previous iteration of the series, which I have to admit sort of died with the second film. Then again I suspect that there was a rather large push to take him out of these independent films and bring him into the Marvel Universe fold (though it appears that Sony still holds the rights to Spiderman, it is just that they are now working with Marvel, no doubt to appease the fan base).
Fortunately, they have decided to use a couple of new villains, which I did quite appreciate because the previous iterations had the Green Goblin and the son of the Green Goblin running around. In Homecoming we are introduced to the Vulture. The story is that after the first Avengers movie he was a contractor cleaning up New York, however the government, with the help of Tony Stark, decided to take over from the contractors leaving him with a mountain of debt. Not to be outdone, he decided that since Stark messed him over then he wouldn't play ball and decided to keep all that he had found, develop his own weapons, and the sell them on the black market. The problem is that because the materials are quite rare then he needs a constant supply, which forces him to make some rather dangerous raids.
This isn't the Spiderman origin story – that has already been done to death in the previous iterations, so the movie works on assumed knowledge, that is it assumes that we already know that Spiderman has been bitten by a radioactive spider which had him gain his spider powers. It also starts after Civil War, where we were first introduced to him, and to a different, and much younger, Aunt May. As such the story is more about Spiderman's (or Peter Parker's) coming of age. The story, as you can probably tell from the title, revolves around the Homecoming dance, though since I'm not American I really can't say all at much about the tradition. However, he is still in High School, but like teenagers everywhere, wants to make his mark on the world as soon as possible.
The only other Avengers that makes an appearance is Tony Stark, but that has more to do with him being a mentor than anything else. In a sense Peter Parker's dream is to join the avengers, but due to his age, and his relative immaturity, they simply recommend that he be your 'friendly, neighbourhood Spiderman.' Of course, he stumbles into this game, lead by the Vulture, who are building some rather advanced weapons, and then selling them on the black market. As such the question of who should be investigating them, and putting a stop to them, comes into play. The problem is that they aren't such a huge problem that the Avengers should be involved, but Stark does not necessarily want Peter Parker going it alone. Not surprisingly he does, with the resulting consequences.
Basically, this is a coming of age film, and also a film that, as I mentioned, brings Spiderman into the broader Marvel Cinematic Universe. I thought it was done quite well, and it is even better that then didn't go over old ground once again (and this was necessary because they had already done this previously and it would have probably dragged the film down a lot more). I enjoyed it, though I have to admit that I didn't find it as funny as some of the other Marvel films that I had seen. In a way it felt as if they were trying to push it a little too much. Still, it is fun film, and certainly worked quite well.