Spider Man Comes Home

Rating: 8/10 (24 August 2017)

Being completely honest, I wasn't really sold on Spider Man Homecoming on the lead up to its release, I was always an advocate for Andrew Garfield and his interpretation of the character and thought his series came to a premature end. Beyond that the trailers weren't really grabbing me and I wasn't too sure if Tom Holland could carry an entire movie for me, but while I wasn't floored I was pleasantly surprised by what I got.
Tom Holland is really coming into his own as this character, he's still my least favourite out of the three live action adaptions but he brought a real humanity to this role, you got the sense that he really was inexperienced yet excited to be this hero and you bought his performance all the way through. I really liked Robert Downey Jr in this movie, his character was a lot more mature in this film in his mentor role to Peter but he never lost that entertainment value that makes people love him. Happy Hogan was also a welcome addition that had great chemistry with Holland.
One positive I have for this film is something I haven't had for many other MCU films; the villain. I actually loved the Vulture in this film, not only was Michael Keaton fantastic in this movie as him but the character himself was just very well written, he had excellent motivation that I could understand, you never got the sense that he was a naturally bad man but instead a good guy who wasn't in a bad situation and didn't come out of it for the better.
I also loved how they handled Spider-Man himself in this movie, we've never really seen him in high school in any of his other films so it was a good decision to put him in that situation. In every film the character always struggled with balancing Peter Parker and Spider Man but it was done in a more relatable way. It was great to see him in his infancy as a superhero, a lot of humour directed at his inexperience and his need to prove himself, despite all the cgi and superpowers it felt like a more grounded and more realistic addition to this franchise.
It's great to see Marvel give smaller directors chances and Jon Watts really took to the task, a lot of the directing in the high school scenes felt really old fashioned and really well edited but he does a really good job with the action scenes, again he adds something if a realism to them that makes you feel Peters vulnerability.
As much as I enjoyed this film it isn't perfect, the pacing in this film wasn't the best. Homecoming cuts back and forth between Peter and Spider-Man and him at high school and the divide isn't done very well, just when the film starts to get quicker with him as Spider-Man he'll go back to high school for a while and the pacing gets a lot slower and this is repeated about 3 or 4 times throughout the run time and did kill the momentum a bit.
While I loved the main villain of the Vulture the supporting antagonists weren't handled very well, they just feel like disposable characters with no result purpose other than to just add more comic characters to this film. The film wouldn't really have been any different had they not been in here which is a shame because there could have been a lot more done with them.
While it's not quite my favourite of the franchise, it was nothing if not a pleasant surprise. The tone was perfect, it has something of a realism to it, Holland and Keaton are both excellent in this film and we finally have another strong MCU villain. While the pacing isn't the best and some of the supporting villains could have been handled better, while I was very sceptical about a new version of this character I was glad to be proved wrong.
8.4/10: A- (Fantastic)