Spider-Man: Homecoming is the sixth Spider-Man movie since Tobey Maguire first started slinging webs in 2002. He and Sam Raimi made three films before the franchise was rebooted with Andrew Garfield and Marc Webb in 2012. Then, following the disastrous The Amazing Spider-Man 2 in 2014 (seriously if you vote for that I wish I could find a way to deliver an electric shock to your brain), Sony decided to lease Spider-Man back to Marvel so Spider-Man could make his debut in the Marvel Cinematic Universe in a small role in 2015’s Captain America: Civil War. Sony and Marvel’s lease agreement on Spider-Man runs through the sequel to Homecoming (scheduled for May 2020). Which has been your favorite film featuring the Wall Crawler so far? Cast your vote, and at the end of July we’ll anoint the best Spider-Man film of them all!
Killing Time 
Some years ago, I did the most masochistic thing of my life. I bought tickets to the musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, and sat through the entire thing.
At first, the clever staging drew me in, and I was bewildered by the fact that I could not tell where all the famous money was spent. But both of those phenomena reversed themselves in the second act, when the fifty foot video monitors were first brought onstage and the actors started doing aerial acrobatics over the audience.
I love U2, and I don’t know what tranquilizers Bono and the Edge were taking that suppressed their energy and talent when they wrote the score. One of the few songs with energy, the musical number that introduced the Sinister Six, was a cacophony of clashing visual elements (the Six in particular looked like baseball team mascots) and a migraine-inducing song about how New York City is full of freaks. Just, like, generally.
Arachne, the character from Greek mythology, appears as Peter’s spirit guide. I am not making this up. She sings the title song, telling Peter to “Turn off the dark.” So that clears up the title. Kind of. Sort of. As for Spidey’s origin, and the Green Goblin’s, and the inclusion of the Sinister Six, all we get is the cliff’s notes version. In fact, I’m not sure the creator of the show, Julie Taymor, ever read a comic book in her life, much less a Spider-Man comic book. I think she just scanned the Wikipedia page.
That this show gestated for ten years is astonishing. It’s enough to make the most fervent Broadway devotee question the entire musical form, because after you watch Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark you have to ask yourself: at what price did musicals come into existence? Taymor is really, really amazingly talented, and I can not figure out how she had anything to do with this tacky, vacuous, tone-deaf circus masquerading as a musical.
And everyone knows that the best Spider-Man songs are not actually about him…
Spider-Pig, Spider-Pig.
Does whatever a Spider-Pig does.
Can he swing on a web?
No, he can’t. He’s a pig.
Look out! It’s Spider-Pig.
also…
Particle man, particle man.
Does whatever a particle can.
What’s he like? It’s not important.
Particle man.
You have to get people who love the comics to adapt the comics. ASM2 failed because it was dictated by suits with no working knowledge of the source. SM3 failed for a very simple reason: Raimi did not like Venom, he did not want Venom in the movie, but he was forced to put Venom in, and the result is a film that is horrid, because everything in the film that has to do with Venom is wrong.
I love the MCU. I wish it were more substantive and less frothy, but on the whole it’s starting to get a lot darker. It’s clearly made by people who love the characters. And that is what counts. Even Tim Burton, who was not a comic book reader, latched onto the Batman character pretty quick, and understood Joker completely. I think Burton related to the Joker on an emotional level. As disturbing as that is. And Burton decided that Batman is not just obsessed, but totally nuts. Batman was always one step away from Arkham, but it took Burton to rub that in people’s noses. He knew Batman better than a lot of us.
I can’t believe that everyone in Hollywood has not figured out the Love Formula. It’s so obvious. All You Need Is Love. Captain Marvel, zap the executives right between the eyes.
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So you’re saying this was WORSE than The Amazing Spider-Man 2 which you also watched after I warned you not to (you never listen, sigh).
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Well I warned you not to watch Pan, and you did anyway. And I have no sympathy. (No, actually, I am human, I have a lot of sympathy for anyone who sat through Pan, including myself.)
Just to put things into perspective, ASM2 is closer in quality to The Dark Knight than to Spider Man: Turn Off the Dark. They say that Julie Taymor was unhappy with the way the show turned out, but from what I can gather they did not really change her work, they just kind of stripped it down. For example, originally there was a “Geek Chorus” of comic book nerds who narrated the show, and those were removed when Taymor left. Also, originally the first act was going to have Peter fighting Green Goblin and the Sinister Six. The second act was going to see him fighting Arachne, from greek mythology. In other words, there is a possibility that the show might have been even worse. Glenn Beck said this show was this generation’s Phantom of the Opera. I kid you not.
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You lost me at Glenn Beck. And now I’m having Pan flashbacks. YOU ARE LUCKY WE LOVE YOU, JACKMAN!!
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