Lots of things explode, Michael Keaton’s Vulture wants to smash the system, and Peter Parker seems to have learned his snark at the school of Tony Stark.
The last Spider-Man: Homecoming trailer before the movie’s 7/7 release is here, giving us a more rounded look at the action and to a lesser extent, the characters and their relationships. Peter, fresh off of the events of Civil War, appears to be a superhero-in-training to Iron Man, which he explains to friends (and likely to Aunt May) as “the Stark internship.”
His Tony-built spidey suit has Tony hallmarks like a talking A.I., computer-based calculations for makin’ webs, and what appear to be “training wheels” that limit what he’s allowed to undertake in said suit. Who wants to bet it’s not long before the suit either goes offline or Peter finds a way to hack it? We know those training wheels will have to come off at some point.
(As much as I love Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony, and appreciate the awkward surrogate dad/mentor thing going on here, I really do hope that this is Spider-Man, and not The Amazing Iron Man Teaches The Kid a Thing or Two, The Movie).
Throughout the course of the trailer, Peter Parker does what we expect a Peter Parker to do: make flippant comments while fighting crime, flip through the air a lot with the aid of his now Stark-enhanced webbing, try to lead a normal high schooler’s life while he’s anything but, and ride subway trains through his native Queens.
In my movie-going experience, Spider-Man can be a mixed bag. There’s movies and moments we’d rather forget, like Tobey Maguire’s dancing in Spider-Man 3, but in general, the Spidey films have always entertained me, if not moved me deeply and caused me to join fandom for several obsessive years (*cough* Avengers *cough* *cough* Captain America).
So while nothing in these trailers dazzles me or makes me look forward to July 7th with rabid desire, I’m excited to see this movie and I think it’ll be a fun way to spend a summer day.
If the trailer looks pretty paint-by-the-action-numbers, I’m hoping Homecoming will push the envelope a bit more. Peter’s story has been told so many times on screen by now—both by Maguire and Andrew Garfield—that Tom Holland will have to work extra hard to show us a fresh take on the character. Luckily, Holland seems game for the challenge, and he has endeared himself to us forever with his Rihanna-themed lipsync performance, so there’s that. We only see a hint of his dynamic with Zendaya’s Michelle, but the way she turns the tables on Peter, professing not to care about what he’s hiding rather than fawning in the backdrop, already make it seem like she’s a good lady to have a crush on.
As io9 points out, the international trailer has also been released, and it reveals a lot more of what’s driving Michael Keaton’s villainous vulture:
I actually like this trailer quite a bit more than the one directed at American audiences. I believe I’m on the record as loving nothing so much as an ambiguous villain who has justifiable motivations for villainy, and Vulture intrigues. He’s tired of the shit that rains down on the city from Stark/Avengers tower. He seems to think that he’s leading a sort of worker/everyman revolution, powered by alien technology left over from Avenger battles.
Sure, Vulture is probably not taking the best approach, but Keaton is a fine actor and we’re likely to see a more nuanced baddie than the superheroic norm. Anything that erases whatever the bad guys were doing in the last few Spider-Man movies from my mind will be A-OK. (Paul Giamatti, I am looking directly at you.)
We also see some cool as hell cameos, including the old Captain America video Peter watches in school (“I stole his shield,” Peter tells his friend), and Chris Evans is billed in the cast, so I’m hoping against hope we may get more of him. But Peter having any kind of interchange with our forever favorite Miles Morales-voicer Donald Glover, as evidenced above, makes this movie worth it for me.
What say you? Do you think this Spider can do what past Spiders have done, and more?
(via io9, top image: Marvel Studios/Sony Pictures)
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