This July, Spider-Man is coming home.
The most recent trailer for the new web-slinging solo movie begins to hint to us exactly what that might mean for our favorite wall-crawler.
The title itself says a lot. “Homecoming” is a high-school dance, and we know from both trailers that this film is taking Peter Parker back to high school. This movie aims to be as “grounded” as a super-hero going to Prom. Homecoming also alludes to the character “coming home” to Marvel Studios, following the deal Sony and Marvel made to share the character so that Spider-Man could play with The Avengers.
This latest trailer, though, is the first to give us a sense of the plot of the movie. We get a general sense of the film’s narrative, and I think that we’re going to see Spider-Man come home in one more way: back to his origin story.
Marvel has promised that we are not going to have to see Uncle Ben’s death for the third time in fifteen years. But how do you capture the foundational moment for this character without showing it? Uncle Ben’s death sets in motion Spider-Man’s choice to be responsible, to be better, and to “help the little guy,” as he says in Civil War.
This latest trailer seems to hint that we might be getting a reverse-origin story; taking Spidey back to his roots and making him relearn what it means to be a hero. Notice the chronology of his suit in the trailer.
In Civil War, Stark upgrades Spider-Man to a better suit, which he begins this movie with. Here in this trailer, after a giant misstep, Stark asks for the suit back. The rest of the movie, if we trust the chronology of the trailer, Spider-Man has to go back to his old suit to fight the villain(s). It’s a reversal of what we have seen in the previous series’, where he starts in his cheap suit and ends up in the upgrade. In this way, Spider-Man is being thematically deconstructed back to the Uncle Ben incident.
When Tony Stark says, “If you’re nothing without this suit, then you shouldn’t have it,” we see him filling a mentor/Uncle Ben role. This is another take on the classic line “With great power comes great responsibility.” The suit makes Peter more powerful, but he’s not yet learned to take responsibility for it. Peter will have to learn in a stripped-down fashion. He’ll have to overcome an enemy who himself says to Peter, “I’ll do anything to protect my family… I know you know what I’m talking about.” Even the villain alludes to Ben’s death, which hangs over this trailer, even if we never see it.
I suspect that if we do see it or hear about it, it might be at the end of this movie, as the film brings his character emotionally and thematically back to that moment. In this trailer, and hopefully in this film, Spider-Man will truly come home: to high school, to the MCU, and to the moment that shapes the rest of his life.
