This morning, Sony released a brand new trailer for Spider-Man: Homecoming and it showed us a LOT of new footage, especially regarding Tony Stark’s role in the film (Robert Downey, Jr.) and fleshing out a bit more of the story for The Vulture (Michael Keaton).
Here are the top five things we noticed in the trailer.
WITH GREAT RESPONSIBILITY
This is perhaps the biggest and most subtle piece of this trailer. Marvel and Sony opted to not give us an origin story for the wallcrawler, but we’ve still got to see Spider-Man making those mistakes and learning to be the “man” in Spider-Man. In the comics, we get Uncle Ben; after Peter Parker opts to let a criminal get away with a theft, that criminal later shoots and kills Parker’s caretaker, Uncle Ben. It’s from this that Peter Parker learns his greatest lesson — With great power must come great responsibility. However, no origin story means we don’t get that lesson.
However, if Parker acts irrationally and rushes into a situation he’s not ready for, then that can spell out certain disaster. This is a hard lesson that Tony Stark has learned countless times — Iron Man 3, Age of Ultron — and is, therefore, the right man to teach this young protege these hard lessons. It makes sense, then, that Stark would take the suit away from the kid when he proves that he’s leaning on the suit and not on himself.
FRIENDLY NEIGHBORHOOD SPIDER-MAN!
We get a full dose of Peter Parker enjoying his suit, swinging through a neighborhood as he says, “hey guys,” then swinging down into a pool, all before getting back to his dorm where Ned Leeds discovers he’s the Spider-Man from YouTube. This leads us into some really fun moments with him, as he asks
“Can you control an army of spiders?”
and
“Do you know him?” “Stole his shield.”
Really, this is all the youthful, high school fun of Spider-Man and what we’re all hoping to see in this film.
THE VULTURE IS REALLY MEAN
We learned yesterday, from a USA Today article, that Michael Keaton’s character, The Vulture, owns and operates his own business, cleaning up after superhero fights and scraping the materials. However, Tony Stark starts up an initiative called Damage Control and puts Keaton’s character, Adrian Toomes, out of business. And it’s here that The Vulture is born. Basically, Toomes joins forces with a couple of his guys who become The Shocker (Bokeem Woodbine) and The Tinkerer (Michael Chernus) and they use the alien artifact and superhero scraps of fights past to create weapons to sell to other criminals.
Basically, Toomes and his crew want revenge on Stark for taking their work and Peter Parker gets pulled into the middle.
SPECTACULAR SPIDER-PLOT
This trailer in contrast to the earlier trailer sort of reorients the film story for us. Initially, it seemed that Spider-Man lost his suit due to a technical problem or, perhaps, Parker wanting to get rid of the suit for some other reason; however, here we learn, unequivocally, that the suit is taken away from him by Stark.
So now, with this bit of information, we can more or less ascertain the narrative flow of the film. Our thinking is that the funny bits with Ned Leeds that we see in the beginning of the trailer all happen early on in the film, as does the field trip to DC when Vulture attacks the White House. This is due to their backing of Stark’s clean-up/salvage initiative, Damage Control. Spider-Man is on hand to help out at the Washington Monument and such, but when they get back to NYC and approaches Tony Stark about it, Stark tells him to back off.
But Peter Parker can’t do that. He’s cocky about it. He believes he can take Vulture down all on his own — and learns the hard way that he can’t. He’s depending on his powers and his suit too much, not enough on his mind, and their fight causes a lot of collateral damage he wasn’t anticipating. Vulture splits the ferry in half and, as it starts to sink, Iron Man has to come in and save the day.
He chastises Parker for not thinking ahead, for being too cocky and trusting in his suit too much. He finally leaves it, saying, “If you’re nothing without this suit, then you shouldn’t have it.”
Then we start the second act, where Spider-Man has to prove himself for the entire film without his suit. We need to see Peter Parker being Spider-Man, not Peter Parker trusting in a suit that Tony Stark made him.
DAMAGE CONTROL
Tony Stark creates a government initiative called Damage Control. This is actually pulled directly from the comics where an organization by the same name has existed in some capacity since 1989. In the comics, their entire purpose is to clean up the debris left by big superhero fights and then help rebuild those streets, buildings, and what-have-you at the lowest possible cost. Their purpose in the narrative is to provide a blue collar, every-person sort of perspective.
It seems that Adrian Toomes and his crew also, in some way, fill that role. However, it appears that they get tired of sitting on the sidelines themselves and decide that they’ve got to take the power back for themselves.
You can watch the trailer for yourself below!
He has two cats and knows all things about Doctor Strange but little else.
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