Who crawls to the top of the pile?
With a new Disney movie seeing release tomorrow, "Spider-Man: Far From Home" will likely be enjoying its final week at the top of the box office pile in a summer that has been fairly disappointing to put it mildly.
Like the legs of an arachnid however, the release of "Far From Home" bring the total entries of the "Spider-Man" film franchise to 8 (we do not speak of "Venom.") and thinking about the journey of releasing 8 films got me mulling them over in my head.
So I figured, why not hash out where I currently stand with each cinematic interpretation of the webslinger and recount the films from Worst to Best?
What will perhaps be the least controversial entry of this entire list, the sophomore entry in the series that was the wall crawler's first attempt at a cinematic reboot will be a low point that will be hard to top anytime soon.
What can truly be said about "The Amazing Spider-Man 2" that hasn't already been put out by the rest of the world at this point?
Existing prove that you need to actually tell as story when telling a story, the film is a made-by-executive-committee example of how not to operate a franchise and the final shred of evidence proving that whatever good or bad comes out of Sony as a studio, they have no idea what they're doing and can't be trusted even as far as Avi Arad's aging ass can be thrown.
From least controversial to most, I stand firmly by my opinion in both my original "Homecoming" review and my reitieration of it in discussing "Far From Home."
"Spider-Man: Homecoming" is an average feature at best, so concerned with being a broadly appealing fluff piece that it forgets to truly play with the tools that make teenage dramas compelling in the first place.
Too competent to be bad but not impressive or compelling enough to be enjoyable, it is only saved by Michael Keaton's killer performance as The Vulture, kicking off a third act that is powerful, addictive and quintessentially Spider-Man.
Fortunately for "Homecoming," that third act does go a very long way.
The controversy train just keeps on barreling forward.
"Spider-Man 3" is a structural mess of a story; too many plot threads, too many disconnected antagonists, too many previously unestablished elements, and too little time to hash them all out while simultaneously telling a compelling narrative skyrocketed into the stratosphere by its successor.
The negatives however do not negate the positives.
Cutting through the fat, "Spider-Man 3" is still a charming narrative of 3 friends coming of age and realizing that their bonds with one another must ground themselves to reality in a world that is proving to be increasingly more complicated than any of them imagined.
Lessons are learned, everybody come out more mature from their endeavors, and it's thus far the only cinematic iteration of "Spider-Man" to end on an emotionally satisfying note despite having had more sequels planned for the future.
It's not the high note of the series but at least it knew when to fold and cash in its chips.
The classic that started it all, there's definitely no argument that "Spider-Man" is starting to show its age.
An oddly wonky structure leaves the film awkwardly bisected into 2 pieces that almost operate independently of one another, with the second half suffering from a certain lack of development in key areas.
Nevertheless, the film is not only a fascinating time machine to a bygone era of filmmaking in this country but an infinitely compelling case study of how superhero movies rose to prominence by cracking a code for quality narrative that folks like Christopher Nolan and Kevin Feige would run with to change the very way that Hollywood operates forever.
That leaves 4 more movies that you may actually be surprised to see make the final cut. But in which order do they land? Find out tomorrow.
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