I must say, I'm really surprised by how well this movie is being received lol. My friend and I saw it on Saturday and felt it was the weakest iteration of spiderman.
I will preface my criticism by saying that this movie was fun to watch; The action scenes were entertaining, and Spidey's tech suit gave us something different, which I enjoyed. But when the action stopped, and the movie had to rely on it's writing, thats where it failed, in my opinion.
The sheer number of high school movie tropes was just overwhelming
I understand that Peter is 15 in this iteration, so I don't expect him or his story to have great maturity or depth, but the movie felt like it was written by someone whose only knowledge of high school came from watching early-2000s teen rom-coms. We had an array of high school characters who really only served as plot devices. And even still, you have a character like Michelle who served no purpose other than to perhaps set her up for the second film. Say what you will about the Amazing Spider-man reboot with Garfield, but when I watched those films, I never felt like I was being patronized. And they allowed their exceptionally talented cast to give their characters life, which Homecoming did not. I also didn't think most of the humor in Homecoming landed. I saw it with a full theater, and most of the jokes didn't get an audible laugh. Some of the humor was actually fairly groan-worthy lol.
In all, I think with every superhero movie, you have to consider both the Hero and the Secret Identity storylines. Here, Spidey's story was solid; a fun, fresh addition to the Spider-man line-up. But Peter Parker's just didn't hold up. Trite, calculated, and uninspired, it never transcended its teen movie formula.
With all that screen time they freed up by not having to rehash Spidey's origin story, I wish they had done something.
6/10