There is a seductive quality to being a teenage superhero. An age when you are aware of injustice, yet can do little to stop it; capable of great optimism but familiar with despair—adolescence has become an enduring trope for good reason. As a mutant pubescent do-gooder, you’re in parts unbound from one, but much more susceptible to the other. Though one essential notion of being a teenager superhero remains the same, an ethos Spider-Man: Homecoming embraces, it could be so much fun.
 
Where I’m no arbiter of such things, is this the Spider-Man we’ve always wanted? It’s a gale of fresh air by any summer movie standard, not just the unwieldy design of superhero pictures. Refusing to take itself seriously in a way Deadpool never grasped, Homecoming is a joyful mixture of gold standard hero creation and genre antidote. And that's the word: joy. An unbridled joy, equally endearing and relentless.
 
The other immediate quality of Homecoming, it uses its brain. Jon Watts and company find a clever way to nudge every expected element of Spider-Man. With each subtle shift in perspective, fresh blood trickles through the reboot weary franchise. From the opening sequence, a series of Peter Parker’s frenetic smartphone videos, the film establishes itself as something rambunctious. No origin story, bougie Aunt Mae (Marissa Tomei), a riff on Spidey’s city dependence, it’s built on solid beats. Perhaps not always unfamiliar, but like an exceptional pop song, the mix is beautiful. Concepts are balanced, relationships make sense, and above all, the film has a good heart.
 
To that end, the stakes make sense. Peter Parker, as embodied by Tom Holland, attends Midtown Tech. A high school science academy and diversity cavalcade of hyper-intellectual youths, *handclaps* this is the future liberals want! It’s the weeks leading up to homecoming, and Peter has Spidey problems intermingled with teenager problems, but nothing is the end of the world.
 
Homecoming plays as much the teen movie—Hughesian in a way, but never a pastiche—as it does a superhero film. Academic Decathlons, ATM robbers, crushes, super weapons, they all coexist, each one’s priority as fluid as any concern of a high schooler. And in a cinematic universe where apocalypses are a dime a dozen, Spider-Man’s tangle with arms dealers feels just as pertinent. Where the scale may sound puny, the connections pulling our characters into the central conflict are personal. Saving an entire Eastern European capital, a’ la Avengers: Age of Ultron makes for grandiose cinema, but a tightly woven story with visceral heroes and villains offers something far more human.
 
And the humans in Spider-Man: Homecoming are rad. With a battery of high-caliber talent to deploy, the film manages to give something substantial to each player. Donald Glover and Hannibal Buress, with four scenes between them, are as effective as co-star Zendaya’s angsty Michelle. We get Martin Starr out there reminding us that protest is patriotic. Even a disembodied voice emerges as a memorable sidekick. And, somehow, the requisite appearances of other Marvel characters are largely tasteful. One such instance is punctured with, for my money, the best joke in the picture. Though, with all the warm pork bone broth goodness this picture pours down your gullet, I couldn’t help but feel the nag of one loose thread. I know, I know, it's always a loose thread with me, but the presence of Bokeem Woodbine as one of our Spidey foils cemented the connection.
 
It’s a moment from FX’s serialized Fargo where ambitious criminal Mike Milligan (as played by Woodbine) ascends in the organized crime world. An enlightened man of the 1970’s, Mike has a higher purpose, justification for each bloody handprint left up the ladder. Yet it’s Morning in America, and the multinational is the new kingpin. The enforcer’s reward is a small office outfitted with a word processor. He’s instructed to ditch his oxblood western suit, cut his afro, and learn to golf. Always golf. And on the dawn of Spider-Man: Homecoming—our Sony, Disney orgy of corporate interest—I can’t help but feel Marvel, a once weird, bankrupt, scrappy, visionary, has traded it all in to be just another corporate stooge.
 
This is not some phony righteousness on my behalf. Hell, if they existed, I would depression-lunch-rage-eat loads of McDoubleCrunchwraps, but some hellish union between McDonald's and Taco Bell does not a positive make. I’m not a fan of Hollywood’s current climate—especially Sony “lending” Spider-Man to Marvel, an echo of bad studio system politics—but the onus is to evaluate what happens between the margins, and Homecoming is a joyful place. So, for the sake of my beloved, beleaguered editor, there ends the need to grind this, my favored axe.

Spider-Man: Homecoming is good, but consolidation of creative enterprise under the penumbra of one megacorporation, well, that’s bad. Should the latter be wielded against the former? No, but they are inextricable.  

—By Monte Monreal

​Trying to unpack the many identities of DC’s newest Wonder Woman is like pulling apart layer after layer of a matryoshka. The large, welcoming exterior is an above-average superhero film, and the smallest doll nested in the center is a bittersweet note where realities of and hopes for our world converge. In between there are contrasting pieces each bearing their own questions, each requiring a peek down to the next level. If this seems like an aggressive rubric on which to grade a summer tentpole, there is a pervasive feeling Wonder Woman is required to save the world both on and off the screen. I’ll attempt to peel back the layers left to contemplate, but if this extended analogy has them eyes rolling, I’ll spare you: Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman is a film powerful enough to carry both words in the title.
 
Superheroes
Where this may be the least meaningful of the film’s accomplishments, you heard it here first, folks: DC is out of detention. Yes, between the frenetic joy of The Lego Batman Movie and the  successes of Wonder Woman, DC has finally managed to post bail. Where I wish I could tell you this film subverted and rebuilt the genre—with its many cataloged problems—we never quite ascend to a tier where films like The Dark Knight dare tread. It’s more of a foundational story concern, all tropes and elbows, but this world of color and empathy purges the grueling self-seriousness that has long shackled DC to inferiority. Though, Wonder Woman does get damn close, and it’s for this exact reason all of this may prove so polarizing.
 
Representation
I took a friend of mine to see the screening, and she quite liked it. This is not a person I would remotely describe as an ardent lover of superhero pictures, or even action films, but Wonder Woman won her over. After the film had a couple of days to settle, I asked her—acknowledging the predictable story beats—if our lead was another dumb dude would she have felt the same? Her response? "I liked watching a woman kick ass." And she’s right, slicing straight to the nut with brute truth.
 
I’m loathe to spoil anything, but in an early sequence we see a crew of Amazons whoop up on some Kaiser-loving bros. A full throated, acrobatic beat down, and it’s doooooope. Yes, specifically because a big budget brawl featured women expressing their physical dominance, this picture is special. I can’t recall another sequence like it, and so goes the complexities of representation. Many of us have come of age through summer after summer of blockbusters, but the list of successful female leads can be counted on one hand. As women make up, like, just gonna throw out a number—half of the population—the disparity is beyond troubling. It’s bizarre. But does plugging a woman into an otherwise perfunctory exercise in hero movie making warrant high praise? I believe it does, because new perspectives, no matter how rote, can transform walls into doors. This begs the question, “Is Wonder Woman a feminist movie?” To which my aforementioned friend replied, “Does it need to be?”

Politics
One element of Wonder Woman I wish they had really dug into was the backdrop of WWI. As this is a film about the ideological evolution of Wonder Woman—or Diana as played by Gal Gadot in an exceptional turn—a moment where industrial warfare, absurdist futility, and a new century converge in the trenches of the First World War is fertile ground. Where this could have been a bold parallel track to run, Wonder Woman turns over a few stones, but never tries to piece it all together. And this is where the politics are at times laser precise, and other moments so very muddled.
 
There is a really thoughtful moment where Diana tries on a number of outfits made available to a woman in 1917 London. She finds them, in a word, constricting. In a brilliant gesture, Diana eventually sports a sensible hat, jacket, and long skirt, an ensemble plucked straight from the black and white photos of London suffragettes marching for the vote. In another deft move, Diana dresses down a quorum of serious men in an impressive dark wood war room. They are predictably aghast, but the subtext is what matters; there is no reality where Diana believes she can’t make her voice heard. It is never said, but it is there, smart and incisive.
 
In other moments, Wonder Woman can’t help but truncheon you with its ethics. Varying comments on racism and sexism and war are spilled on screen through chunky dialogue. They become something without nuance, and ideals without dimension can be reduced to a consumer good. Especially when folded into what is ostensibly a product expected to return a profit. So is this a feminist film? Does it need to be? Both answers warrant their own breathy write-ups, but either way it’s a tremendous expectation to pin on a multinational conglomerate’s franchise installment. There is no box office smash, or failure, that can validate a movement. Wonder Woman does offer a distinct victory for the representation of women in major motion pictures, but is important to remember, this, if anything, is the trailhead, not the destination.
 
Norms
That brings me to the biggest disappointment offered in the film, a distinct inability to think beyond the obvious. Look, if you get me in a room with Chris Pine—the dashing Steve Trevor—I’m gonna try and gin up some sexual tension, but that’s a given. Wonder Woman falls into this and so many other dull traps. Whether it is the endless commentary on Diana’s looks, or the need for coupling, or big romantic speeches (which our picture almost writes its way out of in a near transcendent moment), these norms become inescapable. There’s a goofy dick joke! And where the easy comment might be is that this is simply how things are, that sort of thinking is how they stay that way.
 
Hope
Ugh. See that dopey sub-header? I know, but you’ve come this far, so screw it. Let’s open the old heartlight a bit. We deserve it! And therein lies the crux of the film, what we think we deserve versus what we believe. I believe the world is dying. I believe we have turned the page to yet another dark chapter in collective human history. Diana, 100 years ago, looking across the trenches of World War I sees the same. And when she is confronted with this internal crisis—carnage soaked evidence of a world so far gone—Wonder Woman rejects the crushing blow of despair. Instead, she does what heroes do, super and otherwise, she finds something worth fighting for. 

​—Monte Monreal