My second theatrical experience of 2024 is Dune: Part 2. My second theatrical experience of 2024 is Madame Web. Oh, really.
Now in streaming, which you have to hire (unfortunately expensive), Madame Web no longer requires you to go to the cinema to see it (perhaps waiting for the price to drop), and for the right kind of viewer, I would warmly recommend Let’s Advance what is undoubtedly the greatest superhero movie of the modern era, which in my opinion, began with FOX’s X-Men in 2000. Now, 24 years later, I promise you’ve never seen anything like it.
The most productive way to describe this is to describe it as The Room of Superhero Movies, the famous horrible movie that you watch because it’s awful. So bad it’s good, as they say. I know it’s a different movie than something as horrific as Morbius in Sony’s non-Spider-Man universe, but while Morbius was a meme, it was also some sort of chore and Jared Leto’s growl is rarely really a laugh. or entertaining, no matter how bad the movie is overall.
Madame Web is just an absolutely crazy movie. It’s based on a hard-to-understand Spider-Man character who pretends to be a blind old woman, but instead is Dakota Johnson, star of 50 Shades of Grey and Suspiria, with spider powers that real spider powers, but only the ability to, in short, see the future. An Edge of Tomorrow type of micro scenario where you can avoid anything or replace anything on the next turn.
For some reason, Sony also thought it was time to introduce not only 3 other Spider-Women as supporting characters, rather than giving each one its own movie, since all 3 are more applicable than Madame Web. What’s somewhat infuriating is that this back-end cast includes characters like the hugely popular Sydney Sweeney, as well as Isabela Merced, who is set to become a DCU star as Superman Legacy’s Hawkgirl and with a prominent role as Dina in The Last of Season 2. Us on HBO. . They may have seamlessly put a solo Spider-Woman movie in clever hands.
And all of those women are absolutely devastated. It’s by far the least action ever in a superhero movie. Two big sequences end with Johnson hitting the villain with a vehicle because no one here has a genuine superpower except him. Ezekiel Sims is another confusing mystery here, a Z-tier Spider-Man villain who doesn’t even shoot webs, he can simply climb walls and be strong. None of the genuine stars in this movie have powers without Johnson’s little eyesight skills. And their powers, as well as those of the Sims, were granted to them through mythical spiders in the Amazon, not through anything radioactive like Peter. Sims also has a voice that acts over his functionality for most of the film and remains unexplained to this day.
Oh, and you meet Peter Parker’s baby, when he arrives after being delivered by his mother, Emma Roberts. Adam Scott plays Uncle Ben, leading some to call it the movie about Spider-Man’s uncle’s buddy that ever existed.
It’s very hard to understand why this movie was made, why Johnson, Merced, or Sweeney didn’t get a Spider-Woman movie instead of anything else. . . But if the same other people were concerned (and they are the authors of Morbius, naturally), that would have gone wrong too. I don’t expect Sony’s next spider movie, Kraven, also released this year, to be on this hilarious and horrific level, so I think you deserve to see it. Venom movies are silly but a lot of fun. Morbius was bad in a way that wasn’t funny. Madame Web is evil in a very, very surprising way, and I recommend you watch this with as many friends as you can, as long as they know what they’re getting into.
Follow me on Twitter, Threads, YouTube and Instagram.
Get my sci-fi novels, the Herokiller series, and The Earthborn Trilogy.