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Spider-Man: Homecoming was good, but it did leave a lot of unanswered questions. For instance: we know Peter Parker lives with his smokin' Aunt May, but does he not have an uncle? Where's that guy? How is the audience to know!
When Peter Parker discovers spider-like senses and wall-crawling abilities, he develops his own suit to become Spider-Man.
Yes he does, and for the first time in three different movie continuities, his homemade suit actually looks like a homemade suit. Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield apparently both knew where to get high-tech fabrics and how to mold intricately patterned rubber details, while Tom Holland was limited to more realistic materials (at least until Tony Stark got involved). It's not that the old film series were bad (it's called "suspension of disbelief" for a reason), but it shows the real-world approach that Marvel brought to their partnership with Sony. Now, just imagine what they could do if Fox were brave enough to admit that they'll never be able to do Fantastic Four right.
Pete's suit owes a ton to the Scarlet Spider costume, though in his case it's red over blue, rather than blue over red. It's kind of a shame
we didn't get to see him making the suit, because it would have been fun to see a blue hoodie on the shelf next to the red one he chose. The blue areas are clearly just a sweatshirt and sweatpants, while his "boots" are red shower shoes and tall socks that he tucked his pantlegs into. He has chunky silver webshooters (another ben Reilly nod), and fingerless gloves that prove Peter may be a brilliant high school student, but he's still a naive kid: when you stick to walls, you're going to leave a lot of easily identifiable fingerprints. You get your choice of hoods for the figure, either up or down.
The mask is less easy to identify. It's not as tight and seamless as usual, with a wrinkled seam all the way through the center of it, so that's probably something Peter sewed himself - most likely from the sleeves he cut off the hoodie. But the lenses, though... the black frames are probably simple goggles of some sort, and the white is a narrow mesh, but what are the apertures made of and how do they work?
Spidey has two sets of hands: fists or thwips. Technically there should be webs painted on the red sections of his gloves (they,
like the spider on the chest, seem to be drawn on with a marker) and red between the raised boxes on the bracelets. The figure has a balljointed head, hinged neck, swivel/hinge shoulders (set deeper into the torso than the stock photo on the back of the box would lead you to believe), swivel biceps, double-hinged elbows, swivel/hinge wrists, hinged torso, swivel waist, balljointed hips, swivel thighs, double-hinged knees, swivel shins and swivel/hinge ankles. The waist seems to be ratcheted, rather than moving smoothly.
This movie Spider-Man has the same Build-A-Figure piece as the other movie Spider-Man - or at least, its opposite number. The BAF for this series is Vulture's wings, and this is the middle section of the right wing. This is just one-seventh of the full wing rig, and it's already as big as the figure itself - no wonder they had to break it into pieces in order to sell it!
Spider-Man: Homecoming was not quite the movie we thought it would be, but that's to its credit (and to the credit of the trailers, which for once managed to not give away every single thing that was going to happen). The homemade costume had more of a role than one would expect, making this toy not just a fun little cameo thing, but rather an actual, important part of a movie collection.
-- 08/07/17
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