One thing that couldn’t be escaped as the years went on and the MCU grew into a successful behemoth the likes of which the world had never seen, was that gaps remained. Though Marvel had successfully turned Iron Man from a second string comic book character to essentially the centrepiece of the MCU, more popular characters like the X-Men and the Fantastic Four remained licensed elsewhere. 2016 had finally seen old Web-head make his MCU bow in a well-received cameo, but 2017 gave us the MCU movie that many diehard fans had been waiting for. As Greg D. Smith discusses, the only question was whether the wait would be worth it. As Peter Parker struggles to adapt to normal life after his adventures with the Avengers as part of their civil war, his insistence on becoming more than a friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man sees him taking on a sinister villain who will stop at nothing to get what he wants – has Spidey met his match?

The saga of this character and the struggles of Sony to get him right could fill a whole book, and aren’t why we are here. Suffice it to say, after a tepidly received reboot and its thuddingly badly reviewed sequel, people at Sony and Marvel talked and came to an arrangement. Spidey’s movie rights would not revert permanently to Marvel, but Sony would share them for a set number of movies, so that the character could find a place in the burgeoning MCU. Civil War saw Tom Holland debut in a cameo that was well-received by fans and critics alike, but the burning question was whether the character could achieve under Marvel what it had failed to find in his previous three outings with Sony – a decent solo movie.

Homecoming has the advantage of the main character already having been introduced, and it takes that advantage and runs with it, deciding against running over the details of his origins (Uncle Ben is already dead, we don’t have a Great Power/Great Responsibility speech and the origin of his powers is reduced a five second explanation to best friend Ned – which incidentally results in a hilarious set of questions from Ned, including whether Peter lays eggs) and instead leaping straight into the action.

And where the film gets really clever is in how it approaches that action. Rather than starting our hero out fighting against an evil corporate genius or mad scientist or even his best friend, Homecoming starts small. Still flushed with the excitement of his excursion with Tony Stark to help out in the airport fight in Civil War, Peter can’t wait for his next mission. We open with a broken series of video blogs Peter seems to be doing for himself, with an irritated Happy in the background, both on his way to the airport fight and afterward. Holland does a great job of getting across that nervous, jittery energy of a teenager who’s just done the coolest possible thing ever and can’t wait to do it again, and then of course, he’s back home again.

His repeated calls to Happy (assigned by Stark as his ‘handler’) go unanswered, and Peter does what he can to be the ‘friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man’, giving us a good grounding in the character before anything really big happens. That means hanging out with his friend Ned, staring at a girl he’s too scared to ask out, dodging questions from Aunt May and performing certain helpful tasks locally like helping an old lady with directions and stopping a bike theft. More than any Spider-Man movie before it, Homecoming really wants you to get the message that Peter is an ordinary – if exceptionally bright – teenager, and carries with him all of the awkwardness that brings. It helps to really cement the character as a believable kid, and that adds to the drama of what we see unfold on screen. When he turns up to a party with his suit hidden away, intending to appear as ‘his friend’ Spider-Man to impress people generally and a girl in particular, this is the sort of thing we expect a socially marginalised, awkward young man to do.

Of course inevitably, he gets involved in something bigger. Having foiled an ATM heist that is being carried out with some fancy new tech, the like of which he’s never seen before, he starts looking deeper to see if he can discover what’s behind it. A confrontation with the people selling the weapons leads to him having the power core of one in his possession, and a last-minute rescue by Stark’s remotely-piloted Iron Man suit from the bottom of a lake into which the Vulture had dumped him. And so we turn to the two adult men in the movie who jointly have a massive impact on our young hero.

First, let’s get Tony out of the way. Much like when Avengers Assemble trailers first debuted, the initial Homecoming trailers had me worried that we might end up with a situation where Spider-Man was left basically cameoing in his own movie, overshadowed by the charisma, screen presence and over-use of Downey Jnr. Some still felt that this was the case after the movie came out, but I have to disagree. Stark is a presence in the movie without being in there overly much. His role (plotwise) is to act as a sort of mentor figure for Peter (which makes sense given that he designed his suit) which is also hilarious given who Tony is and the sort of things he says and does. Still, it’s interesting to see his character have a bit of growth in here – he’s really trying to actually be there for Peter and to protect him, as much out of a sense of guilt at having dragged him into things in the first place as anything else one suspects, but still. Practically speaking, of course, one suspects that the people at Disney/Marvel wanted a familiar presence to just steady the ship and make this feel like an MCU entry. To their credit, he’s not an overbearing presence, and the tone of the movie – while full of humour – never quite falls into the trap of just aping the patented Stark Snark for every character.

Then there’s the Vulture, aka Eugene Toomes. I was as excited as anyone to learn that Michael Keaton – who rarely disappoints – would be playing the movie’s villain and he does a fantastic job of being an intimidating and captivating screen presence in every shot in which he appears. That unpredictable, scary energy that Keaton always seems to bring to every role is undiminished here, and the only slight shame is that for a character with a fairly well-developed backstory, Toomes doesn’t quite ring true as a three-dimensional human being. We see his early humiliation as the post-Avengers Assemble New York clean-up work this blue-collar businessman has hired extra men and equipment to do is taken away from him by the government and Stark. We have the idea that he’s a salt-of-the-earth type who’s just trying to earn a living, but then unfortunately he pretty much goes from that to a weapons dealer with a supervillain costume. It’s to the credit of the screenplay that the character doesn’t go down a cliched ‘vendetta against Stark’ plot arc, but it might have benefited from just a little more fleshing out of the actual character to give us some logical progression from what he begins as, to the villain he becomes. As if realising this, the character’s very last scene gives us an inkling that perhaps there’s a bit of the honourable man-in-the-street left to him, as he claims not to know Peter’s identity to a fellow inmate, but still, there’s that part in the middle that just doesn’t quite add up.

But more important than either of these things, and where the movie actually does really well with the central character, is in the actual school boy part of Spider-Man. For starters, the dialogue and scenes between Peter and his fellow students actually rings true. In previous movies about the character, especially the Amazing duology, there was too much of an impression of kids talking and behaving the way an adult might imagine them to. Here, the back and forth, the bullying, the mishaps all feel genuine and believable.

That extends to Spidey himself. The way that he starts the movie so excited to be a part of the Avengers (which he isn’t) is, as discussed, a very believable portrait. But it goes on from there, with a series of scenes that emphasise the fact that for all his intelligence and his superpowers, Peter is still a child with a child’s lack of foresight, a child’s tendency to rush into a situation without actually thinking of the consequences, and a child’s inevitable messing up of various things, not just in his day to day life, but in his hero duties as well.

His cavalier treatment of the power source in the weapon nearly leads to his best friend and several other people being killed. His determination to take on the bad guys head on as they meet for an arms deal on the Staten Island ferry because Tony hasn’t directly answered his calls on the subject nearly leads to a whole bunch of people dying. Even towards the end, it’s as much sheer dumb luck as actual skill that sees him avoid being crushed to death under a building and then managing to actually stop the Vulture. At every turn, and with every move he makes, Peter reminds us that he’s a kid trying to be an adult in a world that’s no more forgiving just because he has superpowers. A scene where he attempts to drive a car with Ned giving instructions via a manual he’s found on the internet rather nicely sums this up – could there be a more perfect metaphor for all of this than a young man big enough to reach the pedals but still unable to actually drive?

What’s nice is that the film manages to convey all this (and have Peter grow through it) without treating him as if he’s stupid, or making the audience feel like he’s being mocked. However ill-though out many of his actions may be, we still feel sympathy for him because they come from a good place. Better, despite the fact that he is so much more powerful than everyone around him, there’s never any sense of Peter being in danger of becoming a bully himself. Witness his horror when the unlocked suit casually engages Instant Kill Mode, his lenient treatment of Aaron Davis and his refusal to let Toomes die at the end. Peter wants to be the best he can, and to give everyone the benefit of the doubt and to do the right thing. There are dozens of points in the movie where he could use his powers as a shortcut or a way to cheat, and he refuses – it’s almost like he didn’t need Uncle Ben there to tell him the whole thing about power and responsibility.

In terms of the journey of the character, we see him progress from an over-excited kid at the beginning who can’t wait to go and join the Avengers in saving the world to a quieter, more measured individual at the end who actually turns down Tony’s (as it turns out 100% genuine) offer of a place on the team complete with a new suit. Though he’s achieved great things, he’s aware of how much luck was involved, and unlike at the start where he wants more, he’s now just ready to go and be the local friendly neighbourhood hero, to grow up a little and not try to run before he’s mastered walking. He’s still that goofy kid, and he still enjoys putting on the suit and doing the whole wall-crawling, web-slinging thing, but he’s content to build up slowly.

Tonally, the movie strikes a decent balance. There’s humour aplenty, but it’s not a simple comedy. When it goes dark, as with the twist reveal of Toomes’ identity as the father of Peter’s love interest, or the actual attempt on Peter’s life by Toomes, it goes really dark, and it helps that the schoolkid optimism and light humour are maintained elsewhere to balance it out. The supporting cast all turn in excellent performances and honestly, it’s the sort of movie that even non-fans of the genre will likely get something out of.

The best compliment that I think can be paid is that it plays to its title perfectly – it’s a story of a nerdy, over-excitable kid who eventually gets his ‘Homecoming’, and although it ends up being nothing like he imagined, he emerges a changed, more experienced person. As Tony rather delightfully puts it, he screwed the pooch hard, but then he did the right thing.