Two months ago, experienced one of the most poignant midnight premieres of my life.
In 3 hours, I went from anticipation, to excitement, to apprehension, to dismay, to devastation.
...The Revenant 4.
A final battle that triggered tears in all fans.
In hindsight, it wasn't so much a movie as it was accomplishing a mission: a generation change.
It was both the end and the beginning, heralding the fall of old characters and hinting at the rise of new heroes.
As you can see, the best thing about Marvel is that it lets you see pain, death, parting, and then insight into loss.
We don't want to admit it, but we have to, it's a complete farewell to youth and a perfect finale.
Slow down.
Listen to what Marvel Studios CEO Kevin Feige has to say:
"The Revenant 4" isn't the Marvel Cinematic Universe Phase 3 finale.
The true endgame of Marvel's 11 years and the last 22 movies is it.
After Iron Man's curtain call, the centerpiece of Marvel's next decade, is him.
Iron Man's single snap of his fingers ripped open a sub-dimensional hole of parallel universes.
With it came a new crisis.
The Elemental Crowd, a powerful group of villains from an unknown universe, transformed into the four elements of water, fire, earth and wind, and tried to destroy Earth.
Mystique, a superhero from another parallel universe, tracks the Elemental Crowd all the way across the parallel universes and joins Spider-Man to quell the crisis.
Hold on.
I know you're getting a little impatient: what's with the saving of Earth again? The people of Earth had enough of that a long time ago?
How is it parallel universes again? Has this setup become a Marvel jack-of-all-trades?
There's the rub.
I'm used to seeing tired bridges full of set pieces about being bitten by spiders, and hearing the cliché 'with great power comes great responsibility'.
With so many of the key storylines already well known, and with the spirit and image of Spider-Man y ingrained in people's minds, how do you find novelty in the clichés?
Fortunately, Marvel got a bold and interesting director for a story that seemed devoid of innovative possibilities:? Joe Watts.
The young director didn't go with the flow and make a mediocre, long-winded coming-of-age history of superheroes.
Rather, he went the extra mile and ditched all the exposition about Spider-Man's origins, opting instead for a short, quick look at youth, and analyzed what it's like to be an ordinary person who becomes a superhero.
In the story, the set-up and counter-set-up arrangements, the interspersing of the real and the apparent, the character's dialogues, the conflicts and contradictions, the special effects and the fight design...are all quite creative and full of sincerity, which makes a textbook demonstration for the commercial popcorn movie and the superhero movie.
It is worth mentioning that the final double eggs of the film are very wonderful, especially the second egg in the whole story inversion, but also foreshadowed the direction of the story of the Marvel Universe in the following ten years.
Stripping away the superhero trappings, this is actually an anti-Marvel cliché, youth movie.
When Spider-Man goes through that 'whatever it takes' battle, when the world is betting on him to be the next Iron Man, he'll be the next Iron Man, and he'll be the next Iron Man.
All he could think about was how to catch up with his goddess while traveling to various European countries.
He was running away, running away from growing up, running away from his superhero responsibilities, running away from his mission to save the world, running away from Tony's departure.
He's awkward, childish, trouble-making, and unreliable.
Until he's forced to grow up.
This "Spider-Man: The Hero's Journey" is, without a doubt, the closest thing to what Stan Lee created in the first place.
As Marvel's first teenage hero, Spider-Man's confusion is never bittersweet, and his obsessions, and those of most of us in life, are so much in common.
The conundrums and dilemmas he faces are actually ones we've all had.
Remember, in "The Revenant 3," Spider Jr. was faced with going up in smoke.
Before he died, he grabbed Tony and said, I don't want to die.
In that moment, he really didn't look like a superhero who was ready to die, but instead showed a great helplessness and vulnerability.
At that moment, he was just a 16-year-old kid who hadn't graduated from high school.
Spider Jr. and Iron Man have long had a father-son relationship.
Spider-Man and Iron Man are very much alike in that they don't want to be superheroes, but the world needs superheroes, and heroes aren't a 'power', they're a 'choice'.
For this reason, he has hesitated, feared, and run away...
Eleven years ago, the Marvel Universe kicked off Marvel's first phase with Iron Man.
When Tony was first thrown into the darkness and trapped in a cave, he hammered out that suit, and the beginning of all storytelling, with a clanging hammer.
Now, the third phase of the Marvel Universe ends with Spider-Man: Heroes Far From Home.
Spider Jr. inherits Tony's glasses and makes his new suit on an airplane as the first and newborn heroes finally complete a ceremonial baton transfer.
This time, Marvel didn't want to be cutthroat and subversive, but appropriately inherited and innovative.
This time, the world of the little spider, there is no longer Iron Man.
Even if there are spray paintings of Iron Man everywhere in the streets, even if there are paintings of Iron Man hanging on the walls of art classrooms, even if the whole world has nostalgic memories of Iron Man, but the 'Iron Dad' who used to protect himself from the wind and the rain, will not appear again.
Regrets, not the only ones.
Once upon a time, Stan Lee openly admitted that of all the superheroes he created, his favorite, was Spider-Man.
But this is also the first Spider-Man movie since 2002 that doesn't feature a cameo from Stan Lee Senior.
In the 1990s, Marvel, at the end of its rope, sold its 'own son', Spider-Man, to Sony for a low price, and after years of bouncing around, the ace IP is back in Marvel's arms again.
Around and around, whether Spider-Man belongs to Sony or Marvel, as a veteran hero, he has always been Marvel's most popular comic book character, not one.
After all, why do we love Spider-Man so much?
Remember, the year Peter Parker was a little boy in Queens, New York...
He wore an Iron Man mask and wished he could be a superhero like his idol, flying through walls and saving the world.
At the age of 16, he had sudden superpowers and became Spider-Man.
Rather than a world-saving superhero, he was an ordinary high school student who didn't know his way around the world.
When he climbs up a tall building, he gets weak in the knees; after participating in a melee, he gets excited about the camera at the hotel; and when he meets a goddess, he can't even speak properly.
He's a kid inside and out: he wears NB shoes, wears headphones around his neck, he listens to hip-hop, he's hairy, he's got a crush on the schoolgirl, he goes to dances, and he brags about it to his classmates.
Letting your best friend advise you on how to pick up girls, giving directions to grandma, and all sorts of other adolescent thoughts.
At the end of the day, he's the closest thing to a superhero figure that we ordinary people have.
He shows his heroic side while revealing his ordinary side to us.
Perhaps, Spider-Man, by his very nature, is a civilian epic.
After taking off his mask, Spider-Man is no different from the average high school student, from the average us.
From being clueless, to being on his own, from not quite understanding what a superhero is at first.
To him finally facing his inner world and finding himself.
Marvel seems to be using this "infinitely close to ordinary Spider-Man" to deconstruct the superhero once again, telling us:
Knowing how to be ordinary is what makes a hero.
You, too, can be your own superhero.
Article first appeared in the public number: A Monumental Movie