Review of the movie Madame Web

It’s a bad movie. In the sense of a superhero action movie, it’s definitely bad. In the sense of a fantasy drama about the intertwining of the past, present and future… it’s also bad. However, in the latter format, it could have worked if the authors had written the characters more carefully and diligently, built the drama, and given plasticity and life to the dialogues… Because this story definitely had potential, and even still has it, if a team of smart screenwriters and a smart director were to take on a sequel and manage to fit Madame Web into the Spider-Man universe in a reasonable and organic way.

In a flashback, we are shown Peru in 1973. In the Amazonian jungle, a pregnant researcher Constance Webb is trying to find a rare spider whose toxin is supposed to heal and cure incurable diseases. But when she finally finds it, her partner Ezekiel shoots her and takes the unique spider away. The woman is saved by the Aborigines, a secret Peruvian tribe that has superhuman abilities thanks to spider venom, including the ability to crawl on ceilings and vertical surfaces, but she still dies, having given birth to a baby girl with the toxin in her blood.

Thirty years later, in New York City in 2003, a young woman named Cassandra Webb (who never knew her father or mother) is also healing. But not from incurable diseases, but from everyday injuries and cardiac arrests, because she works as a paramedic. Cassandra is introverted and does not communicate well with people, not with those who need to be pumped out, but with sane people, friends and strangers. However, he gets along well with his partner Ben Parker, the uncle of the future, that is, the unborn Peter Parker. They communicate not only on duty, but also outside of work. One day, while eating a snack of classic cheap cookies with cheap prophecies, Cassandra comes across this: “Your future is…” and then nothing, nothing further. “What do you think it means?” – the heroine jokingly asks. “It means that… they’re out of ink in their printer, so we won’t be ordering their food anymore,” Ben replies.

Shortly after the fall into the water that triggered the event, Cassandra begins to realize that she is seeing visions of the near future, i.e., what will happen in a minute or a few minutes. One day, on a train, she sees an elderly man about to come and kill three teenage girls who are traveling independently in the same carriage. This man is the same Ezekiel who has been using the power of the stolen spider for thirty years and who, in turn, sees in his own visions (which show the future, which will happen in a few years, not in a few minutes) how three spider-like superheroes in spider super-suits are going to kill him, and so he wants to prevent those events and kill the girls first, even though they are currently just schoolgirls without any superpowers.

Speaking of Spiderman costumes, which are red and blue. It’s likely that the colors were chosen because human blood is red, and spider blood is blue due to copper instead of iron.

In fact, Madame Web, which is based on the principle that everything around us is connected by a single web and is not random, has many potentially interesting and truly non-random moments. For example, in the original comics, Madame Web wears a red suit (in the film, the character wears a red leather jacket), and in the first shot in the Peruvian jungle, Ezekiel suddenly and spectacularly opens a red umbrella (umbrellas resemble nothing more than spider webs in their shape and structure). In the prophecy cookie, the word “future” is followed by a white wasteland, hinting that even the predicted future is uncertain and can be changed. It is trite, but again not by chance that an aboriginal from the spider tribe tells Cassandra to “take responsibility and then you will have power,” as this line is an allusion to the famous advice from Uncle Ben to Peter Parker: “With great power comes great responsibility.”

It is no coincidence that the main character is watching A Christmas Story by Charles Dickens on TV (a black-and-white adaptation from 1938). In this gloomy and macabre tale, the old miser Scrooge, after meeting the spirits of Christmas past, present, and future, changes his bad character so that his black future, which shows loneliness and death, can change. It is also no coincidence that Britney Spears’ song “Toxic”, released in 2003, is playing in the film, singing about “poison”, “toxins”, and “toxicity”.

The names of the protagonist and antagonist are deliberately telling. The surname Webb clearly refers to the English web. The name Cassandra is a reference to the Trojan princess from ancient Greek mythology who had the gift of enlightenment and predicted the destruction of Troy. Ezekiel is the name of a biblical prophet who had visions, but they were quite dark and macabre, as he promised the resurrection of the dead and a terrible judgment on the “pagan nations” Dakota Johnson, by the way, is a rather successful casting decision, because the image and role of the actress is characterized by a certain lack of modernity and a slightly older feeling than her 34 years of age (in the comics, Madame Web is an elderly woman), so it suits her to be outside of traditional time. And the wonderful festival actor Tahar Rahim (who, unfortunately, had no room for dramatic maneuvers here) embodied Ezekiel in a lexical reference to the crime drama The Prophet, which launched his career and recognition.

It is interesting that Cassandra Webb is part of Peter Parker’s spider world, but her prophetic and astral powers are more similar to those of Dr. Strange, as they are also related to time and spiritual practices, and Stephen Strange in the latest Spider-Man movie is closely related to Peter Parker. It is interesting that somewhere in the distant Amazon there is a whole nation of Spidermen, while America is obsessed with Parker alone. It’s interesting and unusual that all the typical superhero action with latex battles takes place here exclusively in visions, while in reality a woman nanny with three children runs away from an annoying man, without any superpowers suitable for action, such as mega-strength, mega-speed, the ability to fly… and even without realistic physical training.

It’s a pity that in the end, as a whole, all the “webs” look clumsy, hackneyed, underdeveloped… And in general, “Madame Web” is closer to cheap “Final Destinations” than to expensive Marvel comics (here, even in one scene, a truck with logs is driving dangerously ahead of the heroine)… So we can say that this is a superhero action movie of the “b” category or a so-called b-movie. But in this case, there is a catastrophic lack of blood and a tornado of… spiders.