Illustration Credit: Arba Bardhi
IMDb rated it 10/10. Sources? Just trust me.
Jacqueline Cho, Staff Writer
This review contains minor spoilers for Madame Web (2024).
I watched this film the way its directors, actors, and probably God intended: at three in the morning, two days before I had a very substantial paper and project due.
I have been a Spider-Man fan for a very long time. I have written endless Tweets, sent my friends countless texts, and even procrastinated writing a journal-length paper on the use of metafiction within 2023’s Across the Spider-Verse. So when I say that this random character that Sony acquired when Marvel was bleeding money in the early 2000s is the best use of Spider-Man IP ever, I do not say it lightly.
Arguably, what sets Madame Web apart from its Sony predecessor, Morbius (besides Madame Web’s being a paragon of feminism and also a far superior film), is that it is so incredibly dumb, and everyone is aware of it. I did not need to read a single article about actresses terrorizing the set because of weird method acting (Jared Leto, if you happen to be reading this, go to therapy).
Instead, I got to watch Dakota Johnson steal multiple vehicles (some of them government-subsidized) and crash them. I got to see that, apparently, Spider-Man may be guilty of slight cultural appropriation. I got to watch Sydney Sweeney and that guy from Parks and Rec (and also Severance) rush to the hospital to help give birth to Peter Parker (who is in fact not named at any point in this film). I got to see multiple plot points be introduced and then never introduced again. I got to hear Britney Spears’ “Toxic.” Also, everybody sounds like they’re delivering their lines at gunpoint. This is the magic of cinema.
X user @sagehyden described Madame Web as “treat[ing] the birth of Peter Parker like its [sic] the birth of Jesus but the rest of the story is about Jesus’ uncle’s coworker’s very bad day.” This user was so alarmingly right that not only do I believe Madame Web outranks Spider-Man adaptations of the likes of the Raimi trilogy or the Spider-Verse films, but I also argue that it demands a new adaptation of the Bible itself. I have never once thought about what Jesus’s uncle’s coworker may have been doing on Christmas while Jesus was being born, but now I am not just curious. It is in fact a moral imperative for me to find out.
Anyway, the long and short of it is simple. This movie should be put into the Criterion Collection, like, yesterday. You should watch Madame Web. I should rewatch Madame Web (preferably right before one of my finals). Everyone should watch Madame Web. Her web connects us all.
