BEFORE: I finally landed a day off at home, and what did I do? I blew it by sleeping late (first time in a while) and then pulling the weeds out of the front planter. I was going to save that for November, when I'm not watching movies for three weeks at least, but the rain held off and it was like 60 degrees out, and I figure there's only about another week before it gets too cold to do yard work, even though a week ago it was too HOT to do yard work, so I'd better take advantage. Plus it's trash night, so I could put out two bags of vines I cut out plus any leaves in our lower driveway that I could sweep up, to keep them from clogging the drain. (We haven't had a very rainy fall, unlike the last three, but it could still come...)
Look, I'm glad I did it, the ivy vines are relentless, if left unchecked they will kill every other bush or flowering thing in the planter, so they HAVE to be cut out. Plus they hide under the rim so they can't be seen, while they triple and quadruple their way around the space allotted. They were climbing up our small tree and the plan was, no doubt, to get to the top and keep all the sunlight for themselves, and/or kill the tree. I like the tree, but I hate the vines, they're pure evil and they must be stopped. There are twice as many vines and weeds in the backyard, I'll bet, but their days are numbered, too.
But the problem is, now I'm tired, achy and in need of a shower, and I ruined my chances of getting anything else done today, I was going to go get some groceries, log in some comics, but now all I have time for is a quick dinner, blogging about today's movie and starting on tomorrow's. Here's to having a little more time after Halloween, I've got a lot to do.
Kerry Bishé carries over from "How It Ends" (2018).
THE PLOT: Forced to confront her past, Cassandra Webb, a Manhattan paramedic that may have clairvoyant abilities, forms a relationship with three young women destined for powerful futures, if they can survive their threatening present.
AFTER: I know, this is not specifically a horror movie, but I have let in superhero films before, in order to make my connections. "The New Mutants" was one of them, I think, "Birds of Prey" was another - while "Morbius" didn't quite fit in by linking, even though it was about a vampire of sorts and could have qualified. "Venom: Let There Be Carnage" could have been a great October movie, but the linking said otherwise. The third "Venom" movie just came out, but I didn't have a clear path to it, so I'll have to catch it on streaming early next year.
This is NOT a Spider-Man movie either, not directly, anyway, but it does feature some of the more minor characters from the Spider-Man comic books. There are references to Peter Parker near the end, but it's left unclear which universe or timeline it takes place in, is it one where Peter Parker never becomes Spider-Man, or is the timeline from the "Venom" movies or the "Morbius" film? It's set back in 1973 and then 2003, so yeah, I'm just not sure. Since the multiverse (Spider-Verse) became a thing it's very hard to keep track of, even after the big crossover between the Maguire, Garfield and Holland Spider-Man films. (EDIT: Wikipedia seems to declare that "Madame Web" is set in the same universe as the "Venom" and "Morbius" films, called the "Sony Spider-Man Universe", along with the upcoming "Kraven the Hunter" film, however this is a rather odd name since none of the films center on Peter Parker)
Anyway, there is a Madame Web in the Spider-Man comics, but she was an older lady who I think died at some point. But this ties in perfectly with the idea to set this film back in 2003, because she'd be another 15 to 20 years older by the time of the "Venom" films, so then almost an old lady. But in the comic books the second woman to use the hero name "Spider-Woman" was Julia Carpenter, and then when they wanted to bring back the first "Spider-Woman", Jessica Drew, I think they turned Julia Carpenter into the new Madame Web. I think the teen here named Julia Cornwall is supposed to be the Julia Carpenter character, but we only see short flash-forwards of her being Spider-Woman in the future. The other girls are also knock-offs of various Spider-Girl or Spider-Woman characters, Anya Corazon also went by the code-name Araña, and Mattie Franklin was the third person to call herself Spider-Woman, though in the comic books she was Caucasian and the niece of J. Jonah Jameson.
But maybe then these three girls are superheroes when they're adults, they work as a team and make up for the fact there's no Spider-Man in their timeline, it's tough to say unless they make a sequel to this film, and based on the box-office performance, that's not likely. Anyway, the film is really about Madame Web, and her efforts to keep these three teens alive, as they're attacked by Ezekiel, who also got his enhanced strength from a spider-bite, only not a radio-active one like Peter Parker's, but a special spider found in the Amazon whose bite grants powers like strength, agility and the ability to stick to the ceiling. He even wears a costume similar to the Spider-Man one we all know, only it's mostly black and looks very basic - he's the pre-Parker Spider-Man, only he's not a hero.
But he's had a pre-cognitive vision of his own death, and every night he's haunted by the same dream, where three teen girls kill him, so his solution is to find these three girls before they get powers, and kill them before they can kill him. You would think a better idea would be to find out who these girls are and then stay away from them, and you'd probably be right, but Ezekiel just doesn't think along those lines. Instead he hires someone with facial-recognition software to hack into New York's traffic cams and all security cameras everywhere, constantly scanning the millions of New Yorkers looking for those three.
At the same time, paramedic Cassandra Webb, drowns but is brought back to life by her partner, Ben (last name not important yet, but just wait) and this somehow activates her clairvoyant powers, which exist because her mother was bitten by the same rare spider while she was pregnant with Cassie, she died giving birth but the venom transferred to her baby, according to the cult of the Arañas, the spider-people from the Amazon who can swing through the trees and do other spider-stuff. Cassandra gets the power to see what's happening in the near-future, but it takes her an enormously long time to figure out what her power is and what to do with it. I mean, a paramedic needs to be a pretty smart person, she's not dumb so why make her act dumb? Is this to make the audience feel smart, that we figured out her power before she can?
At first, she doesn't even believe that she can change the future, but there really can only BE one reason for someone to have this power, to see the bad thing happen and then take the appropriate steps to make sure that it doesn't. They kind of flip the script here on Spider-powers, because Spider-Man's mantra has always been "With great power comes great responsibility" but here the opposite applies, as Cassandra takes on great responsibilities, that gives her great power, the power to change the future by seeing the future.
Ezekiel, on the other hand, thinks he's very smart, yet he goes to attack the girls that he believes will kill him in the future, and thus he comes into contact with them, again and again. Does he NOT realize that any one of these encounters could lead to his death? Maybe he thinks he can beat the system, but really, he's playing right into the scenario that he's trying to prevent. Of course, the three girls have no powers, and for some reason his pre-cog abilities can't take Madame Web's into the equation, he's got some kind of "blind spot" for the other person who got bitten by the same spider? Perhaps that's a result of bad karma since he's the person who killed Cassandra's mother.
Cassandra, on the other hand, gradually gains control of her pre-cog abilities, and then anything she does based on them kind of looks like a magic trick, especially if we don't see every possible future that she ends up preventing. This exact ability was also displayed in the movie "Next", where Nicolas Cage's character could see ten seconds into the future, and he could win any fight because he knew exactly what was coming. To him it just seemed like something bad happened, and then he'd zip back ten seconds and be able to prevent that punch, or that gunshot or whatever. It's a hard thing to portray on film, perhaps, without your movie looking like it 's constantly glitching back.
But in order to really figure out her abilities, Cassandra needs to take a trip back to the Amazon jungle herself, which is very inconvenient because she JUST pledged that she would protect these three teenage girls from Ezekiel, no matter what. Well, it's kind of hard to protect them while she's on her little side trip to Peru, isn't it? Gee, what could possibly go wrong while you're five thousand miles away in the remote jungle, but no, go ahead, take some time, get your head straight and figure out your powers. She leaves the three girls in the care of Ben Parker, who's got a pregnant sister-in-law, but the baby's not due for weeks, so thankfully they can all just stay hidden in the house. Yeah, that baby has other ideas, so they all have to go to the hospital and that means their cover could be blown.
In retrospect, it was probably a bad idea to make a movie about a character who's never even had her own comic book, like Scarlet Witch and She-Hulk and Captain Marvel and even female Hawkeye have. There's no built-in audience for "Madame Web", while there might be for Spider-Woman or Black Cat or even Silver Sable. Well, you live and learn, I guess. There's also that "Kraven the Hunter" movie coming from the Sony Spider-Verse in December, so if that tanks, too, maybe this Spider-Manless Spider-Verse just wasn't meant to continue.
Also starring Dakota Johnson (last seen in "The Lost Daughter"), Sydney Sweeney (last seen in "Under the Silver Lake"), Isabela Merced (last heard in "Migration"), Celeste O'Connor (last seen in "Ghostbusters: Afterlife"), Tahar Rahim (last seen in "Napoleon"), Mike Epps (last seen in "You People"), Emma Roberts (last seen in "Empire State"), Adam Scott (last seen in "Monster-in-Law"), Zosia Mamet (last heard in "Trolls Band Together"), Jose Maria Yazpik, Kathy-Ann Hart (last seen in "Patriots Day"), Josh Drennen, Yuma Feldman, Miranda Adekoje, Deirdre McCourt, Naheem Garcia (last seen in "The Purge: Election Year"), Jill Hennessy (last seen in "Dead Ringers"), Rosemary Crimp, Brian Faherty (last seen in "Unfinished Business"), Shaun Bedgood, Mike Bash (last seen in "The Social Network"), Cilda Shaur (last seen in "The Irishman"), Jennifer Ellis, Kris Sidberry (last seen in "The Forger"), Erica Souza, Rena Maliszewski (last seen in "Don't Look Up"), Michael Malvesti (last seen in "American Fiction"), Gopal Lalwani, Shawnna Thibodeau, Dominique Washington, Michael Papajohn (last seen in "Domino").
RATING: 5 out of 10 explosions in the fireworks factory
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