May include spoilers.
Marvel is expanding their movies to yet another spider movie, Madame Web, though people have mixed feelings regarding this movie. It currently has a 13% on rotten tomatoes and a 56% audience score. Many have claimed it as a ‘disaster’ of a movie that spent little thought on it.
The beginning starts by introducing the villain, who ends up killing the people he works with, using them to find a spider that is said to cure all. However, the villain, Ezekiel Slims, steals the spider and tries to kill one of his colleagues, a pregnant woman. The woman is found by spider-like people who save the child but aren’t able to save her. This scene is completely unnecessary because it is later explained multiple times throughout the movie.
Then, it shifts to Cassandra Web, played by Dakota Johnson, who did a great job at following Cassandra’s life as a paramedic. She lives and breathes to help others, which is heavily shown throughout the movie. She even ends up dying for her cause, only to regain consciousness minutes later confused. However, before that, she sees something but assumes it’s just her imagination. The movie, in my opinion, would’ve been better had it started off with her and her profession rather than the beginning scene which will be explained again later. The audience first learns her profession through her actions when she saves someone, but ends up trapped in a car tumbling into water. However, while she’s underwater she sees webs. Instead, maybe she could see a glimpse of her past or the future instead of these purple-looking webs. The webs make it seem like the producers are trying to push the involvement of spiders into the movie when it feels misplaced.
After, when she’s trying to do CPR, she has a vision and she can’t ignore it. Only the vision has to do with someone she cares about. This scene was a very important piece of the story, but it felt forced. Cassandra runs towards her friend who sadly doesn’t live, however, despite the sad feeling, the viewer only feels the connection through Johnson’s acting. The man is seen once, and it isn’t evident how much she cares for him. Instead, there could be a scene that perhaps strengthens the relationship a little more in the movie, rather than focusing on their foreshadowing.
After the tragic accident that she predicted comes true, she decides to leave. She takes the train, and again the visions happen. She sees a man in a suit kill these kids in ways that would be hard for someone to accomplish. This is an important part of the movie, but rather than the people around her screaming, or running, the vision is kind of obscured. Even her reaction, it’s like she’s acting to the fact she had the vision, and not what was happening in the vision. She could panic, start to freak out, rush to the girls she saw, and ramble on about how the girls needed to leave because it was not safe. Also, the vision was cut into three as each girl was killed getting on. I think it would’ve been better had the vision been put together and she sees the girls all together getting killed instead of taking pauses, and that’s when she rushes to make sure each girl gets off, so that when she has the vision they’re not mistaken for her imagining it, or her losing her mind.
Ezekiel was introduced to her through her visions. However, those watching the movie know far before the movie who the villain is and he is again shown manipulating yet another person into doing something for him. Again, he kills said person after he is provided with information. However, instead of showing how he killed the person he manipulated, I think it’d be better just to show her dead, and then later how she died will come up. Also, it could then be implied that he killed her for more information.
The audience learns that Ezekiel is trying to kill three heroes that will later defeat him. He has someone working for him who has access to all surveillance and can even use the technology to find out what the heroes would look like. They even have pictures of the people, now they’d just need to find them. The dream he has seems cartoonish like it could just all be in his mind. The initiative isn’t really there, he wants to kill these girls simply because he had a dream. What could’ve been done was making the villain act like he’s lost his mind, and making the dream slightly more realistic, and noteworthy. Even going as far as making these heroes look revered as though they could defeat an army.
All three just so happen to be on the same train, and the villain’s colleague just so happens to ask the question of what connects them. Who would guess it’s the paramedic with powers that’s also on the train? The coincidences weren’t great. The fact all three were on the same train made it obvious.
Cassandra, however, finds things out about her mother’s past and is reluctant to find out more, so she tells the girls and the audience everything she’s found, so the audience, despite knowing all this hears the repeat of her mother’s past, and how the villain correlates to the death of her mother. She is too reluctant to leave, it makes sense she wants answers, but it’s too fast, she should try to be almost motherly to the three since they bonded and it could serve as foreshadowing. Also, the way Cassandra’s character was set up, it seemed as though she’d help them no questions asked, but the way she wants to get rid of them as soon as possible seems like her character is a facade.
Cassandra then travels to the very place where her mother passed away. Awaiting her is one of the spider-like people her mother had written about in her journal. He informs her of how her mother died and gave birth to her. Yet, again something the audience could have figured out. They go to a cave, and he pushes her into her mind. It looks like he’s just pushing her soul into the water at the bottom of where they stand. The movie provides a reason the mother was looking for the spider. To cure her daughter, Cassandra, of an illness that could take her life. I like the way they tied this into the plot, though it didn’t seem like her mother hated her in the beginning like they tried to make it seem.
She tricks Ezekiel into following her, where a letter (from a sign) then falls onto him, and kills him. Before, however, she made certain to tell him that his undoing was her and not the girls. It’s very big in movies to do lines like that because in a way they end up inspirational, but her line was just there, it wasn’t really necessary.
However, Cassandra was thrown into the water. The girls save her, but she becomes blind and in the end, she is shown in a wheelchair with the girls preparing food. She delivers the message that she can see them. The movie ends showing a vision of the girls as heroes, in the same wardrobe that Ezekiel had seen them in his nightmares. The nightmare that Ezekiel saw in the movie never actually happened, so it’s a little confusing. Are the girls going to become heroes? They don’t even have powers like the visions and nightmares show. Even how Cassandra ended up the way she did in the end remained unexplained.
The movie is seen as a suspenseful thriller but lacks the suspense entirely. The movie often would show a scene that would be explained again later. Even the very beginning is unnecessary because it’ll later be explained again. The coincidences are a little bit much, and the actual abilities parts were a little disappointing.
There’s a particular scene that caught my eye when a bird flies into the window, and she’s making popcorn. She seems more realistic, which is something they could’ve gone more for, a character that the audience can relate to. Even some of the dialogue with Ben in the movie made it a little more natural, despite how rushed the movie felt. Also, the message that she could save things from death was a good way of foreshadowing there. She couldn’t save her work friend, but she could save the bird, so there’s hope to save others. If they went for little foreshadowing like that it might’ve helped the movie.
Furthermore, there were scenes that were weird to watch because of how the special effects were brought in and the logic behind them, like when certain characters were unprotected and the villain didn’t take the initiative to fight, and instead sat back and watched what was unfolding.
Even the parts that appeared to be significant to the storyline weren’t all that noticeable. The two scenes with the three girls having abilities were nothing but dreams, instead of the rough ending of Cassandra seeing them being heroes, the movie could show the girl gaining their spider-like abilities.
Also, the actual spider part was severely misplaced, they honestly could have chosen any bug or even animal. The webs were only used in the head of Cassandra, who didn’t possess the ability to walk on the walls like the actual spider-like people, and she could see the future, which didn’t scream spider hero. Besides, why choose a bug that’s already been used several times?
