Madame Web, A Spoiler Heavy Postmortem
or: Her Web (Unfortunately) Connects Us All
Dear Reader,
I write to you today mere hours after seeing Madame Web. I saw it as quickly as I could, bearing in mind my unwillingness to attend the cinema alone on Valentine’s Day. I was pretty interested in the film even before its trailer and Dakota Johnson’s press tour inspired a mountain of memes. It seemed sorta ballsy. A female led Spider-Man spin-off, a reinterpretation of a minor, blind, elderly character from a cartoon show, a young woman referring to herself as “Madame”—what’s not to like?
Well turns out, quite a lot. As I’m sure you’ve seen reported elsewhere, the film is a failure. It’s not even a particularly interesting failure at that. Crowds aren’t going to flock to see this the way they did CATS (2019). No sir, this is a film so uninteresting I can actually feel little details and information about it slip out of my pretty little brain even as I type. With that in mind, I want to get my thoughts down on paper and shared with you all as quickly as possible, before I wake up fully from the nightmare and the hazy recollections evaporate all the more.
Let’s start at the beginning. The Peruvian Amazon in nineteen seventy–something (I wanna say three? But the title card could just have easily said two or four). A heavily pregnant Constance Webb (gettit?) is researching spiders whose venom is rumoured to have healing and possibly even superpower endowing ability. Once she finds one of these mysterious spiders it is revealed that the man she hired to protect her, Ezekiel Sims, is actually out to get his hands on the same spider, he shoots her and leaves her for dead with the spider in tow.
(It is at this point in my writing I realise just how often I am gonna have to use the word “spider” in this essay. I apologise.)
Constance is rescued by a tribe of Peruvian Spider People previously thought to only be a myth. They rush her across treetops to their special spider cave headquarters where Constance gives birth to Cassandra Webb in a seemingly magical, glowy pool and dies shortly thereafter.
That’s just a plot recap—a frankly insane and altogether ridiculous one but a mere recap nonetheless. What my retelling fails to communicate is the bizarre filmmaking decisions throughout the prologue. The sequence is shot as if it were a crossover episode of The Office and Power Rangers. The camera zooms in a documentary fashion to punctuate Sims’ heel turn, the Peruvian Amazon can at times be mistaken for a Rainforest Café such is the lack of scale on display and the camera jumps positions so many times that any attempt to map out the scene’s coverage would result in a node diagram more elaborate than an actual spider’s web.
It is bonkers. The prologue is probably the film’s nuttiest sequence in both plot and filmmaking terms. Maybe only rivalled by the part when, after narrowly rescuing/kidnapping three high school girls from the claws of Sims, Cassandra realises the only way she can possibly defeat him is by upping sticks and traveling alone to Peru to retrace her mother’s steps for an entire week, leaving the wanted girls under the watchful eye of her co-worker, Ben Parker.
It’s an honestly hilarious deflation of whatever tension previous action set pieces had built up—the girls’ cat and mouse plot with Sims is totally put on ice to allow for Cassandra’s journey of self-discovery—it is criminally lazy screenwriting.
Other parts of the film are pretty alright, there’s moments when the flipping camera tricks feel justified, Dakota Johnson is an enjoyable presence and Britney Spears’ Toxic is still a certified banger all these years later.
Any further effort to recap the film’s story would be pretty disappointing, it’s largely boilerplate stuff. An ambulance is totalled by a truck five seconds after Cassandra repeatedly warns the driver not to get in, there’s a big standoff in a boobytrapped firework warehouse, a pigeon flies into a window and dies, yada yada yada.
The last remaining interesting thing about this film, in my opinion, is actually the stuff that isn’t in the story. I walked out of the theatre in a bit of a haze, wondering had I somehow missed two crucial scenes. It’s extremely rare for me to finish watching a film and wish there had been more exposition but I truly believe there are two key plot points that go completely unexplained.
The first being how the three girls gain their superpowers. This doesn’t happen across the main plot of the film but the characters are shown with superpowers both in Sims’ visions of his future death and also in Cassandra’s visions of their future as crimefighters. Presumably Cassie hooks them up with some superpowered spiders to be bitten by? Or otherwise maybe she masters her own powers so effectively that she can bestow these abilities upon them?
I don’t know. It’s not explained and I think it really should have been. This is effectively an origin story for a team of superheroes and we don’t even know how three quarters of the team got their powers!
The second plot point that is left unexplained is arguably the most important in the film. It is sorta the script’s inciting incident, Sims’ is plagued by visions of his eventual death by the hands of Cassandra’s wards. This spurs him to seek the girls out long before it ever happens so he can neutralise the threat. The only problem is there’s no reason given for why they would kill him. In fact, their team up only occurs because he hunts them out.
Had Sims done nothing, the three girls would have no reason to come in contact with each other and therefore no reason to gain superpowers, and no reason to kill him. I’m fine with timey-wimey stories where a character’s actions to prevent an event actually cause that event to occur but it is explicitly said that the three girls kill Sims in about ten years’ time, in his apartment. His eventual death actually occurs maybe two weeks later at a firework warehouse.
?????????????????????????????????
I don’t usually like to pick at plot holes but I genuinely felt like the film insulted my intelligence by not addressing these two points. If you think I misinterpreted or missed anything do please feel free to hit me up on twitter or comment below before I tear my hair out completely.
In summary, Madame Web is a boring catastrophe. A failure in writing, production and editing, under no circumstance do I recommend you watch it. Maybe just rewatch CATS.
As the Shawn Levy film said, “This Is Where I Leave You”. I hope you’ll accept this edition of the newsletter being a little sloppy and unfocused—these are just honest to god stream of consciousness thoughts I felt I needed to share urgently. I’ll make sure the next one is more finessed. As always, thanks for reading.