I’ve been an ardent follower of the entertainment industry for the better part of two decades, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned from living through all these innumerable adaptations, remakes, and spinoffs, it’s the great but often overlooked wisdom of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Madame Web appears to be the latest victim of completely disregarding this golden rule of showbiz, and the inevitable result is just one more reason for you to thoroughly disdain this new outing from Sony’s line-up of Spider-verse flicks.
We’re referring to the iconic Spider-Man line “With great power comes great responsibility,” which is usually attributed to Uncle Ben. While Stan Lee debuted that line early on in the webhead’s history, it wasn’t until Sam Raimi’s 2002 Spider-Man flick, starring one Tobey Maguire, that it became truly iconic in the pop culture psyche. Even the MCU, with its questionable creative decisions recently, knew enough not to reinvent something that worked just fine as it was, and so when the time came for Tom Holland’s spiderling to hear the pep talk, Aunt May judiciously repeated it almost word for word in her last moments.
Well, that doesn’t seem to be the case in Madame Web. When Dakota Johnson’s Cassie Web goes out in search of her lost history, she is greeted by a mysterious man who turns out to be a member of a group of Spider-People known as the Las Arañas. Cassie learns the true extent of her powers, but not before getting a reverse version of the iconic phrase: “When you take on the responsibility, great power will come.”
Now, we can fully understand the sentiment being conveyed here. The more responsibility you take on in life, the more powerful you become in time. That isn’t completely out of left field, but it does miss the entire point of the original sentence, which says that power comes with a burden, and that burden is responsibility.
For director S. J. Clarkson, the idea was to for Dakota’s Spider-Woman to give a nod to the past but try to make the line hers. As she explained it to Total Film:
“We wanted to be honorable of the comics and where she came from. And I think that every hero has a moment where their mentor or someone important to them gives them a line which inspires them on the way and this felt like a nod to where she was from, while also making it hers.”
I’m not sure if the fans will interpret it that way, but I guess when it comes to this abysmal shell of a story pretending to be a film called Madame Web, subverting expectations for the sake of subverting expectations should be the least bit of our worries.