'Madame Web': Marvel's fortune teller predicts the decline of the superhero genre

It is still paradoxical: right now, when the future of superhero movies is more unpredictable than ever, Marvel's latest superheroine is a fortune teller.

The new release from the hitherto prolific and profitable factory,

Madame Web

, faces an opaque crystal ball that is difficult to decipher in the face of the evident decline of the genre that has taken over movie screens to the point of exhaustion in recent years.

In that uncertain place is a film that functions as a presentation of a new character located in the orbit of Spider-Man or, to be exact, in what is called Sony's Spider-Man Universe, that is, the franchise created by Columbia Pictures, Marvel Entertainment and Sony Pictures through an amalgamation of films (

Venom, Morbius

) that revolve around characters connected to the adventures of Spider-Man.

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And so we arrive at this

Madame Web

, inspired by a secondary character—a blind old woman with powers to tell the future—who was born in 1980 by Denny O'Neil and John Romita, Jr., and who now comes to life on the skin. by Dakota Johnson, far from being an old woman in this new film set in New York at the beginning of the 21st century.

After a prologue in the Peruvian Amazon jungle, where the new heroine's mother gives birth, the story is set in a world of nostalgic innocence.

Wearing her Dr. Martens boots and her flea market leather jacket, Cassie Webb—a lonely urbanite who only appreciates the company of her cat—drives an ambulance in a city still clinging to the last decade. of the 20th century.

She is about a woman whose powers are presented in the premonitory wake of

déjà vu

: indeed, everything that happens on the screen also seems like something previously experienced by the viewer.

Celeste O'Connor, Sydney Sweeney and Dakota Johnson, in 'Madame Web'.

It is still curious that the traces of the past are also presented through advertising icons, be it a Calvin Klein advertisement in the middle of one of the action sequences of the film or, above all, the ubiquitous Pepsi Cola, evoked throughout the entire film with the

vintage

aroma of Cindy Crawford's famous nineties advertisement through the 1936 sign that was located, before its demolition, in an industrial building in the Queens neighborhood.

Once again, brands are presented to us as global references of a supposed popular culture available as heritage for new generations uncritical of consumption who, it seems, only know how to be guided by corporate iconography.

But

Madame Web

is above all a film that advances the arrival of a squad of teenage superheroines whose broad outline is accompanied by references as unoriginal as the song

Toxic,

by Britney Spears, included on the album

In The Zone.

Also on that album was

Everytime,

which sang and danced another group of teenagers lost in the wild and nihilistic

Spring Breakers,

Harmony Korine's film that more than a decade ago advanced the dangers of millennial disaffection.

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Directed by an impersonal director seasoned in television, SJ Clarkson,

Madame Web

remains in a place without its own roof, between the mere advancement of the interests of a franchise and that

déjà vu

sheltered behind brands.

And if it is worth it for something, it is thanks to Dakota Johnson, an actress with the authentic aura of a star, capable of making bearable a film wrapped in the decadence of a genre incapable of escaping the trap of its own spider web.

MADAME WEB

Director:

SJ Clarkson.

Starring:

Dakota Johnson, Sydney Sweeney, Celeste O'Connor, Isabela Merced, Tahar Rahim, Adam Scott.

Genre:

superheroes.

USA, 2024.

Duration:

116 minutes.

Premiere: February 14.

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