Sony’s comic book film Madame Web launched to derision in February. We take a look at what went wrong with a potentially interesting thriller…
Spoilers lie ahead – and lots of them – for Madame Web.
Much has already been written about Sony’s Spider-Man-adjacent calamity Madame Web following its initial cinema release on the 14th February this year. But because of the breakneck pace the modern cultural world moves at, it already feels as though the conversation has moved on; director SJ Clarkson’s comic book supernatural thriller made its streaming debut in May and barely made a ripple.
This is unfortunate, because number one, Madame Web deserves some sort of cult status for its sheer oddness. And number two, it deserves to be studied as a cautionary example of what not to do if you want to tell a coherent, engrossing story.
So what’s wrong with Madame Web, exactly? One answer could be that it’s a superhero movie that exists only to advertise other potential superhero movies. It’s a phenomenon we’ve seen grow ever since Nick Fury started compiling Avengers at the end of Iron Man in 2008, but taken to its natural conclusion here: Madame Web is not only designed as a teaser for a bunch of Spider-Women movies that will almost certainly never happen, but it’s also laden with the kind of distracting product placement that Sony is strangely relaxed about stuffing into its movies. Its central villain is even nobbled by a falling Pepsi sign, which feels like some sort of metaphor.
What’s more fascinating about Madame Web, though, is that if all of the comic book stuff is stripped away, and you overlook the in-universe ads for Beyonce, Calvin Klein underwear and fizzy drinks, there’s a vaguely okay story in here trying to get out.
Dakota Johnson’s New York paramedic Cassandra ‘Cassie’ Webb gains precognitive powers after a near-death (or maybe actual death) experience, and then attempts to save three disparate teenagers from the attentions of a murderous billionaire who has a habit of crawling around on ceilings.
Those teenagers are Julia Cornwalll (Sydney Sweeney), Anya Corazon (Isabela Merced) and Mattie Franklin (Celeste O’Connor) and all suffer from parental issues of one sort or another. As does Cassie, whose mother was famously researching spiders right before she died (a meme-generating line that, as our own James Harvey pointed out in his review, was in the trailer but not the actual film). The death of Cassie’s mother Constance (Kerry Bishe) was at the hands of the billionaire on the ceiling, Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim), an explorer who wanted the same superpower-granting spider that Cassie had just found in the Amazon rainforest.
Years later, Ezekiel’s having visions that he’ll one day be offed by three Spider-Women, and therefore resolves to uncover their identities and kill them before they can kill him. Using some fuzzily-defined NSA computer hardware (seemingly lifted from The Dark Knight) Ezekiel therefore zeroes in on his targets and begins chasing them around Manhattan.
With its musings on fate and innocents on the run from a killer intent on changing the future, Madame Web is often described as a combination of The Terminator and the Final Destination franchise. Another film it resembles, though, is David Cronenberg’s 1983 adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dead Zone. Like Madame Web, The Dead Zone is about a solitary, socially awkward character – in this case school teacher Johnny, played by a spectacularly wan Christopher Walken – who suffers a life-changing brush with death. Afterwards, he’s able to see people’s pasts and futures, and assuming people will listen to his warnings, he’s occasionally able to change events for the better.
The Dead Zone is a classic, and among the best adaptations of a Stephen King novel ever made. It’s a wonder, then, how Madame Web managed to fuse two solid premises – the solitary psychic of The Dead Zone and the relentless killer of The Terminator – and mess it all up so badly.
A quite staggering amount of repetition doesn’t help. Throughout Madame Web, we’re repeatedly shown future events from Cassie’s perspective – a paramedic’s death outside a firework factory, a murder attempt on a subway – and then shown the exact same sequence again, except with Cassie’s intervention. It’s a filmmaking decision seemingly engineered to avoid suspense; at its worst, there’s a wonder whether we’re being shown several scenes twice just to boost the running time.
It’s the symptom of a movie seemingly terrified of letting audiences figure things out for themselves. In a curious decision, the whole backstory of Cassie’s mother and her death in the Amazon at the hands of Ezekiel is shoved right at the front of the film. The more logical choice, surely, would have been to introduce Cassie first and then gradually tease the mystery of what happened to her mother.
Keeping Ezekiel off the screen until the New York subway sequence would have also given the film more of a sense of mystery, and given the villain a more impressive entrance than the one we have here, where he’s shown out of focus and twirling a red umbrella (no, we’re not making this up).
Instead, rather than discover new information with Cassie, we’re constantly one step ahead of her. When she reads about her mother’s research in her diaries, we’ve already sat through all the science waffle about spiders and peptides. When she realises Ezekiel’s connection to her mother’s death, we’re merely seeing a recap of stuff we sat through half an hour earlier.
Speaking of diaries, here’s another reason why Madame Web doesn’t work as a chase movie: Cassie keeps abandoning the teenagers she’s meant to be looking after. The first time, she leaves them in the woods while she goes off to read her mother’s diaries. She’s then surprised and quite annoyed to discover that three bored and hungry teenagers have trudged off to a nearby diner to get something to eat. This writer, shoved in the same situation, would probably do the same thing. You’re seldom far from a branch of JD Wetherspoon in the UK.
A few scenes later, Cassie leaves the teenagers with her paramedic friend, Ben Parker (Adam Scott) in order to – and I can’t quite believe I’m writing this – go on a fact-finding expedition to Peru. For an entire week.
Leaving aside the logistics of flying to and from South America while wanted by the police (who think Cassie kidnapped those teens), it’s a storytelling move that destroys any illusion that its central characters are in immediate danger.
It’d be like if Kyle Reese, having gone back in time to protect Sarah Connor from the Terminator, occasionally stopped off to do some reading in a local library, or maybe left Connor at her mum’s and took a flight to Hawaii for a few days. Kyle and Sarah are separated on more than one occasion in James Cameron’s sci-fi thriller, but it’s due to unforeseeable circumstances rather than Kyle’s obsession with research.
It’s likely that a lot of these problems are a result of the rewrites that Dakota Johnson talked about more than once on her singularly awkward promotional trail. Evidently knowing she was fighting a losing battle, Johnson spent her press tour talking about the film she’d made with detached bemusement, as though even she couldn’t quite believe she’d been a part of it all.
“There were drastic changes,” Johnson told The Wrap in February. “And I can’t even tell you what they were.”
Did Johnson mean she couldn’t tell the reporter what the drastic changes were because she’d signed a non-disclosure agreement, or did she mean she couldn’t talk about them because they didn’t make any sense? Both scenarios are probable.
Hefty rewrites would certainly explain the bizarre storytelling, stilted dialogue and astonishingly glaring uses of ADR. In this respect, Madame Web recalls director Tomas Alfredson’s messy adaptation of Jo Nesbo’s The Snowman, a 2017 thriller that saw an all-star cast – including Michael Fassbender and Rebecca Ferguson – stumble about on an ice rink of terrible editing and suspect dubbing.
The problem with that film, according to Alfredson himself, was that the production simply ran out of money; the production hit financial problems before it could finish shooting the entire script, and was forced to shut down for a year while additional funds were sought.
“It happened very abruptly,” Alfredson said in an interview filmed for Norwegian television; “suddenly, we got notice that we had the money and could start the shoot…”
Both Madame Web and The Snowman also highlight something ironic about over-explanation in storytelling: having tons of exposition doesn’t necessarily make a plot more coherent. In Madame Web, there’s a scene where Ezekiel, in bed with a mysterious woman he’s implausibly picked up at an opera house, begins to explain in depth his visions and his plans to kill three young women before they can put on superhero outfits and kill him in a few years’ time.
Incredibly, Madame Web’s writers also use the same scene to impart several other key pieces of information: that the mysterious woman (Jill Hennessy, billed simply as ‘Beautiful Woman’) is an NSA agent, that Ezekiel already knows this, and wants to use her to gain access to the hi-tech surveillance equipment mentioned earlier. The scene also teaches us that Ezekiel’s touch is poisonous, and that the longer he touches you, the more dosed you are with his venom.
It’s such a verbose, exposition-heavy scene that it’s easy to miss at least one of these quite pivotal plot details. The screenwriter Andy Guerdat describes scenes in a script as ‘units of information’, and there’s a strong argument that all the plot details laid out in the badly-lit scene described here should have been divided up and parcelled out more gradually. The idea of a villain with a poisonous touch is a solid one, and Ezekiel’s first use of it should have been shocking – a means of establishing his threat as a villain and what he might do to the other women he’s hunting.
Instead, the reveal is so botched that, when Ezekiel grabs Cassie’s wrist later in the film, it’s easy to overlook the significance – if he holds on for too long, Cassie’s as good as dead. The writers seem to know that audiences might have missed the detail, since they later take the time to show Cassie wincing at the pain in her wrist.
Madame Web therefore bears the scars of a troubled production, and yet remarkably few stories have leaked out – stories that might provide some insight into how it all went so wrong. Compare this to 2015’s Fantastic Four, where numerous reports emerged before its release about disagreements between its studio and director Josh Trank. That film also underwent heavy reshoots, and the results were critically panned; a day before its release, Trank tweeted that “A year ago I had a fantastic version of this… you’ll probably never see it.”
With the exception of Dakota Johnson going rogue on the press trail, the makers of Madame Web have largely formed a united front. No horror stories have emerged from the set; early script drafts are nowhere to be found on the internet. In the absence of concrete information, Madame Web’s release was joined by all kinds of theories: that its plot was originally completely different and was reworked after filming was completed. There’s even a plausible theory (put forward by Nando V Movies) that actor Tahar Rahim was originally cast as a completely different villain, and that Sony originally intended to have Spider-Man himself appear in some capacity.
(That nobody in the film is allowed to say the name ‘Peter Parker’, even though his birth is a sub-plot, is a sign of all the legal red tape surrounding Sony’s shared IP deal with Marvel Studios.)
Other YouTubers, such as Erik Voss, have obsessed over the film’s extensive use of ADR and what the dialogue Rahim uttered might have been. It’s easy to see why some people have studied Madame Web in such detail; it’s such a strange film that it sort of burrows into the brain like a cheap pop song. In fact, the baffling choices made in the movie are almost too numerous to recount without this article breaching the 5,000 world mark.
Consider the way Madame Web constantly introduces great actors in tiny scenes, only to thoroughly waste them (if you’re unfamiliar with Kerry Biche, do check out the excellent TV series Halt And Catch Fire). Or its 2003 setting, which feels so specific that it must have had some sort of greater significance which has since been lost. And whose idea was it to shoot a scene where the four leads all practice CPR in a motel room? What must actor Zosia Mamet, daughter of eminent writer and filmmaker David Mamet, think of lines like, “They’re teenagers now, but in the future, they have powers, and they will try to destroy me… I came from nothing – less than nothing!”?
There are so many questions, and it’s likely to be months or even years before we find out exactly what happened behind the scenes on Madame Web. Until then, we’re left with one of the most fascinating critical and financial failures in years. Most bad films are merely disappointing or flat-out boring; Madame Web is so bizarre that it’s almost intoxicating. That, at least, is an achievement worth celebrating.
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