#DoomsdayPrep: Gone Fission.

Still von Trapped in the beige purgatory of seventies TV, Spider-Man Strikes Back – the theatrical title bestowed on the TV series’ two part “Deadly Dust” season one opener sees our corduroy-clad hero taking on the twin menace of seventies nuclear paranoia and bored university students while remaining mired in a world where the spectacular is replaced by the functional, and where the eponymous wall-crawler spends a surprising amount of time lurking behind filing cabinets.
The plot kicks off with a trio of university students whose idea of a peaceful protest involves the casual assembly of a functional atomic bomb. It’s a wonderfully misguided bit of 1970s campus radicalism infused with pre-Three Mile Island paranoia as they seek to embarrass the university administration by proving that security is so lax that any undergraduate with a library card and a bit of moxie can manufacture a city-levelling device. Their ultimate goal? To ironically highlight the inherent danger of processing nuclear material in the heart of New York, a point that’s almost immediately validated when they promptly lose the weapon to a powerfully generic European villain named Mr. White (Robert Alda).
Robert F Simon takes over from David White as J Jonah Jameson, but still cedes much of the berating Peter Parker duties to Captain Barbera while Hammond continues to play Parker with a gentle, slightly bewildered sincerity. There is a quaintness to the stakes here; the film treats a stolen plutonium canister with the same narrative urgency you might afford a lost library book and the storytelling operates at a glacial pace, prioritising lengthy scenes of people walking into rooms and describing things they are about to do, rather than actually doing them.
Director Ron Satlof struggles to make the suit look anything other than a slightly shiny set of pyjamas and the stunt work rightly earns its reputation for pragmatism. It’s not quite Adam West and Burt Ward slowly sidling along a studio floor turned ninety degrees but it’s not far off. Judicious framing keeps cables or cherry pickers out of sight as a stuntman in spandex shimmies awkwardly up the side of an LA high rise in broad daylight. The action sequences, such as they are, are at least bolstered by funky, horn-heavy music that’s still a bit more police procedural than a comic book fantasy, but it gives everything a welcome dash of groovyness.
The villainous Mr. White is a masterclass in the generic antagonism, spending most of the runtime looking moderately inconvenienced in expensive suits, backed by henchmen who appear to have been recruited from a local knitwear catalogue. The film’s insistence on treating this bargain-bin heist as a national crisis is where things really come unstuck but what truly lingers is the sheer lack of momentum. Huge swathes of the film are dedicated to the logistics of 1970s journalism: Peter asking for permission to go to Los Angeles (allowing the production to at least stop pretending it shoots in New York for a while), Jameson complaining about expenses, and the general faff of travel before the digital age. In a way it might be the Spider-Man adaptation that captures the mundane reality of a superhero who still has to worry about his per diem most accurately, even if that accuracy comes at the expense of dramatic interest. The climax, involving a showdown that lacks even a hint of physical tension, serves as a reminder that this era of Marvel was less about great power and great responsibility and more about filling a broadcast slot in between the commercial breaks.
While the production values are undeniably ropey, there is a distinct lack of cynicism in the performances that makes it difficult to truly dislike. Spider-Man Strikes Back (although there’s very little actual Striking) is a relic of an age when “special effects” was a term used very loosely, and the spectacle was secondary to ensuring the lead actor didn’t get tangled up in his own webbing or do anything too expensive too often. It doesn’t offer the kinetic thrills or sassy trash talk of modern iterations (in fact Spider-Man in costume is almost entirely mute), but what it does provide is a deadly dull adventure where the deadly dust isn’t just the plutonium residue but the thick layer that’s gathered to smother the inert action on screen.