"SPIDER-MAN NO WAY HOME WAS A GREAT ENTRY TO THE MCU AND EXCELLENT WAY TO BREAK DOWN A STATUS QUO TO REINSTATE A NEW ONE." BRYSON SAUNDERS-BECKLES, GRADE 11
Spider-Man is one of my favorite superheroes of all time. It's everything about him: the costume, the name, the gift, the power. As a writer, I have a great appreciation for the themes and thematic weight behind the movies. The ideals of sacrifice, tenacity, and trying to balance your life. The inspirations behind Spider-Man deliver further insight into some of my own ideas about superheroes. The everyman character whose struggles are the same as our own and faces life with a combination of luck and tenacity. I loved the newest movie, Spider-Man: No Way Home, released on December 17, 2021. And so did everyone else, judging by its financial and critical acclaim, which surpassed and subverted everyone’s expectations, including my own. I kind of expected this to be your average Marvel movie and to just kind of move on from it. I really didn’t expect much, and yet here I am.
I spoke about this in my Shang-Chi review several weeks back, but I’ve become jaded about Marvel movies over the past couple of months and others seem to share similar sentiments. Kind of like how Martin Scorsese said that Marvel Movies weren’t cinema and consistently accurate comparisons that MCU films are the movie equivalent of fast food. And on a side note, why is time and space so fragile in this series/comic books in general? The way the characters put it, the slightest change to literally anything related to time and space will make reality fall apart. But with the amount of time-traveling and reality warping mutants and entities, I strongly think the world should've ended already.
Multiverses feel like marketing gimmicks and one made explicitly to introduce new characters and make more money by making more and more movies. But Spider-Man made the decision to go back to the previous two Spider-Men and THEIR bad guys from other movies to create one of the biggest movies of both this year and the last.
The film itself is really well paced, even with a runtime of two hours and twenty-eight minutes and multiple plot threads to wrap up. The premise itself is that Mysterio reveals Spider-Man's identity and frames him for murder. The case itself is cleared up by Matt Murdock (Daredevil, show on Netflix, *Wink, Wink*), but life just isn't the same after that. So Peter asks Doctor Strange to rewrite the world's collective memory so everyone forgets. But the spell goes wrong, and now the fabric of reality is on the line because, why not? As a result, five villains and two other Spider-Men from the previous live action movies enter our dimension and now need to be put back.
No Way Home marks a very integral moment for Spider-Man’s development in this series because it hits Spider-Man in a way the comics did before them; in particular the Ultimate Spider-Man comics by Brian Micheal Bendis. This one feels more grounded and grittier than other Spider-Man movies before it (sans Spider-Man 3). As far as familiarity, it had the tone that the Ultimate Spider-Man comics were going for, or The Amazing Spider-Man movies were trying for. It felt long overdue considering what came before, by which I mean that it felt a lot less serious despite that being when Spidey is usually at his best. This feels like the point where Peter Parker really grows into his own as a character and where Tony Stark becomes less of a major figure in his life, which I appreciated. One criticism that's been leveled at the MCU the past several years is that nearly every major villain has some kind of connection to Tony Stark, and it's not hard to see where they´re coming from: Vulture was a Stark thing, Mysterio was a Stark thing, and (On a non-Spider-Man note) Ultron was also a Stark thing. And by extension, that Spider-Man depended on Iron Man to find things to do and villains to fight despite his very own roster. So it was a noticeable change of pace that I appreciated as it allowed things to develop on their own.
The displaced are easily the highlight of the movie for me mostly because their chemistry together is amazing. Toby Maguire and Andrew Garfield have excellent bonding with Tom Holland and the three of them have a triplet/brother dynamic going on that I really appreciate. The villains are great and always fun to watch. They bounce off each other the way the heroes do and the film humanizes them in a way that’s become popular over the years in mainstream culture: their backstories are tragic, they're misunderstood, and they are met with varying degrees of success and mixed public reception. For the tone of this film, this really does work. Willem Dafoe as the Green Goblin is enrapturing to watch and Tom Holland really shines here. The thing about these movies is that he always brings his best at the ending where it counts, as most actors do. As I said before, two hours and twenty-eight minutes is a bit of a stretch to pace properly, but the film did it so well, and the ending feels so right, and out of left field. Overall, 9/10: great time watching at the movies with my brother and mom.
I spoke about this in my Shang-Chi review several weeks back, but I’ve become jaded about Marvel movies over the past couple of months and others seem to share similar sentiments. Kind of like how Martin Scorsese said that Marvel Movies weren’t cinema and consistently accurate comparisons that MCU films are the movie equivalent of fast food. And on a side note, why is time and space so fragile in this series/comic books in general? The way the characters put it, the slightest change to literally anything related to time and space will make reality fall apart. But with the amount of time-traveling and reality warping mutants and entities, I strongly think the world should've ended already.
Multiverses feel like marketing gimmicks and one made explicitly to introduce new characters and make more money by making more and more movies. But Spider-Man made the decision to go back to the previous two Spider-Men and THEIR bad guys from other movies to create one of the biggest movies of both this year and the last.
The film itself is really well paced, even with a runtime of two hours and twenty-eight minutes and multiple plot threads to wrap up. The premise itself is that Mysterio reveals Spider-Man's identity and frames him for murder. The case itself is cleared up by Matt Murdock (Daredevil, show on Netflix, *Wink, Wink*), but life just isn't the same after that. So Peter asks Doctor Strange to rewrite the world's collective memory so everyone forgets. But the spell goes wrong, and now the fabric of reality is on the line because, why not? As a result, five villains and two other Spider-Men from the previous live action movies enter our dimension and now need to be put back.
No Way Home marks a very integral moment for Spider-Man’s development in this series because it hits Spider-Man in a way the comics did before them; in particular the Ultimate Spider-Man comics by Brian Micheal Bendis. This one feels more grounded and grittier than other Spider-Man movies before it (sans Spider-Man 3). As far as familiarity, it had the tone that the Ultimate Spider-Man comics were going for, or The Amazing Spider-Man movies were trying for. It felt long overdue considering what came before, by which I mean that it felt a lot less serious despite that being when Spidey is usually at his best. This feels like the point where Peter Parker really grows into his own as a character and where Tony Stark becomes less of a major figure in his life, which I appreciated. One criticism that's been leveled at the MCU the past several years is that nearly every major villain has some kind of connection to Tony Stark, and it's not hard to see where they´re coming from: Vulture was a Stark thing, Mysterio was a Stark thing, and (On a non-Spider-Man note) Ultron was also a Stark thing. And by extension, that Spider-Man depended on Iron Man to find things to do and villains to fight despite his very own roster. So it was a noticeable change of pace that I appreciated as it allowed things to develop on their own.
The displaced are easily the highlight of the movie for me mostly because their chemistry together is amazing. Toby Maguire and Andrew Garfield have excellent bonding with Tom Holland and the three of them have a triplet/brother dynamic going on that I really appreciate. The villains are great and always fun to watch. They bounce off each other the way the heroes do and the film humanizes them in a way that’s become popular over the years in mainstream culture: their backstories are tragic, they're misunderstood, and they are met with varying degrees of success and mixed public reception. For the tone of this film, this really does work. Willem Dafoe as the Green Goblin is enrapturing to watch and Tom Holland really shines here. The thing about these movies is that he always brings his best at the ending where it counts, as most actors do. As I said before, two hours and twenty-eight minutes is a bit of a stretch to pace properly, but the film did it so well, and the ending feels so right, and out of left field. Overall, 9/10: great time watching at the movies with my brother and mom.