Spoilers Spider-Man: No Way Home - Review and Discussion Thread

No, we know he did have a Uncle Ben because of references in both Homecoming and Far From Home. We just don't know the manner of his death, but we do know it wasn't something he felt responsible for and only felt protective regarding May's loss.

 

If Tom is burnt out, give Garfield another go.

 

Pretty sure he's already said he can keep doing these for as long as they want him to. So if this is it for him it's less about burnout and more about contract negotiations.

ETA: I've been wondering about how the runes of whateverhisface spell actually works. Strange said it removes all memory and it'll be like Peter (in this case) never existed. One assumes that by "memory" he doesn't just mean human organic memory, but literally all lasting traces from digital files, documents, photographs, to even MJ's detention sketch of him she made in 'Homecoming'. It would have to be that extensive otherwise it would be too easy to just get back his life as it would be collective selective amnesia.
That said, there would still be a negative space "footprint" of his existence, no? Unless the spell fabricates new memories to fill in the blanks (something that feels like it'd take the reality stone to pull off on that scale) there would still be indirect traces. Like any time his teacher took the register (I think it's called "attendance" in the states?) Peter's name would be on it, but the final count for his classes, and only his classes would be off by exactly 1. Same any time he got on a plane or got counted on any kind of official document.

Don't get me wrong, a discrepancy of 1 spread across hundreds, or thousands of documents and artefacts is hardly noticeable, and indeed even a forensic investigator would be hard pressed to reconstruct anything useful even if they knew what to look for, or even had a reason to. But there should still be traces, which means the spell may have some loose threads that could unravel the whole thing.

Hell, for all we know the next Dr. Strange movie could blow the multiverse apart and render all of this moot.

 

No Way Home was... well, it was cinematic Esctasy, wasn't it? It was, for me, a lot like Steven Moffat's Doctor Who -- in the moment, it felt good, but it's insubstantial and when I started picking at it I started going, "What?" It's a competently made film that throws enough fanwank at you to overwhelm you into submission, and the plot is so amorphous that even an MFA student would say, "That's a bit too out there..."

Don't misunderstand. I enjoyed the film. Having rewatched the Raimi and Webb films in the last week, I got the callbacks because they were fresh in a way that the audience I saw it with yesterday clearly did not. But I also left the theater thinking that the script for Amazing 2 was better constructed than the script here.

I can easily imagine a rewrite that plants seeds for later payoffs and better addresses the key problem in the story -- Peter wants to cure the Ferocious Five of their afflictions, knowing that when they return to their worlds, they will (in at least three of the cases) die pretty horrible deaths. Frankly, a line of dialogue from Otto probably would have handled it; he knows it's tragic, he knows it's their fate, and yet he accepts that this is what needs to be done. "I once called my Peter 'brilliant but lazy,' but you, Peter, you're brilliant and far from lazy. It has been my pleasure to know you, however briefly, before I meet my fate," is probably a starting point.

I keep thinking of more interesting routes the film could have taken, like a post-credits scene in which Flint Marko, cured of being the Sandman, reunites with his daughter, calling back to his first scene in the film and paying off that thread from Spider-Man 3. I also thought it would have been cool if a character from one of the older universes could have remained in this universe, like Otto, who perhaps goes to work for Stark Industries or Horizon Labs -- and yes, I'm aware of the post-credits scene.

While much of the Dr. Strange material was interesting, I felt there was too much of it and, as imaginative as the Mirror Plane fight was, that's time that could have spent on better developing the returning characters and their arcs.

While JJJ has always been an asshole, I don't know that I've ever seen him portrayed as malevolent as he was here. Hunting down where Peter was holed up escalated the situation there, and who ordered the SWAT team and why were they on shoot-to-kill orders? Tobey's JJJ may have been a jerk, but it was clear that, deep down, he had a grudging respect for Spider-Man. Tom's JJJ is irredeemable -- and more of a monster than Spider-Man ever was.

Was Norman's "Green Goblin no more!" scene staged in the same alley where Peter had his "Spider-Man no more!" scene in Spider-Man 2? Or do all alleys in Manhattan look the same?

The conversation with Ned about how, in the other universes, Peter Parker has a best friend who turns villainous and tries to kill him seems pretty over-the-head for most people. I got it -- Ned becomes the Hobgoblin -- but I'm not sure anyone in my audience did.

There wasn't enough of New York as a character in this film for me. Also, adding Captain America's shield to the Statue of Liberty is really gross and even straight-up fascist, given that we just had an entire television series about what the shield means and how people interpret it as a symbol.

I seem nitpicky, and I suppose I am. No Way Home was okay, I liked it, and I wanted it to be better. B-, maybe.

 

Official numbers for the weekend are in and it took in over 600 million worldwide, so will probably hit a billion by the end of the year. Pandemic? What pandemic?

https://deadline.com/2021/12/spider...s-matrix-international-box-office-1234899298/

 

I think that's kind of the point. Remember this is around the same time (give or take 6-ish months or thereabouts) as the US government recruits a new "Captain America" to basically be what they tried to turn Steve into in the 40's before he ran off and became an actual hero.
Easy to miss, but I think some of the news reports mention how unpopular this renovation/government sponsored vandalism is proving to be with the locals, so I don't think this is the film makers thinking this would be a good idea, but a bit of deep background worldbuilding going on that may or may not play into the seemingly inevitable Thunderbolts/New Avenger vs. the Young Avengers arc.

 

I think that is a good assessment of everything. I enjoyed it a lot. But there was very little story here. That is not a nitpick just the reality. Peter curing villains who are doomed to die anyway is hard to get emotionally invested in. This may be this Peter’s origin story but hard to see it having the same strength of Uncle Ben’s death. There he was lazy and did not want to use his powers to help others. Here his Aunt May died because he was too eager to help everyone??? Not just curing the villains but protecting his friends from his secret being public?

Watching yesterday I wonder how many in the audience understood the smaller references. I have not watched the Disney Plus shows yet. Had no idea why the Statue of Liberty had Cap’s shield. Only two guys cheered when Matt Murdoch appeared. So loud you could barely hear the dialogue. Same two guys in different parts of the theater who did that every time there was a “moment”.

Most of the villains had little to do at all. They appear for their presence.

 

I should add the cheering guy was closest to me called “Bullshit!” When Venom disappeared quickly. Sorry but that gave me real pleasure. I have no problem with people cheering. But the whole film he was not just cheering but calling to the screen. He wanted attention. He was acted like he was posting on Twitter. So his disappointment gave me joy... plus the fact I have never seen a Venom movie and likely never will. I was happy that he was not a major part of the movie.

 

There were two women near me who acted like that. Really OTT laughs to show that they’d understood that reference. Then, to cap it off, when Dafoe said “I’m something of a scientist myself”, they whipped out their phones and spent about 10 minutes on them, seemingly on WhatsApp. My best guess is that they were texting friends to say “OMG, he said the line from the meme” or something like that. When I rule the world, this sort of behaviour will be an imprisonable criminal offence.

 

Ended up seeing it on the weekend. Theater went back and forth over and over what it was doing and ended up cancelling all pre ordered tickets and opening again for same day tickets, but not many people must have noticed as it was pretty empty.

Its another Marvel movie. It looked like a Marvel movie, it sounded like a Marvel movie, and it played out like a Marvel movie. Like I said in the Shang Chi thread, I'm bored with the sameness of them all. Phases 2 & 3 opened stuff up a bit with a few of the movies but then everything started reverting to the mean again.

I'm going to try and avoid repeating what anyone else says.

I haven't seen anyone commenting on the villains lack of agency. Outside of Goblin they just did whatever the last person to talk to them told them to do. They were macguffins, not characters.

No exploration of what it means that they're being sent back cured. Did they change their timelines, despite Endgame talking about how that was impossible? Does Tobey go back to a world where Osbourne stopped Green Goblining around and is running his empire, with a non-traumatized Harry by his side? Does Garfield not have his climactic fighters with Lizard or Electro? Or did the cures reverse the moment they were sent back to when they left, with the movie essentially never happening for them?

Garfield's Spider-man was a little off compared to his description of himself. He quipped a lot for a bitter vigilant who stopped pulling his punches (aka killing his villians without hesitation?) and basically quit his life as Peter Parker.

Tobey seemed pretty unenthusiastic. In it for the cheque.

There were bits I really liked (like Matt Murdock, organic webbing talk, Tobey and his back) and overall it wasn't bad, it was just... more of the same.

 

Full agreement! Would not surprise me if the worst offender in my screening already saw the movie or read the spoilers. So he was just showboating. There were cheers and laughs through out the movie from the rest of the audience. So it’s not like no one cared. When Matt Murdock appeared the one guy was so obnoxious it was hard to tell if anyone else knew who that was. He made the scene about his reaction!

 

The villains had no agency or motivation. Considering they had no history with this Spider-man they just exist. They are like action figures fighting in a kids sandbox. No story. That is fun to an extent. I expected a big team up. But it never happened. If this was one aspect of the overall movie it would be ok. But the whole movie is built on displaced characters with little motivation.

 

The weird thing is, Strange is probably the closest character in the film to an actual antagonist for Peter, and even though I said above that there was, for me, a little too much of Strange and the Mirror Plane fight, while visually impressive, took time away from developing characters and planting seeds, a rewrite that upped the conflict between Peter and Strange (Peter wants to cure the villains and keep them on his Earth where they won't die, Strange doesn't care and wants to send them back to their deaths to fix the multiverse) that ends with Peter realizing that Strange is correct and that sometimes doing the right thing leads to bad outcomes (a very Spider-Man story there) would have been effective. This would, in a way, make the villains Peter's allies, at least temporarily because they want to live and Peter wants them to live, and because of Peter's interference (stealing the box and trapping Strange) the little problem (sending them back) has become a much bigger problem (the cracking of the multiverse coming through) which forces Peter to make the hard decision to wipe himself from human memory.

One thing that would have helped would have been some villain POV scenes. There's really only one -- Norman smashing the helmet in the alley. The rest of the film, we're seeing them from Peter's perspective.

 

I didn't notice any major lack of agency on the villains' parts. I mean sure, what was there was fairly bare bones, but this movie wasn't really about them, it was about Peter. Plus of course, there was six of them, and this time around MJ had quite a bit more to do, which I consider a worthwhile trade-off.

But to summarise: Conners wanted to turn everyone into lizards because he's crazy. Max didn't want to go back to being the nobody he saw himself as, because he's power crazy. Flint Marko wanted to get back to his daughter (alive). Otto (once he had his mind back) wanted to do the right thing and make amends. Green Goblin is just a force of chaos and ego. And Venom wanted to get drunk and go skinny dipping.

And at the finale, they all wanted the box because most of them either knew it meant their deaths or thought it might. Conners even ask Max if he survived or not, but he didn't answer him. Flint was never that bright or ever really thinks things through, making him more reactive than contemplative, and since he didn't really trust Peter he took off. When Peter called the Bugle, he took it as an implicit threat so he showed up to stop him from pushing the button.

 

I understand that it seems to be the default for every writer to want to always reset Peter to a penniless loner with no on his side, and I get that this was probably intended to be the last we saw of MCU Spidey in a major role in the MCU, but can I at least hope he's not selling photos in the next film and found a better job than that?

Cause really, it's hardly some horrible crime for him to have someone on his side and have SOMETHING to show for his life.

 

...In his last 6 (6? 7?) appearances so far in the MCU he's been the protege of the worlds richest man, outfitted with incredible tech and with Stark Enterprises, Shield, and The Avengers to fall back on. Which has been a huge complaint from fans for Holland's entire run. This is the first time he will be a penniless loner with no one to fall back on for his entire MCU run. Unless he's just randomly back with them all like Tony un-retired after IM3.

 

IE, the MCU actually bothered developing him from the standard starting point he's often continually reset back to over and over again.

Well at least this time he gets to remember times when he had help and resources. And they also aren't going to bother with his "Poor Fragile Aunt May must never know my secret!" stuff too, so this will hopefully lead to something beyond the usual characterization.

But really, this is almost on par with the X-Men telling a story where they actually make progress on making humans accept mutants more and making the more extreme mutants be willing to accept humans, but then some writer comes along and resets everything.

 

Let's keep this somewhat in perspective: he's not "ending up" as a penniless loner, he's starting as a penniless loner. This is a beginning, not an ending, and there's all kinds of places he can go from here. Places like: Mile Morales, Black Cat, Parker Industries, doing the Alien Costume Saga properly this time, a grounded street level Daredevil & Jessica Jones crossover, Madame Web and the whole spider totem thing, Jessica Drew, or indeed any one of the other half dozen Spider-Women from Gwen to Cindy to Anya to Mayday (though honestly, any one of those would be better served as a Disney+ show.)

If they do another MCU Spider-Man movie (and I'm sure they will sooner or later) then I wouldn't expect this whole situation to be the status quo, because historically the MCU doesn't do "status quo". Everything is always evolving, and if you haven't figured that out now we're 27 movies in . . . I just don't know what to tell you.

 

I actually quite liked the Ultimate Spider-Man update, where he got a job working on the Daily Bugle website.

 

We need to know more about this spell as Parker may no longer exist on that Earth. Hard to get a job when you have no social security/national insurance number.