The fourth and final Marvel Cinematic Universe movie of the year and I really don’t know what attitude I’m supposed to have going into this. The MCU is still kicking goals after Avengers: Endgame, and Spider-Man: No Way Home is bringing twenty years of live-action Spider-Man all together, repurposing the Raimi trilogy, the best Spider-Man movies, to make them relevant once again. For that, a standing ovation before I even buy my ticket – I may be sitting in my desk chair as I type this, but my heart is a-leaping, and my valves are a-clapping. On the other hand, the initial reason for the multiverse, from what we’ve seen in the trailers, is Doctor Strange botching a spell, and shouldn’t he know better? A lame premise to get to an awesome concept, perhaps? I haven’t had the best run-ins this year with movies trying to cram in novelty for novelty’s sake (oh, hello Space Jam: A New Legacy and Free Guy), but I know what I be hoping for with Spider-Man: No Way Home… Joy-gasm!!
The cat is out of the bag! Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal) has broadcast Spider-Man’s relatively secret identity across New York City, and J. Jonah Jameson (J. K. Simmons), at the internet show ‘The Daily Bugle’, has run with it, labelling Spider-Man a murdering menace. This is trouble for Peter Parker (Tom Holland), Aunt May (Marisa Tomei), Ned Leeds (Jacob Batalon), Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau) and MJ (Zendaya), who have known about Spider-Man’s secret identity for a while, and are now under public scrutiny and police investigations as accomplices. Peter, Ned, and MJ are denied applications to go to college, and Parker starts to hypothesise about how he can fix the damage that he’s secret identity has done. He visits Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) and asks him to cast a spell where everyone will forget he’s Spider-Man; but Parker jabbers away through the spell’s casting, and the spell opens up a portal instead, to everyone in the multiverse who has ever known that Peter Parker is Spider-Man! Enter, Dr. Otto Octavius/Doc Oc (Alfred Molina), Dr. Curt Connors/The Lizard (Rhys Ifans), Max Dillon/Electro (Jamie Foxx), Flint Marko/Sandman (Thomas Haden Church) and Dr. Norman Osborn/The Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe), and we’re about to have some fun 😊
The New York public and police officials turn on Peter Parker so vehemently and quickly; it’s really disappointing. The other movies, Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2, made a point of the citizens of New York standing by Spider-Man despite the constant attacks in the news; I think The Amazing Spider-Man makes a similar point about the New York locals too. There’s as much evidence that Spider-Man is a danger to society, as there is that he’s an Avenger who stood alongside Captain America and helped defeat Thanos after the blip, surely. I don’t get how J. Jonah Jameson is presented foolishly like an Alex-Jones-style nut-job and yet he is broadcast on giant mainstream news screens across the city. Or maybe that’s the movie’s point, about how easily people are led by ‘fake news’ nowadays and… wait… is that Charlie Cox as Matt Murdock? Matt Murdoch is finally on the big screen in the MCU?! Wow, all that speculation about Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield, and Daredevil is here?! Well, does this mean that the Punisher can come in?!?! Will Iron Fist actually get to play with Shang-Chi?!?! What about Jessica Jones – they’re making a pretty heavy point that MJ’s last name is Jones; does that mean they could be related?!?!?! OMG, okay, I think the nostalgia bait is kicking in harder than anything else. I’ve found my attitude.
But also, okay, Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield are here, and it’s a pretty perfect reintroduction, just after our current Peter Parker faces a very heavy tragedy for himself, losing Aunt May. Sony, after one jumbled attempt at executing the ‘with great power comes great responsibility’ mantra in The Amazing Spider-Man, they still can’t bring themselves to have Marissa Tomei actually say the damn line? I think she says something like ‘with great power must also come a great responsibility’. Surely someone on set could have said, ‘cut. Marissa, yeah, we’re going to need you to say the line straight. Thanks. Stop jerking around, it isn’t going to bite you.’ But I really love how Aunt May gets to deliver the sentiment, but it unfortunately means that she has to die. Tomei’s entire run as Aunt May has been a great modification of the character, and she has been terrific. I remember being just as gob-smacked as Tony Stark in Captain America: Civil War, because Aunt May ‘got hot!’ (Please tell me you read that like Stifler from American Pie’). She’s the cool Aunt, who invented the Peter tingle, and was completely supportive from the start when she found out that her nephew was a superhero. One of the first comic books I ever owned was an ‘Amazing Spider-Man where Aunt May discovers Peter is Spider-Man, and it explores her emotional depth, but even with that knowledge in my brain, Tomei as May has done wonders. And her death, along with saying that iconic line, works to bridge the gap between what Spider-Man die-hards want with these solo movies, and the kid-friendly adventures the MCU has given us. I thought a lot about James Bond while watching this movie; how the last two Daniel Craig movies have given us an alternative Bond and I haven’t liked it, and this Spider-Man has been quite unconventional too, but this movie works towards giving us an alternative to respect… a worthy webslinger in his own right. Even the ending of Spider-Man: No Way Home is a lot like Skyfall, as the movie has certainly taken the road untravelled but got us to a familiar place, that embraces and respects the character’s history and value in conclusion; gorgeous.
While I’m hitting on Spider-Man’s allies, I really like Zendaya’s MJ here – I’m a big fan of the actress already, who’s shown she can hang with the big guns in Dune and especially Malcolm & Marie this year. I was a little worried in those initial scenes where Peter and MJ are running around the apartment in a frantic panic, and it’s meant to be funny (millennial humour), but Parker’s… romance…?… with MJ in the last movie felt so out of left-field, after Spider-Man: Homecoming dealt with Liz Allen, while MJ was a dark and shady side-character. But here, for at least the first time as far as I can remember, they are genuinely good friends with the cutest little high-school relationship anyone could wish. Ned Leeds, on the other hand, has always been a champ – what more needs to be said. I may still not be sold on Doctor Strange as a character in the MCU, or on Cumberbatch either really, but this is not his movie to prove it, and he serves as a means to an end. They sort’ve ‘multiversed’ the trailer too though, ey? Wong’s attitude to the spell casting in the movie is just ‘leave me out of it’ when he seemed completely against it in the trailer. And what about Tom Holland himself; with a maturing Spider-Man comes a maturing performance, and I thought he was mightily convincing. I recently caught up with Chaos Walking, which was filmed a few years back, and trust me, Holland has improved as an actor. This is the most I’ve ever admired Tom Holland’s Spider-Man (excluding the ‘Civil War drop-in, I think), and so this is the most I’ve ever liked Holland as well.
This movie is fantastic, with quite a few sentimental call-backs, like the Lizard being transported back to the school (recalling the best moment from The Amazing Spider-Man), and Aunt May fading away in a similar position to how Spider-Man got dusted in front of Iron Man in Avengers: Infinity War – these moments aren’t in-your-face, and hold enough subdued subtly to actually be touching fan-service. Then, when the Spider-Mans get to speak, it’s like thick gooey mousse on a hungry day; delicious and rich. Actually, this is a Spider-Man talk, so let’s say it’s better than Harry Osborn’s pie; ‘so good 😋’. I could listen to the three Spider-Men shoot the shit for hours. They talk web-shooters, mechanical or not. They talk identities, and enemies, and relationships, and responsibilities, and back ache. They’re all bonded by their own heart-shaped tragedies; Aunt May for P1, Uncle Ben and Gwen Stacey respectfully for the other two, and it’s the best evidence of how they’re all different but so very much the same.
And Spider-Man: No Way Home probably elevates my idolisation of Alfred Molina’s Doc Oc and Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin; elevates! They were always fine choices for the roles, as crafty actors first – if the movies were to ever have a scenario where Norman Osborn could exist as a recurring character, then this is exactly how they would do it, with his black-outs and memory loss. It kind’ve felt like the entire beginning of his arc was just an excuse to get him in a purple hoodie to eventually replicate the classic comic design, and I’m absolutely okay with that. At the end of the day, the Green Goblin is Spider-Man’s Joker, and even in a sea of other colourful villains, it’s the Goblin that stands out as the most dangerous and causes the most damage in this movie; it’s just brilliant. Max Dillon is given 10 times the characterisation that he was given in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, and he was awesome too. He’s gone from just wanting people to look at him to actually being drunk with power, and it turns out, he was only ever obsessed with Spider-Man because he was convinced that he was black – surely there’s a black Spider-Man out there somewhere, right? Yeah, that’s funny. I didn’t understand why Flint Marco was entirely made of sand for the entire movie, and it seems like they used archival footage of Thomas Haden Church, and Rhys Ifans, when both characters transformed back to people, but at least they reprised their voices for the movie.
Spending time with these villains, they get to talking, and relaying how they all died in their own worlds. Parker, being an optimistic kid influenced by May, decides to take it upon himself to find a way to cure them of their abilities as a way to change their fates. Through this, you realise how these flawed geniuses have all lost, and you’re reminded that the Spider-Men lost too, every time they couldn’t help to save one of their villains’ demises – especially Osborn, Connors, and Octavius; they were all mentors to Peter and all Spider-Man tried to do was get them to calm down. So, the Parkers work together to find the necessary remedies and its cathartic for the Spider-Men to finally succeed – Doc Oc get to ask Maguire how he’s doing, as a peer, and Garfield gets to relate to Max, helping him feel valued. Garfield gets to save a Spider-Man girlfriend, and it means more to him than it does to MJ, who’s life he just saved. And Maguire gets to quell Osborn and save a friend’s rage, echoing events that ruined his life the first-time round. It’s beautiful. It’s cathartic for us too, who have carried these narratives for over twenty years, and are now seeing Parker succeed through a multiverse of second chances. But I can still see people getting upset, saying, ‘well, they’re just giving everyone a happy ending, and how is that different to Maz Kanata randomly giving Chewbacca a medal in the middle of a celebration’, but c’mon man – I think this is earned because Spider-Man has always been intent on saving lives and doing good since the beginning of web-slinging.
And for all the bitching and moaning about how the Tom Holland Spider-Man is ‘not the same’. No, ‘not as good’. Where’s Uncle Ben? Where’s the existentialism? This movie opens my eyes that he’s just… lucky. He hasn’t had his best friend turn against him or resent him. He hasn’t been isolated, holding on to secrets from loved ones. He’s always had other superpowered beings around him, to share his hang-ups – the chief weapons manufacturer of his universe in Stark Industries, has even lifted him up, where Oscorp would always try to bring him down. He’s got through countless scrapes without losing a guardian until now (a genuine parental guardian). Right now, I no longer feel like hating on the Tom Holland Spider-Man for being what he is. By bringing in the multiverse, it’s also a way of acknowledging that Mary-Jane still does exist as a red-head somewhere, and Uncle Ben is a thing, but they know that we know that this is something different. And sidebar, just a little bit – Andrew Garfield is so cool, yeah? Perhaps my happiest moment of Spider-Man: No Way Home is Garfield being disappointed in his Spider-Man, and Maguire telling him that he’s awesome. Actually, Maguire says he’s amazing; ha-HA! And Garfield was amazing; it’s just that those movies came out so closely after the Maguire series was canned that the rivalry between the two franchises was strong, at least from my perspective. But now we’re all together; we can love! Andrew Garfield’s appreciation for getting to play Spider-Man was always evident and should definitely be respected – you are a worthy point of the live-action triangle.
So, I guess all that is left to say, is thank-you. Thank-you for giving us the Spider-Man that we want – he’s in a shitty apartment, where nobody knows his secret identity, but he knows his responsibility. Thank-you to Jon Watts for directing this epic movie, and thank-you to the writers, Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, for keeping all the many moving pieces of this exercise relevant and entertaining so wonderfully. I look forward to the fourth instalment of this Spider-Man franchise with most interest (see; a ‘fourth instalment’ – Holland’s Spider-Man is lucky). Thank-you to Sony and Disney for bringing Marvel back together. I’m a little gobsmacked. I’m overjoyed. I’m humbled.
5.0
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