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.
Agreed.
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.
Good point.
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?
Questions that will never be answered, since the entire villains popping in and "cure" sub-plot was so convoluted that it just tossed them into the film to be there, and ultimately leaving its nonsensical plot threads severed. At least there's one saving grace: anyone can watch the other Spider-Man films and never consider the events of NWH.
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Spider-Man: No Way Home
"W-what is he? Your ward?"
--Doctor Strange
, Avengers: Infinity War
....the answer was and remains yes. Three MCU/Spider-Man films in--with
No Way Home allegedly the last (not counting the rumored appearance in the
Captain Marvel sequel, and Spider-Man lacked any of the depth, the
individual's weighty, grim acceptance of a job he did not want, but his own inaction committed him to for the rest of his life. That should have been the foundation of MCU/Spider-Man, not the character being a version of the eager 1940s sidekick (i.e., a ward), and now dropped into some slapped-together version of
One More Day and other thin stories.
As pointed out about
Homecoming, MCU/Spider-Man never possessed the sense of greater purpose developed on his own--a sense of maturity. One would have expected that Spider-Man--
after Civil War, where he knew there was a larger, more serious world out there, he would not be portrayed as just giddy to worship Mister Stark / join the club, but that was the heart of his characterization in
Homecoming (the film where he was supposed to grow up a bit).
The Raimi
Spider-Man (2002) started with Parker as a high school student, but that film--
true to character origins--did not step around any personal failings or psychological trauma just to get to the noisy heroics. Raimi's film had Parker learn what it meant to misuse his extraordinary gifts at a terrible cost, so it justified his crusade. For some viewers to suggest
No Way Home is following that Spider-Man storytelling tradition, one has to wonder where it plays out in the film. His motivation for contacting Strange is so uncharacteristic of the
classic era of the published character, that again--three films in--Parker comes off as someone never learning anything about accepting life's sometimes dark, unfair consequences...but by this point in his MCU run, he should have crossed that maturity bridge. Its rare when a movie series lead ends in a far more ethically challenged position than his first outing.
Then, there were the villains...there for what reason? Dafoe and Molina (above all others) did not have a logical, meaningful plot to justify their presence--ultimately, they were there just to..
be there, in one needless conflict after another, only living off of the fumes of better Spider-Man films. That point was screaming across the screen with Maguire's cameo.
Finally, there's May. Because she was so poorly developed, that her 11th hour line-drop / support and death felt rushed--a forced motivator for Parker, yet lacking dramatic weight. The connection and shared fortitude between aunt and nephew--that internal strength which comic book May always gave to/shared with Peter (perfectly adapted by Rosemary Harris in the Raimi films) was absent. Of course, when the MCU version began life more as a running, adolescent joke about how May was now some sort of "cougar" as opposed to the grandmotherly type, there was nowhere to go with such a character. Marisa Tomei is a far better actress than anyone would know just watching her as May, and ultimately, her version will be one of the more forgettable supporting characters in the MCU.
At the end of it all, MCU/Spider-Man--whether his own series ends here or he's given another--was more of a sidekick and witness to the world he lived in than one of its prime movers.
GRADE:C, only thanks to Maguire's cameo.
