Since when does Spider-Man have a thing for curing evil? And is getting into college really
such a big deal for one of the world's most famous heroes? These questions and more are
the kinds of things in "Spider-Man: No Way Home" that only adults will notice.
In "Spider-Man: No Way Home," we pick up right where the last movie left off,
with Mysterio revealing Spiderman's identity as 17 year old high schooler, Peter Parker.
With so much pressure from the press, police, and the public, Peter finds his world upended.
Luckily he is cleared of all charges, but Spider-Man and his best friends
MJ and Ned are rejected from MIT due to their association with Peter Parker.
It's a crushing blow for Peter, that causes him to seek out Dr. Strange's help and set the plot of
the whole movie in motion. But the more seasoned members of the audience might ask: who cares?
For one thing, MIT's reluctance to admit Peter Parker and his friends
is kind of unrealistic – and also, the older you get, the more you realize how
overblown the importance of college is. Sure, higher education is nice and all,
and it can get you a leg up in life, but is it really worth risking the entire universe over?
As "the most famous person in the world," as well as a certified genius who's helped save the world,
Peter could have easily gone into business with his equally brilliant friends,
hired world class tutors, or found independent funding based on his web serum alone!
College only gets you so far. Being Spider-Man is more than enough to get Peter to MIT and beyond.
Let's face it – you don't go to a Spider-Man movie to have a long think about moral relativism. You
go for the action, and if you're lucky, a little bit of heart. In this movie, a bunch of proven bad
guys from other universes get sucked into the MCU, and instead of kicking their butts back to where
they came from, Peter Parker decides to convince them to change their wicked ways instead. What?
Why should we be rooting for this? The idea that
Spider-Man is too good of a guy to let any harm come to his enemies
is kind of childish, not to mention a little contradictory with movies we've already seen.
"Activate instant kill!"
It's established in "No Way Home" that the presence of these villains threatens Peter's
universe, and the villains also pose a real danger to everyone around them. And it sort of undercuts
our years of experience watching this Spider-Man and others battle various villains to the death,
when apparently they could have just done some vague science stuff and "cured" them all along.
"You deserve that, you're a criminal! Bye Mr. Criminal!"
By far the most fun part of No Way Home is the hilarious,
stuttering interplay between the three versions of Spider-Man,
all of which appear to have aged along with the actors that play their characters.
Tobey Maguire's Peter has mellowed into early middle age, Andrew Garfield's Peter
is dealing with the more existential onset of your 30s, and Tom Holland's Peter needs their
help to deal with some late teenage rage. As they work on scientific villain cures
and plan the big battle together, there are enough laughs to fill a whole sitcom.
Older movie goers also saw a bit of themselves when Garfield and Maguire's Peters Parker
bonded over back pain. Back pain happens to pretty much everybody, and it's oddly
comforting to see two iterations of Spider-Man himself complain about "middle-back stuff."
It's enough to make a person grateful that their biggest issue is finding the right standing desk,
or making time for a yoga class,
and not constantly sustaining body-blows from a super-powered rogues' gallery.
You don't have to have seen every previous Spider-Man movie to enjoy Spider-Man:
No Way Home. But for each movie that you haven't seen, or don't remember well,
there's definitely going to be a few things you'll miss.
This is in addition to the many MCU movies that No Way Home assumes you've already seen.
You need that background to understand the dynamic between Peter and Dr. Strange,
and so on. But taken as a whole, it's a lot to ask of the average viewer.
At this point, how many people who saw The Amazing Spider-Man 2 will remember the finer
points of the history between Electro and Andrew Garfield's Spider-Man? And after fourteen years,
we might need a little more than a line or two's worth of refresher
on what Sandman's whole deal with his daughter was in Spider-Man 3.
Obviously, the MCU was built on a new strategy of connecting the movies in a larger universe,
and it's worked to great effect – but each installment still has to serve as its own
story. No Way Home depends almost entirely on your knowledge of other movies, to a dizzying extent.
Kids who have been keeping up will have a blast, but any adult who's been on-and-off on Spider-Man
will have a seriously hard time keeping up with the subtext of what's even happening.
It's one thing for movies to bank on your nostalgia, but it's another thing to make a
viewer feel left out, like they haven't done their homework. If you're a viewer who's getting older
and maybe started to check out of comic book movies, Spider-Man: No Way Home is like
expert-level nostalgia, designed to challenge your memory of about a dozen movies from decades past.
"So you know too huh? It's cool. I've known first and I've known longer… It's not a competition."
If there's one crime the MCU has committed, it's the popularizing of mid-and-post-credits
scenes. After four phases and two dozen movies,
Marvel Studios has us trained en masse to wait through all the credits for one
or two more glimpses of what the future installments in the series have to offer.
Spider-Man: No Way Home has a mid-credits scene with a fun cameo that's worth the wait,
but then makes you wait alllll the way until the end for a teaser trailer for Dr. Strange
in the Multiverse of Madness. It's not even a post-credits scene! Cool footage or not, it's
just an advertisement. Even by the logic of the MCU, it seems criminal to make people wait until
the very end of "No Way Home" to see a trailer for a movie that they'll definitely see anyway.
"I'm going to go, thanks so much everybody for coming!"
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