Prole Hole vs Spider-man

Update - I swear I haven't forgotten to finish this but I started a new job and have been snowed under. Combined with some home-life stuff I just haven't gotten round to watching Far From Home and Spider-Verse again, but hopefully I'll get FFH done within the next week or two.

I insisted on seeing this in 3D at the theater, and I was frickin' amazed at it. The juggling of comic-book style art with awesome animation AND perfect 3D was so cool.

And then that final battle came along and BLEW MY MIND. HOLY MOTHERFORKING SHIRTBALLS. I have never seen 3D used that well. The entire battle, with tons of random shit flying around, and yet not ONCE was I lost on what was going on. That is a frickin' MIRACLE of animation. I literally sat there with my jaw open for the entire thing.

You're absolutely right that this movie is perfect. I put it on for my daughter last year, and ended up watching the whole thing again with her, and she loved it too despite having virtually no experience with Spider-Man before.

I have mixed feelings here. I had hoped we were going to have a Miles movie. But Issa Rae is really good, and Spider-Gwen is back somehow despite being from another dimension. And the more focus on a bunch of spider-heroes the less time there is for villains.

Hm, interesting theory. Since earlier in the movie he was crowing about how he wanted a suit or armor for the world, I guess he could have spent 5 years in retirement making a drone army and not telling anyone. Or using it in the all-time climactic battle.

It's been pretty widely reviewed by now how dancin' Peter Parker in Spider-Man 3 is not supposed to be cool, but Cracked actually has a good article discussing the in-movie flaws of Peter Parker and how the theme ties together.

The retcon is awful, and Sandman was a good enough and interesting enough bad guy to carry the movie (FWIW, and adjacent, I wrote up Venom: Let There Be Carnage on my blog and the review consisted of seven words - what an absolute piece of shit movie. I maintain - Venom sucks).

I'll write up the latest as and when I get a chance to see it!

Raimi 1 & 2 weren't written to be 'Post 9/11' movies, and they famously had to edit the 'Twin Towers' trailer (or just ditch it altoghether?), but it's hard to overstate just how much the reaction to the movies was a result of the attacks. Spidey is arguably the most *New York* superhero in Marvel's catalog. He's the scrappy, quippy, friendly, best version of our selves. He might not have much, he might get kicked around a lot, but he's gonna keep getting up to fight back harder, but not meaner. 2, especially, with the riff on the 'Spiderman no more!' arc, really hit those 'I'm so tired of this, but I'm gonna keep going' buttons that probably affected most of the country, but really hit New Yorkers.

Battlestar Galactica was a better interrogation of our responses, but for pure feels, the first 2 Spideys were probably the biggest things going

Spider-Man - No Way Home (2021)



It’s time for Tom Holland’s third outing as the webslinger, but how do things go now everyone knows Peter’s secret identity?

Pre-Existing Prejudices: None. Which is to say, this is the first Spider-Man movie I’ll be writing up concurrent with its release, rather than retrospectively. Despite it’s generally good reception I remain somewhat underwhelmed by Far From Home, so I’m hoping for a course-correction this time out.

What’s It All About, Proley? Mysterio, being kind of a dick, revealed to the world that Spider-Man’s true secret identity is in fact high-school kid Peter Parker! This, understandably, fucks with his life so he goes to Dr Strange to ask him to cast a spell so everyone forgets who he is. Things Go Wrong, so we get treated to a multi-franchise pile-up as previous Spider-Men and their associated bad guys turn up to do battle in this universe. With the usual assist from Ned and MJ, they’re stopped and everything is put right, but at the cost of everyone forgetting Peter, so he loses his girlfriend and his best friend to set the world right.

Any Other Business:

• This movie follows on directly from Far From Home, which means that no time has passed at all, and the “Peter Is Spider-man” reveal is a fresh wound, rather than something that’s scabbed over after the passing of some time.

• It takes about all of four minutes before Tom Holland gets his shirt off. Gets it out of the way I suppose.

• Happy and Aunt May have split up. While I appreciate the effort to give Happy an anchor to what’s going on in the Spider-Movies, I’m not entirely sure this thread has worked.

• The supreme awkwardness of Peter’s real identity being used as a proxy for teenage awkwardness in general could have been leaned into a little more, but it works well.

• As does the fact that the reveal doesn’t just bugger up his life but costs Ned and MJ their place at MIT as well. Enough effort has been invested in the friendship with Ned and the relationship with MJ that this actually carries some weight.

• Fuck me, Daredevil! Yes and please! “I’m a very good lawyer.” Heh.

• And Wong is the Sorcerer Supreme!

• Dr Strange’s, “wait, you didn’t even try and call them?” moment is nicely played.

• The whole bridge battle with Doc Ock is just supremely wonderful. It’s just utterly brilliant to have Molina back in the role, and of course developments in special effects since he last donned the robotic arms means he gets to do a whole lot more damage.

• Very clunky, “you are a hero!” line after Spider-Man saves the MIT admissions officer. Yeah, we know.

• Oh and here comes the Green Goblin too! Lovely.

• One of the things that the MCU has often struggled with is having memorable villains. Falcon worked well enough in the first Holland Spider-Man movie, but Mysterio was pretty much a bust and there have been a lot of so-so bad guys for Our Heroes to square up against. How refreshing it is, then, to see the likes of Doc Ock and the Goblin, clear distinct villains who have actual weight to them (ditto the Lizard, Electro and Sandman) played by actors who really invest in them. By showing how well the Maguire and Garfield Spider-Movies did their villains it does kind of highlight how the MCU has struggled somewhat.

• Speaking of other Spider-Men… Andrew Garfield was the big surprise here, and Toby Maguire is back too. Given Garfield’s movies are generally regarded as the weakest of the Spider-Man film, Garfield is relaxed and supremely confident returning to play Peter and No Way Home just goes to show how great he is in the role. Maguire is a little more variable - occasionally charming, occasionally wooden. Regardless, though, it’s really rather lovely to have them all here.

• Demystifying the Mirror Dimension as “hey it’s just geometry, I can do that!” is a nice way of demonstrating how smart Peter is rather than just being told about it, though it’s hard not to get the impression that Strange is defeated, then trapped, a little easily, and more for plot-convenient reasons than anything else.

• Peter’s attempts to help everyone, especially a de-controlled Octavius (another great piece of work from Molina) is sweet but the movie really lets Peter off the hook for the fact that everything that goes wrong here is basically his fault (and Dr Strange’s, to be fair, who should never have agreed to cast the spell in the first place), and none moreso than when Aunt May dies. Marisa Tomei, finally given something substantial to do, is fantastic, she gets the “with great power” speech. Her death scene is genuinely moving.

• There’s something quite pleasing about the fact that, in the Maguireverse and the Garfieldverse, it’s Uncle Ben who dies whereas in the Hollandverse it’s Aunt May. It’s a good way of nodding to the fact that their universes are parallel to ours but still different. Facts like they don’t have the Avengers in them are the big sweeping differences (great points too for Garfield’s Peter asking, incredulously, “are you in a band?”) but the ground-level differences matter too.

• There’s something incredibly. sweet about the way Maguire and Holland stand around telling Garfield that he’s “amazing”. As is Garfield’s slight embarrassment about having battled, “a Russian in a rhino suit”.

• And, unlikely as it seems, they actually address, on screen, the fact that Maguire’s Spider-Man produces his web internally. It’s still not something I’m that fussed about one way or the other, but they absolutely didn’t have to bring this up and not only does it get brought up, it actually makes for a lovely sequence as the three of them address their actual webslinging. Top marks there.

• Ned can do magic. It’s a bit of a narrative short-cut, but I’m OK with it, and it’s mostly played for laughs.

• The climactic battle is all pretty much as you would expect, with the three Spider-Men getting to defeat all the bad guys. Thomas Hayden Church (as Sandman) and Rhys Ifans as Lizard don’t get a whole lot to do throughout the movie, but Jamie Foxx gets some great shots as Electro.

• Garfield’s version gets to save a falling MJ in the way he failed to do for Gwen. It brings an unexpected lump to the throat and packs a punch I absolutely did not expect. Garfield is great in the moment (as you may have gathered, he’s great all throughout this), and his earlier recollection and guilt at not saving Gwen is excellently played.

• It all ends with everyone being sent back to their own dimension, but Peter sacrificing his girlfriend’s love and his best friend’s support to make it happen. Again, the film needed to lean more into how all of this was Peter’s fault to make this resonate more, but Holland is great in the coffeeshop scene where MJ doesn’t recognise him, and his performance does manage to wring some pathos from the situation.

In Conclusion:
One of the principal complaints the last review had about Far From Home was, basically, it took too long to get to the damned point already, and when it did the point wasn’t really worth getting to anyway. Bit of a problem, that. Still, you can’t say that No Way Home hasn’t learned from the mistakes of its predecessor, and then some. It is, simply, the best of the three Holland Spider-Man movies, and by some considerable distance, because, above and beyond anything else, it’s the one that seems to have remembered that these movies are meant to be fun. Far From Home went for a sort of shaggy-dog approach to storytelling, rambling about Europe without much sense of direction while Jake Gyllenhaal’s variable attempts at being a credible bad guy never really cohered into much of anything. There’s the shape of a decent story, and individual bits were entertaining enough, but the end result just never managed to convince in a way that squared “entertaining” with the slightly-desperate “You! Will! Like! This!” air that clung to events. It was scattershot, in other words. One might expect multiple returning villains, three (three!) separate Spider-Men and a whole bunch of ancillary characters to fall into the same traps, but what’s so impressive about No Way Home is that it manages to find a way to balance out all its different heroes and villains, given them all time, and still wrap up its story in a satisfying way. Sure, some get more attention paid to them than others, but the balancing act, here, is successfully executed.

Over and above the returning villains and Spider-People, one additional challenge that No Way Home has to address is this - if you are going to, as a Spider-Man film, do multiversal shenanigans and have a play around in that sandbox then you have one very large shadow looming over you - Into The Spider-verse. As you may have gathered from the review of that movie, Spider-verse is basically perfect, so it’s going to take some effort for this movie to not simply seem derivative of that one - a live-action version of the same thing. Impressively, though, that’s what No Way Home does. By choosing different, yet still personal, stakes, there is a similar core at the heart of both movies - the impact on Miles / Peter - but because No Way Home leans on previous movie iterations of Spider-Man, where Spider-verse leaned specifically on comic-book versions, it manages to cover similar territory but remain distinct. That’s quite the feat, and though it’s easy to miss it’s absolutely one No Way Home deserves to be commended for.
    
It’s also clear what a blast everyone is having here, and that just becomes incredibly infectious. Andrew Garfield, as mentioned, is just terrific returning to Peter, and though not quite as good it’s clear that Tobey Maguire is relishing the idea of playing a slightly older version of Peter who can mentor Holland’s still-allegedly-teenage version (Holland is boyish, obviously, but come on - the days of him passing as a teenager are long gone). Every one of the returning bad guys are terrific too. Alfred Molina takes the prize for best performance, both as Octopus and the briefly-free version - assisted, admittedly, by the biggest role - but Willem Dafoe deserves special mention too. He’s just great at playing Norman, and his deranged Goblin is, if anything, even better than his original performance, genuinely disturbing in places. Basically, nobody and nothing puts a foot wrong here, and everyone is just tremendous fun to watch as they smash about the place. Is Lizard just a stompy-stompy bad guy? Sure, but at least he stomps great! Whenever the movie spends time with the bad guys it’s an absolute pleasure to watch, and with that many bad guys it means there’s a lot of pleasure to be had.

Peter (our Peter) is put through the wringer here, losing first his aunt to the rampaging monsters, then his best friend and love of his life to try and fix his mistake. Yet the other thing that’s impressive about Far From Home is that it doesn’t try and go grimdark or faux-serious over it. Events are difficult to deal with, and Peter learns the hard way that being a hero means you don’t get to control everything just because you want to, but the film allows a note of hope. MJ stops Peter saying, “I love you” because she believes that they will find their way back, and the final cafe scene suggests that this is, at least, a possibility. It stops the film becoming too maudlin or miserable - Spider-Man, of all the Marvel heroes, shouldn’t allow his spirit to be crushed by events, and while things are hard now there’s a suggestion that they won’t always be. And hey - his friends got in to MIT, so that’s something! He’s helped get their lives back on track - it’s not the biggest win of the movie, but it’s something, and something is… well, not nothing. It’s a fine balancing act, but the movie more or less gets it right. More should have been made of how much responsibility Peter bears for events here, but there’s just about enough emphasis on it for that point to be made, and in allowing Peter to learn his lessons the hard way there are enough repercussions for the point to be made.

That failure to state more directly how much Peter (and, again, Dr Strange) is responsible for what happens here is really one of the very few missteps the film makes. It’s not a perfect movie, and for all that JK Simmons is simply brilliant as J Jonah Jameson, his spluttering on-screen performance doesn’t add all that much here - he’s more fun chewing people out in his office, and having him trying to flog supplements after his segments is a really clumsy piece of “satire” that doesn’t land at all. That suggests he’s aligned with - or at the very least being compared to - the likes of Alex Jones, which doesn’t read right at all. Jameson is wrong about Spider-Man, and he’s a hard-ass to boot, but there’s never been the suggestion that he’s actively corrupt in that sort of way, just misguided and blinded by his desire to get The Big Scoop. It’s a small moment, to be sure, but it’s a real bum note. It’s fine to reflect real-world events in the movies, of course, but this feels like it undermines a character for little more than a cheap shot. Slightly more effective are the “Mysterio Was Right” crowd, prepared to believe in someone demonstrably wrong regardless of how much evidence there might be to the contrary. It’s not exactly subtle, but it’s a bit better at least.

This review is going to be slightly shorter than the others because, well, I’ve only seen this once. Maybe my opinion will shift once I’ve had the chance to see it again, maybe its flaws will become more obvious (or not). But on an initial viewing this was pretty much great. There’s very little to actively criticise, nothing is taken too seriously, everyone’s clearly having the time of their lives, and it doesn’t overstay its welcome. Holland is on top form, the other Spider-People slot easily into this world, and even Dr Strange - a perfectly fine Benedict Cumberbatch who turns up to do what he does in Marvel movies - is pretty well utilised. It’s not really clear at this point if Holland is going to get any more Spider-movies. If he does, this one suggests that there’s plenty more mileage that can be gotten out of this version of the character. But if he doesn’t, this is also a terrific place to end his run. Holland’s last movie gets to be the best one of his run, it is for the most part great fun to watch, and it manages to end on a note of hope that feels earned but not corny. Well, maybe just the right amount of corny.

Which is just what Spider-Man should be.

Script v Length: More Or Less?
It’s fine. This is a movie that manages to feel brisk and well-paced, even though it’s just shy of two and a half hours long. Since there’s a lot of characters to squeeze in there it makes sense that this isn’t exactly going to be a short movie, but the constant swapping between various different alignments of villains and Spider-Men keeps the sense of momentum going and the film rarely feels like it drags or comes to a standstill. It’s true that there are some places where narrative logic takes precedence over real-world logic - Peter gets a long time to say goodbye to Aunt May as she dies while the cops just stand around outside not diving into the building they have now surrounded. Why it’s almost as if they know Our Hero is having a Big Emotional Moment and don’t want to disturb him! But generally speaking everything is paced well, and there’s nothing much to complain about.

How Convincing Does This Webslinger Look?
These, not this, since we have three of ‘em. And they all look fine! Well. I still don’t like the Iron Spider look of Holland’s version. It looks tacky and a bit fake (which I realise is an odd thing to say about someone dressing up as Spider-Man, but anyway) and those mechanical legs, while certainly handy in certain circumstances, feel rather like overkill. Both the Garfield and Maguire versions are as they should be, and they all look terrific webslinging their way around the Statue Of Liberty or just hanging out together and being charming. Basically - all good.

Villainometer – How Does This Movie’s Plan Seem And How Goes The Costuming?
Well, there’s no actual villain plan, per se, in this movie. Indeed the opposite is true, as Peter does his best to try and help the bad guys, rather than sending them back to their inevitable deaths. While that makes Peter look like a moral character - which is appropriate - it does mean that the villains don’t really get much chance to scheme. Electro is the closest to having a plan, but that’s mostly that he likes the power here and doesn’t want to go back and lose access to it. Doc Ock’s arms take him back over (after that lovely, understated performance from Molina as the freed version of Octavius - “it’s so quiet”) so he can stomp and smash, and the rest all get the chance to turn up and do their party pieces. Holland’s Peter genuinely wanting to kill the Goblin, then being held back from it by the other Peters, allows this version to get pushed unusually far out of his comfort zone, but his eventual commitment to curing, rather than killing, comes across well and speaks volumes for the character. As for the costumes - well, they’re all great. Jamie Foxx is spared the bald cap and prosthetic stomach this time out, so we just get the full Electro, and he has some amazing shots of lightning crackling round him. Doc Ock is All CGI All The Time now, but advances in technology from Spider-Man 2 mean that he looks fine. Ditto the Green Goblin. Only the Lizard really shows noticeable improvement from his first outing, though that’s mostly, again, because of the improvements in special effects and CGI since he was first digitally conjured forth.

What Else Happened / Is Happening in 2021/2022?
Stephen Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story seems to have everyone’s fingers clicking as he brings the musical back to public consciousness. Abysmal, dreadful Venom sequel, Let There Be Carnage, dribbled out not long before No Way Home was released, and disappointing spy caper The 355 limply failed to make much of an impression on anyone. Kenneth Branagh explores his childhood in Belfast, while Peter Dinklage takes on Cyrano. Elsewhere, Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings gives the MCU it’s first Asian lead (and it’s a pretty great movie into the bargain), and Daniel Craig gets his last Bond outing in the surprisingly good No Time To Die. For fans of pointless franchise extensions, there’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife, The Addams Family 2 and Space Jam: A New Legacy. Oh, and Resident Evil. And Scream. And F9: The Fast Saga. And The Matrix: Resurrections. Oh well at least a dinosaur got to punch a monkey in Godzilla v Kong.

Rankings:

1. Into The Spider-Verse
2. Spider-Man: No Way Home
3. Spider-Man 2
4. Spider-Man: Homecoming
5. The Amazing Spider-Man 2
6. Spider-Man
7. Spider-Man: Far From Home
8. The Amazing Spider-Man
9. Spider-Man 3

OK, I finally saw No Way Home. I feel like we need to discuss who the actual villain of the film is. I refer, of course, to Stephen Strange.

First, a teenager comes to him with a problem, and his first instinct is to cast a magic spell that might affect basically everyone in the universe (and maybe even people from other ones)? Next, he fails to explain the consequences of the spell, and then when casting a spell that apparently requires intense concentration to prevent possible screwing with the multi-verse, he allows that teenager to be in the room with him. And then he's got the nerve to chastise the kid for not thinking of something else first? Strange, you are the adult in that situation! 

And then finally, we need to press the button on the box to save the multiverse, even if we know its going to kill these five people in the room. That's some Thanos-light shit right there. You cannot blame fate, when you are the one responsible for those people being there outside of their own universes. You break it, you bought it, Stephen. 

And then I'm not sure how or why the spell went from everyone forgetting that Spiderman was Peter Parker to everyone simply forgetting who Peter Parker is, but now Strange doesn't even have to live with the fact that he helped trigger May's death, because he doesn't get to remember any of it.  Convenient, that is.