Sunday 26 December 2021

Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) - Movie Review


I know this is far from the first time Marvel Studios has done me, but fuck me, the marketing for this film has been extremely annoying. No joke, I saw two ads that were promotional tie-ins to this movie in the pre-session of the actual movie. Because buying a ticket for it apparently wasn’t enough; they had to keep trying to sell it to me. There’s also how flat-out ridiculous the session times for this movie have been, where it assimilated between 75% and 95% of all available screenings at both of my local cinemas, with one, maybe two sessions that were taken up by the eleven other films that are supposedly showing now as well. Anyone trying to use this film’s success as a gotcha for the 'wokeness' of other MCU films, or the MCU in competition with the DCEU, or even as a sign that the industry is picking back up since COVID first broke, are leaving out that the odds were stacked substantially in the production’s favour to get those box office receipts.

To be honest, I deliberately put off watching this movie for its first week because, as much as I love superhero movies, I really didn’t want to reward this overbearing, “Scorsese might have been underselling the problem” kind of behaviour.

Anyway, now that I’ve got my initial gripes out of the way, let’s get into how fucking brilliant this movie is.

This picks up right where Far From Home’s mid-credits scene left off, with Peter Parker being publicly outed as Spider-Man, and for the next two hours and twenty minutes, the pacing is absolutely taut from end to end. The action never drops off for even a moment, with every scene both having something substantial to contribute to the larger whole and sticking around for just long enough to make their point without dragging things out. Even the better MCU efforts to date, like Black Panther, the Guardians Of The Galaxy movies, or hell, even the first Avengers and Endgame, had their slow points, but not here. This is wall-to-wall entertainment; what blockbusters should be.

It also looks bloody amazing. The web-swinging Spidey action is as good as ever, the big battle scenes are captured beautifully on-screen, and in easily my favourite aspect, we get a return of the glorious reality-bending chaos magic from Doctor Strange. The scene with Strange and Spider-Man in a pocket dimension looks genuinely incredible, on par and possibly even exceeding what I still consider to be one of the greatest CGI showcases of the 2010s, and the rendering work throughout is air-tight. And to add to the presentation on offer, we also have Michael Giacchino returning as composer. For a film that is this emotionally-charged (more on that in a bit), his reliably-gorgeous orchestrations add a lot of punch to what are already pretty intense moments to make them demand the tears of the audience.

There’s still a bit of background I need to get through before we get into the real treasures on offer here, though, and it goes back to what I described as the ‘bombshell’ of the previous film’s mid-credits scene. Way back when I reviewed Captain America: Civil War, I mentioned how Spider-Man’s presence in that specific story had a lot of comic book baggage attached to it, and most of it is connected to this story as well. The public unveiling of Spider-Man’s identity was originally part of the fallout of the character’s involvement in the Civil War comic book, as was him going to Doctor Strange for a way to fix... other things that took place. However, that original storyline eventually culminated in Peter making a deal with Mephisto to, among other things, make the world forget the reveal as well as annul his relationship with Mary Jane Watson. Like, to the point where they completely forgot about each other afterwards.

If the idea of one of the most family-friendly heroes in the Marvel catalogue making a deal with Satan sounds like a bass-ackwards move, then you’re about in-line with most comic book readers; it remains one of the most controversial decisions in the history of modern comic books. But much like with Spidey’s involvement in Captain America: Civil War, this film also feels like an attempt to re-do that idea and do it properly this time around. While the film starts out with Peter in the midst of a mass media cancellation campaign led by J. Jonah Jameson (who apparently went full InfoWars in this continuity, which is a pretty hilarious detail), it mainly sticks to the idea that everything that is happening on-screen is intrinsically tied to Spider-Man and Peter Parker. And Tom Holland manages to find a new crescendo for his performance in this role, managing to balance out his limitless optimism and heroic heart with some darker colours that… well, help drive home the biggest moments here ever further.

That whole “this time, we’ll make it right” approach extends to more than just the comic books, though, as this also takes the same approach to the previous Spider-Man films. And I don’t just mean the MCU ones; I’m talking about the Raimi and Marc Webb versions as well. Without getting into too many direct spoilers, let’s just say that Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers’ script join the dots that connect every hero and villain in these Spider-Man movies (namely, the tragic circumstances that led to them becoming heroes/villains), and uses that as the foundation for a story all about redemption and brotherhood.

I mentioned in Homecoming that I had my own issues with Maguire and Garfield’s respective takes on the character, but I want to emphasise that I still love both of them. Hell, I have yet to find a live-action Spider-Man flick that I don’t like (yes, Spider-Man 3 and the Marc Webb movies are good, actually), and part of that is down to just how well-developed the characters are across the board. They cared enough to flesh out the people on-screen, and this film follows suit to ensure that we care about who is on-screen. Even after all these years, and all these different universe reboots, that connection still persists.

An easy comparison to make would be between this and Enter The Spider-Verse, given all the multiverse shenanigans going on, but they’re ultimately different beasts to each other. Spider-Verse was all about exploring the untapped potential of the Spider-Man mythos, whereas No Way Home is all about celebrating what has already been done with it on the big screen. It’s a crowd-pleaser in a generational sense, where viewers have been stuck around through all three incarnations of this franchise will get the most out of the experience, and it avoids the pitfalls of being a pure nostalgia flick because everything that makes these characters compelling is carried over from the older material; that Raimi and Webb charm is still here, just refracted through the MCU’s more hopeful take on the Friendly Neighbourhood Spider-Man.

Put simply, this is the MCU equivalent of a Doctor Who cross-over, where the stakes are built high enough that it warrants the heroes joining forces, their personalities work well together while also being distinct enough to highlight what makes each incarnation special, and none of the other characters feel sidelined just to make the leads stand out, as just about every character here is given a reason to be cared about, both by the audience and by each other. It feels like the culmination of the MCU’s general approach to antagonists, where victory comes not from death or mere defeat, but by the hero doing what they do best: Saving people.

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