Spider-Man: No Way!
By Colin Udall
Spoiler Warning: Spoilers for “Spider-Man: No Way Home”
“Spider-Man: No Way Home” is roughly the same, tired model seen from Marvel Studio in the last 10 years. “No Way Home” pats itself on the back for bringing fan-loved actors Toby Maguire and Andrew Garfield together into the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), which largely connects Marvel Studios movies. However, the movie, which was released on Dec. 17 of last year, does not particularly offer anything of much substance beyond fan service.
Photo of Spider-Man taken fromTrustedreviews.com
The fan service in this movie is not much different from that of “Avengers” in 2012 or the massive box-office hit “Endgame”. Gather a bunch of characters from different movies and have them meet each other, make some quips and jokes and then team up to fight the big bad. The only difference in this Spider Man movie is that half of the characters are from movies not owned by Disney properties and therefore not a part of the MCU. While this was certainly nostalgic for fans of those movies, it does not do much for the plot—not to mention that some actors very noticeably could not make filming. The inclusion of Sandman and The Lizard is incredibly distracting as their characters, now CGI monsters, run amok until the very end where archive footage is used. The other characters from the nostalgic, older movies, however, did actually offer some substance. Notably, Andrew Garfield as his version of Spider-Man and Willem Dafoe as The Green Goblin absolutely killed their roles and their acting was a joy to watch. This was unfortunately not enough to save the movie.
The subversion of expectations by having Aunt May be killed rather than Uncle Ben was clever yet perhaps a little late. Something that was revered by the early MCU Spider-Man movies was the choice to skip past the origin story, which has been told about a million times through various different formats. An implied set of sequels have already been confirmed for Tom Holland’s Spider-Man and it is a bit unfortunate that Disney plans to machine out Spider-Man movies rather than create a meaningful trilogy like the original Sam Raimi movies.
Ultimately, what “Spider-Man: No Way Home” comes down to is a substantial amount of quantity with a minuscule amount of substance. With no sequel out yet, it is hard to tell whether the decision to span Spider-Man’s origin story across three movies was a good or bad choice, yet the sheer amount of things the writers fit into these movies do not look good for planned sequels.