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Spider-Man: No Way Home - A Love Letter to Fans
Updated: Jan 23, 2022
The final act of the MCU Spider-Man trilogy is finally upon us. And let me just say, while I’m usually excited any time Marvel drops a new project, it’s only once in a blue moon that they have the chance to drum up hype on this level. The way rumors and fan theories overflow in the community as the release day comes nearer and nearer is the kind of stuff I live for. This is definitely one of the most highly anticipated Marvel movies we’ve seen in a good while. But with great hype comes great expectations and for Spider-Man: No Way Home those expectations have never been higher. Does it manage to live up to the hype? Let’s take a look.
Side note: I’ll be splitting this review into two parts because a lot of this movie is difficult to get into without delving into spoiler territory. For that reason, I’ll be hiding the second half (where I'll be going into that movie as a whole, spoilers and all) so those who hope to watch the movie for themselves spoiler-free, something I’d recommend, can do so as they please and I'll be keeping the front end of this review spoiler-free. Thanks! :-)
The first act of this film focuses on the ensuing fallout that directly follows the final scene of Spider-Man’s last movie, Far From Home. The audience is shown Peter Parker’s life turned upside down and inside out and how it affects both him and the people closest to him after the world finds out that he is Spider-Man. It handles it all with a very real sense of controversy and personal stress and it’s an important stepping stone in Peter Parker’s character arc and yet I can’t help but feel like the opening segment of this film is the slowest and messiest. See, every Spider-Man movie faces the challenge of juggling the two sides of its titular character: Spider-Man and Peter Parker. You can’t have a traditional Spider-Man story without Peter Parker being a nerdy student who lives with his Aunt May. Tom Holland’s first solo Spidey outing, 2017’s Spider-Man: Homecoming, handles this tactfully and intertwines the Peter Parker that is a high-schooler with the Peter Parker that is a masked crime-fighter in a way that’s both fun to watch and narratively interesting. However, the aforementioned sequel, Far From Home, fumbles this a bit and allows the high-school Peter segments to come off more like filler that detracts from the more engaging superhero action of the movie. I always cite the bus scene, a scene in which Peter accidentally initiates a drone strike on his school’s field trip bus with him and his classmates in it and desperately struggling to deactivate the drone while everyone else is blissfully unaware. This scene always felt like hijinks to me and really hurt the pacing of the movie. This issue, while not as obvious or consistent, rears its head in the first act of No Way Home. After the legal trouble settles and things become a little less frantic the movie takes its time to let Peter Parker be a teenager with his girlfriend and best friend. While these scenes aren’t as abrasively unnecessary as something like the bus scene felt they still ultimately feel like the weakest part of the film. I’d like to take a moment to mention that Flash Thompson, Peter Parker’s school bully character, returns in this movie purely as comic relief and is just never funny. He has about three on-screen appearances and each time it’s to make a joke that never earns much more than a pity laugh. It’s definitely necessary to have these high-school turmoil scenes and reestablish the relationship between these characters which isn’t wholly unfun to watch and does set certain stakes for the movie but you can’t help but get stuck tapping your foot in anticipation of what comes next instead of being totally engaged with what’s happening in front of you during these segments.
After a brief segment where Peter and his pals try and fail to get admitted into college, rejected on the basis that Spider-Man having been publically unmasked has been a major point of recent controversy in the world, Peter Parker visits Benedict Cumberbatch's Doctor Strange for help. This is where the movie starts to pick up some and we start to get some fun mystical action scenes that we've come to expect with Doctor Strange. Doctor Strange obliges Parker (thanks in part to a clever blink-and-you'll-miss-it callback to his own 2016 debut film) and casts a spell to make everyone forget that Peter Parker is Spider-Man. However, things go awry and the spell gets screwy which brings on a slew of negative consequences that our heroes spend the rest of the movie trying to clean up. It’s a grim movie, foregoing Spidey’s typical snarky and fun attitude for a much darker and more brutal tone. It doesn’t hesitate in tackling heavy and even depressing scenes and it goes about them with a pregnancy just appropriate enough to drive a dagger deep enough into your heart that you’ll remember; effectively trapping the audience in the brutal reality of the film’s harrowing stakes. and even the action is much grittier focusing on more intimate bloody and white-knuckled fistfights. Preceding the film's debut, actor Tom Holland alleged that the film would “not be fun,” a sentiment that shouldn’t be taken lightly when going into this movie. That isn’t at all to say that it’s not worth watching. If anything, the darker tone is much appreciated and the film benefits from it in many ways.
The big commercial draw of No Way Home is the return of villains from by-gone eras of different live-action Spider-Man adaptations. Sure, Marvel’s done the interdimensional crossover time and time again before but this time they’re playing outside the box by bringing back characters we didn’t even know we’re still on the table, making it a unique event to see play out on screen. Back in the fledgling days of the 21st century, superhero movies hadn’t yet quite found their footing. This was a few years before the MCU turned the genre into a household name for the box office so a lot of superhero movies were generally campy schlockfests. This was the same era where we were first introduced to comic book movie adaptations to characters like the Green Goblin and Dr. Octopus, played by Willem Dafoe and Alfred Molina respectively in Spider-Man's first two live-action movies. They were already great characters then and certainly do have their fans for those performances but seeing them now inside the MCU they feel no longer inhibited by that atmosphere of cheesy early-00’s superhero flicks as they had been before. The Green Goblin has a genuinely threatening presence on screen and Dafoe’s performance playing this character for the first time in two decades is just as stellar if not more so than his first time around the block. It might be the gritty tone of this movie or the fact that these characters feel a bit more serious in the MCU but they feel like much better villain characters for it. I never thought I’d say that Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin and Alfred Molina’s Dr. Octopus are probably some of my favorite MCU villains but here we are.
We also have the return of Thomas Haden Church’s Sandman, another returning villain from the original Raimi films, who spends the movie as a CGI sand sculpture instead of being played by his actual live-action actor. That’s not to say that Church didn’t reprise his role, it’s still very much him, but they just made the odd decision to have him be entirely made of sand for the movie. I’m not sure if this was something on the actor’s part, maybe they were reluctant to show their face in the role again for a whole movie despite their voice and character being present? Whatever it was, it was marginally distracting throughout the film but nothing that takes anything significant away from the movie as a whole.
Along with Green Goblin, Doc Ock, and Sandman, we also have two faces returning from a different era of Spidey: Jamie Foxx’s Electro and Rhys Ifan’s Lizard from The Amazing Spider-Man duology that happened a few years after the first Raimi movies. Ifan’s Lizard is in a similar boat to Church’s Sandman, spending the duration of the movie in a totally CGI form. While it’s a bit more noticeable with Sandman because in his debut movie we’ve seen him have the ability to freely switch between sand and human form it still feels like a detriment that holds these two back from the same kind of grand return to the screen that Dafoe and Molina had, both of whom were a spectacle any time they were on-screen. Jamie Foxx’s Electro is a curious case for being the only returning villain to receive a major redesign for their character. This is most likely due to his original performance, where Electro is adapted as a totally blue man with transparent electro-membranes, being critically panned by audiences. It’s overall an upgrade for this character and Foxx’s performance definitely redeems this character a bit after TASM2’s big flop making him an enjoyable villain and a force to be reckoned with. Still maybe not as much so as Ock or Gobby, but hey, kudos for making one of the iffiest live-action Spidey baddies significantly better. I absolutely adore how this movie acknowledges the storied history of Spider-Man's cinematic outings by adapting his two prior iterations as different universes in the same multiverse. It interconnects prior canons that were thought to be all but irrelevant and breathes new life into them in an organic and believable way that manages to provide ample well-handled fan service with narratively convincing stakes for our protagonists to deal with. It's a brilliant and innovative idea that's never been done before and I can't help but give them props for that.
With each new MCU appearance of Spider-Man, we’re usually given one or two new suits for him to swing around in. Earlier live-action Spider-Man adaptations only had one or two suits but Tom Holland’s Spider-Man has seen upwards of seven different variations on the classic Spidey look. I can get behind a new suit when it makes narrative sense, e.g. the Iron Spider suit being an upgrade that was very welcome during the higher stakes of Infinity War. However, during a good portion of this movie Spider-man dons the “black and gold suit,” a suit that turns out to be his regular Stark suit inverted inside out because the outside got messy. This has zero narrative weight and comes off as a completely transparent attempt from Marvel to sell a larger variety of Funko Pops and other assorted merchandise. There’s plenty of reason for them to give us to make a suit justifiable to be in the spotlight but this one really just had no reason to happen besides merch sales and feels lazy in its explanation for why it needed to have screen time. All in all, this is really just a nitpick on my behalf but there’s a massive pool of options for Spider-Man suits that Marvel can draw from and adapt to the big screen and the quote-unquote “black and gold suit” really just feels like low-hanging fruit.
Unfortunately, that's about all of what I can say without giving away any of the big surprises this movie has in store for the audience. I know a good portion of this review so far has been personal nitpicks but I'd honestly recommend seeing this movie, especially if you're a fan of Spider-Man. It's one of those films that benefits from being experienced in a theatrical environment. You will not regret seeing this film, I can guarantee you that.
REVIEW SECOND HALF - WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS
Those bastards actually did it. They brought together all three live-action Spider-Man actors on-screen to make the most Spider-Man movie possible. Of course fan predictions, rumors, and leaks caught onto this pretty quickly before the movie's debut but that didn't detract from the surprise and pleasure of seeing Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire step into the frame as Spider-Man again for the first time in years. It is such a wonderful reveal, so much so that even if you can see it coming from a mile away it still hits with the same awesome impact every time.
Andrew Garfield has a reputation among fans for being the least memorable Spider-Man performance of the trio, acting as the awkward middle child of the three actors to hold the mantle. I’ve seen countless online polls accounting for “which Spider-Man is your favorite?” and of the three of them Andrew tends to bring up the rear, usually by a considerable margin. Without the advantages of early nostalgia like Maguire or new-fangled Avengers status like Holland and bearing the weight of the lowest-reviewed live-action Spider-Man movies of the bunch he has been colloquially regarded as not a bad Spidey but certainly the least adored of the three. Despite all of that, Garfield’s comeback performance as the friendly neighborhood spider in this film consistently stole the show anytime he was on-screen. He was a delight to watch in this movie, proving time and time again that maybe we were all a little harsh on him during his time in the red and blue web-spangled spandex. His return to the role was endlessly charismatic as he portrayed a slightly more snarky and overconfident yet goofy Peter Parker in ways that I would absolutely love to see more of. And I'm not alone in this assessment, after his performance in this movie fans have been clamoring for more with people petitioning to have Garfield given a second chance with a new entry in his Spidey series and Sony even saying that we may be able to expect more of Garfield's Spider-man in future projects. In the same way Garfield brought his own variation of the Parker personality to the table, Tobey Maguire reprises his more soft-spoken, kind of dopey but wise Peter straight from the original Raimi trilogy. Having the three of them share the screen is an absolute treat and their dynamic is tirelessly great. There’s a brief reprise in the movie’s action where the three of them are allowed to just hold an almost leisurely discussion that feels like you’re listening to a podcast between the three Spider-Men rehashing and comparing their past experiences as the character and it is fantastic to watch unfold. The way all three of these characters, different yet the same, interact with each other makes this movie worth seeing on its own basis alone. It’s something that’s never been seen before and is a bold new step for the Spider-verse that marks a first in live-action cinema history. The reprisal of these characters wasn’t just hollow cash-grab cameos, these are true-to-character straight-from-source comebacks for these Spideys, just as their respective villains are. They act true to character and readopt their unique mannerisms and body language and each have touching moments that call back to significant events of their own individual pasts. Andrew Garfield gets a redeeming save when he snatches Zendaya’s MJ from a death drop, an emotional callback to when he failed to do the same for his own love interest in 2014’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2. Tobey Maguire comes face to face with a sound-of-mind-again Otto Octavius, a character who had been a mentor to him before his machines drove him to super-villainy back in 2004, and they shared a touching moment while reuniting on screen again after nearly two decades. There are echoes of these characters' past moments and motifs that make this movie so special to see especially for any fan of the character. Some may also worry that the inclusion of three different live-action Spider-Man characters might bungle the arc of this movie but no, their implementation into this movie's run-time was perfect. They don't overstay their welcome and at the same time, we feel like we get a really good amount from these characters that we haven't gotten in ages. Their inclusion in this film is downright masterful and makes this movie worth seeing for anyone who remotely even likes Spider-Man.
The pacing of this movie feels reminiscent of Avengers: Endgame. Both films are composed of a messily paced and mediocre first-half that’s very sparse on action and feels more like trailer filler to keep the secret second half of the movie, the high-flying crossover showdown extravaganza, hush-hush and spoiler-free. They aren’t outright terrible but they’re definitely not super well-paced and are mostly just in the way of the final act they’re setting up. I can definitely see this first half becoming something of an obstacle for rewatches the same way Endgame’s first half sort of feels like. But then there’s a case to be made that these movies are all about the fanservice spectacle that their finales offer. It’s difficult to measure Endgame and No Way Home against the same metric one might use for any other film because they’re by nature designed to cater to the audience’s primal feelings of hype and excitement. It’s much easier to excuse poorly executed first acts when the epic culmination is so much more enthralling.
Okay, how about we talk about that ending? I’m a huge sucker for bittersweet conclusions. Especially when it comes to superhero movies, I’ve seen so many people complain that “superhero movies are all the same” and that “they’re just gonna save the day in the end. Who cares?” Luckily, the MCU has gotten pretty good at subverting that tired trope and No Way Home is no outlier. This movie is relentless with its tragedy and wouldn’t even think to give us a fitting ending without a grand sacrifice. By the end of the movie, the world forgets that Peter Parker ever existed and our hero is left with nothing. He allowed himself to be erased from the memory of every living being, including MJ and Ned, to save the world from a grand multiversal implosion. This conclusion makes the earlier conflict of them struggling to get admitted into college, something I earlier accused of feeling like padding, much more resonant as we have established the kind of sacrifice Peter must endure for the greater good. Peter is left with nothing. Nowhere to turn and literally no way home. The final scene of the movie shows him moving into an apartment by himself and swinging out into a snowy New York skyline in a new suit that looks like the truest representation of the Spider-Man character we’ve seen on-screen yet.
This marks Tom Holland’s true coming into the character. Since the beginning, he’s surely been Peter Parker, but the MCU subverted the character by foregoing his origin arc. After all, we’ve seen Uncle Ben shot and killed enough already by now, right? So it was a welcome new take to drop Peter Parker into the universe already being Spider-Man. But this film offers a revelation: these past films where we’ve witnessed Holland’s Spider-Man grow and develop has effectively been Tom Holland’s Spider-Man origin arc this whole time. It’s now finally his turn to hear the iconic mantra: “With great power, there must come great responsibility,” words that have been practically synonymous with Spider-Man for as long as we can remember but now at the end of a trilogy instead of the beginning and for Tom they almost recontextualize what it means to be the character. It’s not all fun and games, Peter Parker must have a tragic core to his character. His decisions in this movie, while costing him everything he has, benefit the greater good making him a truly heroic and selfless character. It really speaks to the true meaning of what it means to be Spider-Man and with this movie it feels like that final jigsaw piece is being placed for Tom Holland to complete a full masterful image of a true Spider-Man. He is now alone, completely by himself and living in a dingy New York apartment fighting crime by tapping into police radio waves. He is a standalone, unadulterated Spider-Man. Tom Holland may have entered his movie a boy but he sure as hell came out a grizzled man, and not just any man, but a true Spider-Man. The way this character’s arc is completed but at the same time it’s only just beginning is done so masterfully and is such an intriguing new angle for a character who is at the same time extremely true to source and fulfilling for the role of Spider-Man. It’s no surprise that I’m a big fan of the MCU but I am more ecstatic than ever to see where Spider-Man shows up next in the universe… or perhaps multiverse. This movie has served to set up the multiverse even more after earlier projects like Loki laid the groundwork for phase four’s grand new backdrop and even gave us a whole-ass teaser for Doctor Strange: Multiverse of Madness as its post-credits scene. Seeing Marvel open up the Multiverse can of worms has been both exciting and intriguing at every turn and has given us some of the best content we’ve seen from them and it’s only just beginning. Spider-Man 4 has already been confirmed to be in development by Kevin Feige but I’m left with so many questions after No Way Home that I just can’t wait to have answered. After that mid-credits teaser, can we expect to see Tom Hardy’s Eddie Brock and Venom come face to face with Tom Holland’s Peter Parker? We saw Hardy’s Eddie Brock stranded in the MCU after being warped through dimensions in the post-credit scene of the Venom sequel but he went as quickly as he came being zapped away by Strange’s spell at the end of the movie and yet we see a little drop of Venom has managed to stick around in the MCU. Are we gonna see Venom in the MCU without his Eddie Brock half? I’d hope we see Tom Hardy return as Eddie Brock because his sweaty and sputtering portrayal of the symbiotic anti-hero duo was the saving grace of his two otherwise messy and mediocre solo movies outside of the MCU continuity. It’s a really charming performance from Hardy that I really hope we get to see collide with Holland’s Spidey at some point in the future. Then there’s Spider-Man: Freshman Year, an animated series confirmed to be a canon recounting of the events that take place before Holland’s first debut as Spidey in Civil War. I fear this series will suffer the same predicament Black Widow did, telling a story that’s ultimately rendered kind of redundant by an event that takes place afterward that we already know about that ends up flattening the stakes of any retro-continuity.
If you are a Spider-Man fan or even just a Marvel fan I'd highly recommend this movie. It is a critical point for Tom Holland's arc as Spider-Man. He has officially come into his own here as the character and it's his best performance to date. This movie has fan service galore, incredible villains, wonderful callbacks, high stakes, and amazing surprises around every bend. It is not one to pass up on. As a final verdict, I'm going to grant this movie a 9.5/10. Amazing and definitely one of the most memorable and exciting Marvel movies yet.