Saturday, December 18, 2021

My Review of Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) - SPOILERS INCLUDED

 


Written by  Chris McKenna And Erik Sommers
Directed by Jon Watts

Aunt May (to Peter): "With great power comes great responsibility."

Trilogies are an odd beast, aren't they? The third part might be a good ending, it might also be the weakest of the bunch. Then there's the possibility that it might be the best installment of the lot. Can you guess the category where this particular movie falls into?

Following being publicly outed as Spider-Man from the previous movie, Peter Parker (Tom Holland) has found himself to become a polarising figure among the residents of New York. It's also gotten to the point where both himself and Aunt May (Marissa Tomei) move in with Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau) and his associations with MJ (Zendaya) and Ned (Jacob Batalon) have jeopardized their own futures. 

Because of that, it would make sense that Peter would try and fix things. However Peter's method to do that mean getting in touch with Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) in order to make the world forget about him being Spider-Man. A spell that Peter managed to mess up on Stephen and as a result, the Multiverse made it's introduction into the MCU on the big screen.

Specifically, Peter's bumbling resulted in enemies from at least two different universes landing in Peter's own world. The enemies in question being Doctor Octopus (Alfred Molina), Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe), Sandman (Thomas Haden Church), Lizard (Rhys Ifans) and a revamped Electro (Jamie Foxx). If they had added one more member, you would've had a Multiverse Sinister Six there.

The five baddies in question make their presence known to our Spider-Man and the latter teamed up with Strange in order to contain them. However it didn't take much for both Peter and Stephen to have different opinions on how to deal with the visitors from other worlds. Peter also learned the hard way that no good deed goes unpunished when the baddies predictably turned on him and as a result, Peter found himself losing the one important adult figure in his life and felt despondent.

Of course the highlight of the movie and the elephant that has been in the room for a year now was the returns of two other Spider-Men. Yes, both Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield are in this movie and the moment they're in scenes with Tom Holland, everything elevated to pure cinematic heights. Seeing these three actors together could be dismissed as fanservice but it's far greater than that.

There's history with both Maguire and Garfield's versions of the web slinger and it's respectfully honoured throughout here. Our Peter learns from his other selves as they learn from him and seeing the three of them band together in order to save the day definitely feels like a moment you'll want to witness on the big screen if you can. It's comic book history made on screen and the joy in seeing it play out truly felt unbridled. 

However there are lingering consequences to Peter disrupting the spell that Stephen tried to initially do and it's our Peter who will feel them for a while. It's like the MCU not only acknowledged certain criticisms regarding their handling of Holland's Spidey and felt this movie was the perfect place to deal with them head on, by setting up an interesting new status quo for Peter to set up his next trilogy. Even I didn't expect it to play out like it did.

- Charlie Cox might not have put on a certain suit but we did briefly see him here as Matt Murdock, who represented Peter at the start of the movie.
- Of course Flash would write a tell all book about his 'friendship' with Peter Parker while Betty has a job at the dailybugle.com.
- J. Jonah Jameson (J.K. Simmons) certainly went out of his way to antagonise Spider-Man that I really do hope they have scenes together in the next movie.
- Giving Aunt May that infamous line as well as having two Spider-Men say it too worked beautifully here.
- Chronology: We did get to see parts of Halloween and Christmas as time progressed throughout the movie.
- The mid credit scene gave us a brief cameo of Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) and the Venom symbiote with a little of the latter remaining the current MCU. 

There's no denying that Spider-Man: No Way Home delivered and then some. Every single cast member brought their A Game with Tom Holland giving his best performance in the MCU so far. Seeing him with both Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield was sublime and I cannot wait to see where the next trilogy will take this version of Spider-Man. An absolute triumph of a movie.

Rating: 10 out of 10

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