Spider-Man, nobody knows who you are…
Even before seeing the movie, I thought the title Spider-Man: No Way Home was a bit ominous and negative compared to Homecoming and Far From Home. Now I know why.
No Way Home has all the great elements I’ve come to expect from Marvel Studios movies, but it’s also kind of a bummer. And to explain my opinion, I basically have to go over the entire movie. There’s not much point in giving a spoiler warning, because not only has everyone seen this before me, half of the major plot elements have already been given away in previews.
At the the very end of Far From Home Mysterio, in a last act of spite, blames Spider-Man (Tom Holland) for his death and announces his Secret ID as Peter Parker. This taped statement is broadcast to the world by none other than J. Jonah Jameson (once again played by J.K. Simmons). Peter, his friends, Aunt May and Happy Hogan all get investigated by the government, but the charges are dropped thanks to “a very good lawyer.” But this doesn’t repair Peter’s reputation, and he’s caught in a very Spider-Man like situation: “I am the most famous person in the world, yet I’m still broke.” This all comes to a head when Peter, MJ and Ned all apply to MIT in their senior year and are turned down due to “the recent controversy.” So in his awkward adolescent fashion, Peter decides to look up his old friend Doctor Strange to solve all his problems with magic. And Strange, in his own adolescent fashion, actually agrees.
Strange no longer has the Time Stone, so he can’t just go back and prevent the original event, but Wong (who is now the Sorcerer Supreme cause Strange was ‘blipped’ for five years) recalls that there is a spell of mass forgetfulness. So Peter asks Strange to cast the spell, but when he’s reminded that this would mean that everyone forgets who he is, Peter attaches so many exceptions to the spell, Strange loses his concentration and the spell turns into this giant dimensional anomaly that will eventually destroy reality. As happens in these situations.
This ends up summoning the various super-villains who fought Spidey in the other Sony movies, and these are fairly easily defeated, but when they compare notes, Strange, Spider-Man and the bad guys all deduce that the villains had been plucked from their time lines just before Spider-Man ended up killing them. So Peter doesn’t want to send them back before curing the psychotic disorders that made these guys villains (which in most cases also would remove their powers). Strange doesn’t care. So Spidey actually defeats Strange and resolves to fix the problem without killing anybody. This involves science instead of magic, which is probably why Strange didn’t think of it. Peter makes real progress, but Norman Osborn’s evil side re-asserts itself and screws the whole thing, with catastrophic results. At which point MJ and Ned discover that the other two Spider-Men (Mans?), Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire, are also in New York, so they get them together to help Peter. And this part of the film is a real blast, with the three Spider-Men trading stories and working together in the lab. And eventually they lure the villains out and manage to subdue them again in a big brawl, but during this, Osborn/Green Goblin shows up again and sabotages the containment spell Dr. Strange was using to stop Earth’s dimension from imploding. When Strange tells Peter that he can no longer stop all the various parallel dimensions from merging with Earth, Peter tells him to redo the original spell, under its original parameters, which means that everyone, including MJ, Ned and Doctor Strange himself forget who Peter is. And even though there’s no real reason Peter can’t just come back to MJ, explain what happened, and try to rebuild the relationship, he sees that she and Ned have actually gotten into MIT… so he basically figures they’re better off without him.
Like I said, a real bummer. And I haven’t even spoiled the real bummer.
One of my Facebook friends posted (before I’d seen the movie): “I did really enjoy Spiderman: No Way Home. I highly recommend it. However, there is a takeaway to the story that needs consideration. ‘The most heroic thing you can do is cut yourself off from friends, family, and all social contacts. Give up love. You will only hurt those you love. Give up rage. Rage will only make you a monster. Give up pursuing personal joy, comfort, or basic needs. Give up anything outside of a single minded focus on your mission. The mission is everything.’ That is a classic view of masculinity. And it is toxic as hell.”
I don’t know if this story was a specific example of toxic masculinity, but I see the point. The thing is, this film kind of flies in the face of what came before, where half the fun of these movies was in Tom Holland’s interactions with the supporting cast, and the generally light-hearted tone. Not unlike CW’s The Flash TV series, the central character in No Way Home works better as a member of a team with a network of friends, and the conclusion took all that away from him. Theoretically, they could address all this in the next movie, but Marvel doesn’t usually do more than three movies focusing on one character (and Sony’s track record with Spidey hasn’t been the greatest).
But in regard to that last point, No Way Home is good at least in that it creates a sort of redemption for the last two Spider-Man actors, who in the movies might have been obliged to kill their enemies but still did kill them. Not only is the fan-service premise perfectly executed, but the acting is at the least very good, especially from Willem Dafoe, who at this point is so creepy and reptilian that he can play the Green Goblin without a mask.
The other aspect of this movie is how it ties into the whole chain of MCU movies – as I’ve mentioned, some of these movies tend to fit into the sequence better than others. In this case, the fact that Doctor Strange was actually willing to go along with Peter’s crazy idea just illustrates that the personality problems that caused him to lose his medical career didn’t go away just because he achieved ridiculous levels of magical power. In fact, this leads directly into the next movie, because the second after-credits scene of No Way Home isn’t even a “scene” but a straight-up preview of Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, simply without the title logos. Which raises the question: How does Strange deal with the consequences of breaking into the multiverse when he doesn’t even remember WHY he did it?