The viewing prompted many different thoughts -- you know, the type I'd write about in separate posts if I wanted to have a week's worth of Spider-Man posts. Since I don't, I'll fit them all here, making use of subheadings.
And of course, there will be SPOILERS.
The first was one that had occurred to me previously, but one I've never written about:
Why is Spider-Man the hero who is always trifling with the multiverse?
It's a shame Spider-Man: No Way Home is so many times more successful than the already successful Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which is getting a sequel in 2022. I wouldn't say it's a remake of that movie, though it does deal with multiple versions of Spider-Man from different universes coming together to fight a threat to the very space-time continuum. At the very least, it owes something to it.
Into the Spider-Verse is an adaptation of a 2014-2015 comic book series conceived and written by Dan Slott. So he was the one who may have taken Spidey down this path to begin with.
As an MCU movie, I think No Way Home does its best not to be directly indebted to any particular source, since these plot turns are supposed to take even comic book nerds by surprise. However, I'm reading that the basic story arc comes from a 2007 comic story arc called "One More Day," and Wikipedia credits Slott's Spider-Verse story with inspiration for the film.
Because I don't have a huge breadth to my comic book knowledge, I cannot say this for certain, but I have to figure that other superheroes have had multiverse type storylines, if only because they have been around so long that the writers need to get creative (or ridiculous, take your pick). But Spider-Man is the only one whose multiverse dalliances have received the cinematic treatment -- twice now.
Why is that? I'll leave that one dangling as we get to our other topics for today ...
Covering our eyes for different reasons
I noticed while buying tickets that Spider-Man was rated M, meaning it is appropriate for children over 15. My younger son is eight, and only just turned eight last week. That's not even close.
But we were already at the cinema, and if I mentioned it to my wife, it could only derail a day I had carefully planned through two viewings of the previous two MCU Spider-Man movies -- presumably also rated M. So I just bought the tickets and moved on.
So it was with some surprise that my wife groaned over the intensity of the trailers before the movie, which included The Batman and Morbius. (She was less shocked by The 355, maybe just because it stars women?)
And so while I was closing my eyes to avoid seeing footage I didn't want to see, part of my ongoing prevention of having all the images from a movie spoiled by familiarity, my eight-year-old was closing his eyes to avoid traumatizing images -- and my wife was providing an additional layer of protection by using her hand as a second shield.
I can't tell you how traumatizing those images actually were, since I didn't watch them. I suspect it was just the tone, since the 15-year-olds who were officially approved to watch these movies wouldn't want something that my eight-year-old would be perfectly comfortable with. I'm sure my 11-year-old was plenty awed and excited in an aspirational way. I suspect more than anything, the eight-year-old had that sense you get when you've shown up in the wrong place and are suddenly subjected to something that wasn't intended for you.
Then again, superhero movies are sort of intended for everybody, and it was clear from the trailers that we are not winding down on them anytime soon. Speaking of which ...
A reminder of when I didn't see every superhero movie
You'd figure someone like me would be perfectly prepared for the fan service in No Way Home, perhaps even its ideal target. You'd be wrong.
As I was watching the film and piecing together who was who by process of elimination, I was reminded that I did not go to the theater to see three consecutive Spider-Man movies ... and still to this day have not seen them.
It's a weird sequence of events considering that I really liked Spider-Man 2, the second Sam Raimi movie, the one with Doc Oc as the villain. I guess I heard bad things about Spider-Man 3, though, because I never bothered with it.
Then I recall finding it absurd that they were rebooting the character so quickly, which means I didn't see either of the films starring Andrew Garfield.
By the first Tom Holland movie, every superhero was being rebooted constantly, and I'd also adjusted my perspective such that I felt like I had to see every significant film released in a given year before I closed my rankings each January. Perhaps especially superhero movies, even if they didn't have a realistic shot at my #1 for the year. (Though Wonder Woman was actually my #2 in 2017, the year of the first Holland movie.)
In hindsight, it seems really weird that I just blew these movies off, especially given the character's prominence within the pantheon of superheroes. (I once had a theory that Spider-Man was one of the most famous five superheroes of all time, joining Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and the Incredible Hulk.)
But it wasn't totally uncommon either. I didn't see either of the Iron Man sequels in the year of their release, and that character is, nowadays, the most prominent challenger for that top five.
I suppose it's not completely unprecedented even today. I'll be wrapping up my rankings next week without seeing the latest Venom movie. There was one Friday night when I was going to see it, but I couldn't find a parking space at the mall (it was Black Friday) so I just bailed and never got back to it.
Having missed three of the existing seven Spider-Man movies -- or eight if you count Into the Spider-Verse -- was not ultimately a problem. I knew Jamie Foxx was the villain in the second Garfield movie. I didn't remember who was the villain in the first Garfield movie -- a lizard? -- but by then it was obvious because I knew Thomas Haden Church's Sandman was the villain in the final Tobey Maguire movie. When the lizard finally transforms back into Rhys Ifans at the end, I remembered Ifans' announced casting in that movie.
I do think it would now be worth going back and seeing what I missed, and I can watch it in a manner that gives appropriate nods to the multiverse. Having watched the two Holland movies with my kids leading up to the viewing, maybe I will boomerang back outward and watch the Garfrield movies in reverse order before getting to Spider-Man 3. Hey, why not.
Which leads me to ...
The surprise ongoing effectiveness of Tobey Maguire
Tobey Maguire has become an absolute pariah in Hollywood. Everyone thinks he's an asshole -- we all know the stories of his behavior as a poker player, as documented in that Aaron Sorkin movie -- and he really hasn't been working at all.
Since Garfield was the first one to appear here, I wondered if maybe Maguire wouldn't even be in the movie. After all, they could have but didn't include James Franco in the cast.
When he did show up, I was surprised at a) how youthful he still seems at age 46, and b) how he's still able, more or less, to do the thing that ingratiated us to him in the first place.
Most actors who see a dimming of their fame -- say, Orlando Bloom -- seem awkward when we see them again. Like all the sudden they just can't do what they used to do anymore. Whereas once they were charming, now they aren't. Now their awareness of their own downfall actually diminishes their craft, and they just can't pull it off anymore.
That wasn't the case for Maguire. He's actually sort of the heart and soul of this movie in a weird way. He factors into a key moment in the climax when he gets Holland's Peter Parker to control his rage and resist doing something he would have regretted.
I'll be curious to see where he goes from here. Is this the comeback role Maguire needed?
Or will he fritter it away and still act like an asshole to everybody?
Dr. Strange's carelessness with magic
After all he'd been through with Thanos, I never really believed Dr. Strange would conjure a spell to "brainwash the entire world" -- to use his own words -- on a whim.
So while we might blame Peter Parker for the space-time endangering events of this movie, that's like saying you blame the child for asking to play with a gun, rather than the adult who gave him the gun to play with.
I guess Strange didn't see any of the other Spider-Man movies, because he's unfamiliar with the phrase "With great power comes great responsibility."
Sure, one of the film's funniest scenes is the one where Strange has to keep changing his spell in progress due to last-minute edits by Peter. But again, do we blame Peter for remembering one more person he doesn't want to forget him, or do we blame Strange for not reviewing all the parameters of the spell with Peter before he even started?
It's not like Strange is the genie here. It's not like he's trying to use the exact semantics of Peter's request against him in order to deny him a wish on a technicality. Since he's on Peter's side, you'd think they'd want to sit down and hash out the spell over a couple of hours.
Not so much.
Mysterio's unbelievable credibility
Another thing I didn't believe was that the world would believe Mysterio -- a "superhero" who had been famous for like a week -- over Spider-Man, an Avenger who had demonstrably saved the world, or at least his small part of it, on multiple occasions.
I tried to consider whether Mysterio had been known to the world longer than his three or four fights with the elementals, but I decided he had not been. Peter wasn't even aware of him until his school trip to Europe. In fact, Peter names him. Mysterio dies at the end of that school trip.
In this case, I think you can view it as a criticism of our sociopolitical landscape, not something that's supposed to be realistic. The conspiracy theorist talk show host played by J.K. Simmons is supposed to be a riff on Alex Jones. The things he says are not supposed to make sense, which makes it all the more of a sharp satire that so many millions of people believe him.
Still, as the core conflict for an entire movie, I didn't totally buy it.
Plus, aren't there schools other than M.I.T.?
Cool but not clever
Although I liked this movie quite a bit, it doesn't approach the rarefied air of the Marvel movies I have really loved in the past five years, such as the final two Avengers movies, the most recent Thor movie and the most recent Ant-Man movie.
My ultimate assessment is that all the multiverse stuff was cool, but not particularly clever.
When you look at any individual detail of this movie, it doesn't care much about explaining itself. Villains just appear, Spider-Men just appear. There's no rhyme or reason to where they appear or when they appear. They appear at the time the plot needs them to, and only because the plot needs them to appear.
I think the key to a head-trippy film involving paradoxes is that the paradoxes themselves should be clever. The guiding principle behind the making of Back to the Future was the unanticipated repercussions of traveling through time. Everything that happens is an offshoot of a paradox or an attempt to avoid one.
No Way Home doesn't care about paradoxes. All it really wants to do is assemble a bunch of different characters from three different cinematic threads and figure out a way for them to coexist.
And it does that in a cool way. Just not a clever one.
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Okay, I think that's enough subheadings for today.
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