So…I’ve seen Spider-Man: No Way Home for the second time and I have…mixed feelings.
Spider-Man: No Way Home is a solid movie with a lot of really great moments…if you’re a diehard Spider-Man fan…which I’m not. And that’s where the heart of the problem lies for this movie compared to Homecoming and Far from Home.
Those movies, of course, thematically, felt more fun and funnier. This movie is stuffed to the brim with fan service that paid off with the first viewing in a packed theater full of enthusiastic Spider-Man fans but at home…at times, some of the scenes fell flat. Like Tobey’s Peter and Andrew’s Peter meeting for the first time and having a Spidey face-off. That part was kind of meh. Or the apartment fight which is a good scene but not nearly as impactful as I remembered.
And yet, despite not feeling as much of an attachment as I felt last time to the story I didn’t refrain from crying quite a bit through the second half of this movie. This movie is very depressing. I’m talking go-to-bed-extremely-sad-depressing.
Peter Parker loses so much in this movie, becoming what feels like officially Spider-Man throughout the course of this story. It’s just…a really sad movie.
Now, I will always love the interactions between the three Spider-Men which I still kind of believe I get to see in real life. I mean, their scenes together are so important/impactful, and heartwarming. Oh, I love it.
So, my current verdict about this movie is it’s no Endgame. To this day Endgame makes me feel the exact same way I did in theaters when I saw it for the first time…minus the incessant crying…well, I still cry a lot while watching this film.
Maybe it was because I was watching this movie at 4am this morning but it just did not hit the same. In fact, Spider-Man: Far from Home may still be my favorite of the trilogy. We’ll see in a few months and a few more viewings.
8/10
I thank you for reading and I hope you have a fantastic day.
On what platform were you able to watch Spiderman: No Way Home at home? Didn’t know that it had been released for at home viewing yet…
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It’s wherever you buy movies digitally: Amazon, Google Play, etc.
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I’m a Spider-Man fan since childhood. I did wait to see this for a few weeks until the theater was mostly empty to avoid all the fan cheering. I have a feeling the crowd reaction influenced some people’s opinion of the movie, like a laugh track on a sitcom is supposed to make you think the show is funny.
Ultimately I’m looking for something executed well. None of the action here was as dynamic and energetic as most of the action scenes in Black Widow, like the apartment fight between Natasha and her sis. There were usually action scenes that made my jaw drop in the older Spider-Man movies. Like the Spider-Man 2 train fight or the opening to Amazing Spider-Man 2 with Spidey juggling the cannisters and so on. I was very underwhelmed by the action in this movie. Nothing stands out that I’d want to watch over and over on the home theater.
As for what it does for Spider-Man fans, it takes the ‘semi-reinvented’ MCU Spider-Man and tries to back him into a classic version of Spider-Man by undoing everything they spent precious time setting up in prior movies. Ultimately, the choices made in the story seem forced by the invisible hand of the screenwriters to get to this conclusion. The story doesn’t feel very spontaneous or organic. The situations and the character motivations feel pretty contrived. I can’t buy the good guys trusting in the rehabilitation of the villains as much as they did. Spider-Man as a character was never that naive. He would always be suspicious of his villains. I think back to the way Superman dealt with Lex Luthor in the original Superman movies. Lex was always trying to con Superman, but Superman never fell for it.
There’s nothing offensively bad in the movie, but it just feels like they met a minimum set of goals in a serviceable but unspectacular way.
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“Unspectacular.” Exactly! There’s nothing wrong with this movie but it’s one of the MCU movies where there’s not one scene I want to watch over and over again. And that’s unfortunate.
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The Unspectacular Spider-Man. 😂 I do hope they title the next movie Spectacular Spider-Man, since we’ve already had Amazing Spider-Man.
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👍
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