Spider-Man: No Way Home

Smashing box office records, even by pre-COVID standards, it seems like everyone in the U.S. will have seen this by the time this review goes live. What follows is a short spoiler-free review of Spider-Man: No Way Home limited to the stuff you’ve seen in trailers. After the break, however, is a full-on spoiler-filled review where nothing is off limits. Consider this a warning.

Spider-Man: No Way Home picks up where Far From Home left off, with an Alex Jones-inspired J. Jonah Jameson (J.K. Simmons) exposing Peter Parker’s identity as Spider-Man. The knowledge of this outing is somewhat novel considering a majority of the MCU heroes lack the secret identity aspect – most live action depictions do because it doesn’t make for functional storytelling in that medium. The last time this plot point was explored was back in Iron Man 3, but the identity of Spider-Man has always been something more present in this transmedia property from the films and the comics. Notably in stories like “Civil War” wherein Peter reveals himself to the world and in the infamous “One More Day” where Peter and Mary Jane make a deal with Mephisto (no Mephisto watchers out there he doesn’t show up in No Way Home) to make everyone forget just that.

The impact of this outing is quickly understood in very Peter Parker terms as the biggest villain in this film is college admissions! Not the sinister multiversal villains from films past. After Peter and his friends are all rejected because of their association with him, Peter visits Dr. Strange and returning screenwriters Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers hatch their “One More Day” riff.

No Way Home continues the overall crowd-pleasing formula for the previous two Spider films and my disinterest at large portions of them due to how they are made. Tom Holland continues to be really the best Peter Parker and an OK Spider-Man. It might be a Sony-distributed film but the brain trust and method behind these films are Marvel Studios, which means a few too many jokes and unwillingness to have a sustained moment of drama lest the crowd think about what, if anything, this film is trying to say. If you’ve liked those last two, you’ll like this one. Going in as blind as you can is part of the charm to this movie. But not when it comes to reviewing it.

I cannot conceive of a way of thinking about No Way Home without being hyper aware myself of what this film is doing and its place in the constellation of Spider-Man transmedia. That sort of urge is always at least somewhat subtext in reviews, but with the reflexivity of the multiverse you can’t help but make it text.

When the first trailer for No Way Home dropped the idea of a multiversal live Spider film seemed like the potential nadir of the franchise. One of the most consistent knocks on the Holland era of Spider-Man has been that they took Marvel’s working class hero and made him into a blubbering fanboy at the altar of the former Merchant of Death turned Saint of the MCU, Iron Man. It all seemed a bit too big for your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, but alas Marvel can’t do small. The metatextual twist the producers introduce and use the multiverse to push this iteration of Spider-Man into something closer to the popular imagination is well done and provides a surprisingly effective emotional core to a film that gets bogged down in typical Marvel quips and moments of “hello fellow kids” attempts at activating some idea of nostalgia – that sadly proved to be effective.

As Marvel continues its push into the Multiverse and the threat of a new “Secret War” looms, perhaps we will begin to see a shift in modes of fandom and identification. The multiverse concept allows for the easy activation of nostalgia and references for long term audiences, and after two decades and three iterations the Spider-Man film franchise has plenty of that. No Way Home smashes the old cinephile joy of understanding a homage to an old or foreign film, the activation of knowledge that most people wouldn’t have. In its place is a thudding string of obvious references; or as someone behind me wouldn’t shut up saying some variation of “they said the line!” with fannish joy. That reaction is legitimate, but also incredibly shallow. It ultimately means nothing and adds little, if anything, to the film.

My theater could barely sit still as they erupted in adulation at the barest of references. The common critique of metatextual elements and self-reflexivity is that it exposes its stylized surface and lack of depth, a critique I do not fully buy as I’m someone who often advocates that the style is the substance, but No Way Home is different. This increasing reflexivity might be entertaining to the masses or at least the loudest in the theater, but when taken in conjunction with Marvel’s often bathos laden logic it interferes with the engaging performances in the film and somewhat interesting existential questions they ask. As with most Marvel films you could’ve cut half the attempts at humor and let moments of drama play and trust in the audience and the filmmakers to say and feel something. Instead, you get a quip about being “stabbed before” that undercuts everything and tells the audience “It’s going to be ok” instead of letting the realization come to the audience, despite that same basic puncturing resulting in someone’s death 20 minutes earlier.

Tom Holland really is a great Peter Parker even if he isn’t the most engaging Spider-Man. You can’t help but like Holland’s screen presence or his chemistry with the dry wit of Zendaya’s MJ and the earnestness of Jacob Batalon’s Ned. It’s also why he is perhaps unfairly maligned for taking on roles in Cherry and The Devil All the Time that go against that star image: that presence and the Marvel Method are what has made these films popular, if not always artistically engaging. To his credit, Holland is what allows the larger ethical questions about the nature of superheroes and glance at the inherent violence of them to not fall into a surface trap. You believe that Peter would think it’s his responsibility to try and cure, maybe save, these extradimensional villains of his. His grappling with responsibility as a person and hero are what this cinematic iteration has grappled with since they talked around it in Civil War. It was a different sort of metatextual play compared to this film, a deferral, that amazingly allows the Uncle Benning of Aunt May and her utterance of “with great power comes great responsibility” to land, even as it plays out in a sudden and melodramatic key that even Zack Snyder doesn’t approach.

In preparation for this film, I’ve been returning to past Spider films. One of the interesting discoveries is realizing how much the first Raimi Spider-Man (2002) largely doesn’t hang together and how much the Amazing Spider-Man (2012) mostly does. As it so happens, I have also been thinking about this 2007 article, “Digital Heroes in Contemporary Hollywood: Exertion, Identification, and the Virtual Action Body” by Lisa Purse. Purse surveys the general shift towards digital cinematography and production that has occurred and focuses on Spider-Man 2 (2004)’s use of fully body replication to theorize what this means for identification going forward. That article kept rattling around in my head as the theater erupted in rapture at seemingly every little thing in an action sequence and I stayed quiet.

By and large the action in this movie didn’t work for me and it rarely worked for me in previous Holland films. The first major sequence, the one on the bridge, was the most effective. Cinematographer Matthew J. Lloyd and the VFX team do a good job of mirroring the framing and camera techniques so that most everything has this extended Steadicam tracking shot feel as Peter battles Doc Ock across the bridge and tries to save people. That cinematography mixed with what seem like mostly physical sets, or at least as physical as these VFX films tend to be, created a feeling of material existence and reality even when everything clearly becomes fully digital that other sequences lacked.

Obviously, the fight with Dr. Strange in the mirror dimension has no basis in material reality and becomes a kaleidoscopic montage. The battle at the Statue of Liberty is supposed to have this material referent as it is centered around an American and international icon, but it never comes through, even as Tom Holland fights Willem Dafoe and his stunt double on a stage that looks like it came out of an alternative Metal Gear Solid; there is a fakeness to the frame. Other than a few wide shots for coverage the sequence continues this sense of claustrophobia that develops in the third act.*

These limitations are why Holland consistently falls short of a great Spider-Man for me compared to Andrew Garfield or Tobey Maguire iterations. The former’s suit design and way the VFX handled swinging had weight and texture to it. Maguire’s film trilogy startled the shift to digital and featured more classic staging and use of VFX, and more physical production design. The VFX teams that have handled Holland Spider-Man turn everything into a plastic surface. That plastic surface is ported over to the other Spider-Men who show up, which is a shame. Their suits, body types, and methods are all different and other than nominal differences in shades of red and blue fail to stand out against the all-encompassing night sky.

To the films credit the action of this film is “well done” in that it is understandable. Characters are not so much fighting one another as chasing after a given McGuffin resulting in something more akin to a series of chase sequences. This shift in action styling I appreciate; I just wish it looked and felt more real.

That lack in materiality is a nagging feeling that also pops up throughout when you consider how certain sequences are shot. It is a feeling most prevalent in the final act as the two other Spider-Men show up. What should be group sequences become oddly claustrophobic irrespective of setting from tight close ups and resulting shot reverse shots sequences without any medium cuts to reset and break up the monotony. Worse the compositing for the background proves to be ineffective leaving me with the feeling that either they reshot a good deal of the Spider-Men stuff, or it was originally filmed with Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield alone on a green screen and no one to really act against.

That sort of production method isn’t new, go look up how Tom Holland and Benedict Cumberbatch filmed Avengers: Infinity War while Cumberbatch was also filming The Current War: it isn’t entire sequences, but it is shots and minor sequences that just break up the flow of the film. Despite their insertion in the final sequence, I don’t think any of the reaction shots for the Spider-Men or MJ and Ned were filmed with one another around the same set. The editing really highlights how disconnected the geography of this film can be sometimes. A feeling of disconnect is the last thing you want when the film becomes about the unity and shared but different life experiences of three Spider-Men.

There is no real sequence akin to the round table from Zack Snyder’s Justice League, which also features plenty of cuts but is working in a continuing and fluid motion that creates the illusion of a long take. As the Spider-Men repair their cures for their villains you’d be hard pressed to see them all working together in the same frame despite them recreating that meme. Everything just looked so cinematically flat in spots. Ironically perhaps the “best” shared frame the trio of Spider-Men have is an entirely digital one as they all pose on the Statue of Liberty.

Despite my qualms about the action, No Way Home pulls off something surprising: it made a third film that doesn’t fall on its face! The trilogy capper is often the bane of this genre’s existence and No Way Home runs the meta gambit to close and reveal what audiences have seen over the past half-decade is an origin trilogy. Stripped of his identity, Holland’s Parker now lives in a shitty New York City apartment with GED test books and a homespun, surprisingly shiny, costume. Superhero films, and comic books to a degree, always operate on a “no resolution, only sequels” formula. Even if a franchise like The Amazing Spider-Man ignominiously ends, nothing is resolved: Andrew Garfield still shows up a few years later still swinging. There is the momentary resolution to the problem of the film, as MJ and Ned get into MIT and the villains are cured and sent back home, but the larger problems of being Peter Parker have shifted into different and new, but not entirely novel, permutations. The finale to No Way Home encapsulates that quintessential Spider-Man idea of even when you win, you lose in a way that was effective.

Most importantly to Sony and Marvel, it left me wanting more: to see how Holland continues to play Peter and them going the full LOST with Ned and MJ. To see what the creative team do now that they have something closer to the Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, it promises a size closer to Hawkeye than Far From Home.

I did not expect to feel this ambivalent about the film, but as I have written and rewritten, my thoughts on the film that ambivalence kept rising. It isn’t a bad thing; more people should get used to that liminal state with art. This is a clearly entertaining movie, even if I worry it won’t hold up very well.