For all the guff that Sony has received over the last decade, it seems that they’ve finally been able to crack some of the Spider-Man code. We’ve been blessed with one genuinely great film — Into the Spider-Verse, which was the best animated film to emerge from the West in the last decade — and two amazingly fun ones in the Venom series, which offers a rejoinder to the sexless and silliness-less ethos of the MCU being superior at the box office (it turns out you can make your superhero movie gay as hell and break box office records, and Joel Schumacher lies vindicated here). Yet their mainline Spider-Man series, helmed by Jon Watts and starring Tom Holland, has been one of diminishing returns. Homecoming was fun, elevated by a great Michael Keaton performance and decent humor, while Far From Home offered far less and required a galaxy-brained interpretation of the film as a criticism of Kevin Feige in order to make it more palatable, despite all of Jake Gyllenhaal’s best attempts at bringing it to life. Now, Watts has returned with Spider-Man: No Way Home, a live-action attempt to do Spider-Verse without any of the intangibles that made that film special, playing on our memories of both the Maguire and Garfield films in lieu of being able to either recapture the magic of those films and/or imagine anything that could be potentially greater. It will make billions of dollars and inspire audiences to cheer, but the only thing that No Way Home proves is how great most of those films were and how poorly we have it in comparison to the Raimi days, at least in live-action.
Despite offering some measure of hope to the contrary with Homecoming‘s occasional innovations, each individual film in the Watts Spider-Man series is made from the same structure. Peter begins the film coping with the events of the last film — in Homecoming, it’s his becoming an Avenger, in Far From Home, it’s the combo of Aunt May (Marissa Tomei) knowing his identity and recovering/healing from the Thanos conflict, and in No Way Home, his unmasking at the end of the last film establishes the status quo. He seeks out a mentor figure — Iron Man, Nick Fury/Happy Hogan/Mysterio, and, here, Doctor Strange (and other characters) — and asks for their help in alleviating their burden. Though he’s given gifts that aid him on his quests, the mentor proves to be of little help or an antagonist, and the major conflict reveals itself following Peter doing something dumb. Here, it’s him begging Strange to fix his issues but his mid-casting edits cause the Sorceror to fuck up the spell that would make the world to forget he’s Spider-Man (which feels like a weird meta-dig at Amy Pascal’s script notes). That’s how the otherworldly villains — the main ones being Doctor Octopus (Alfred Molina), Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe, who kills it here), and Electro (Jamie Foxx), though there are more — make their way into the MCU from their various locales. Strange demands that Peter cleans up the mess he’s made, but the younger hero blanches when it’s revealed to him that each of these villains was taken from their universes moments before their deaths fighting their own Spider-Men, and he refuses to do so until he’s able to help them. This is all shit you would have learned about from the trailers, so please, do not give me guff for saying more than a mere thumbs up or thumbs down, and I can guarantee you that pretty much everything I talk about here doesn’t really go beyond the first act.
Anyhow, there’s an interesting nugget of an idea buried within the bedrock of plot here in the form of that last conflict between Strange and Parker — healing versus timeline maintenance — but Watts seems to be limited to just cracking around it with a dull pickaxe for fear of bringing down the whole mine of the MCU with it. We’ve come to take villain deaths for granted in superhero films, which is understandable given their proximity to the action film where righteous vengeance is foisted upon them for their deeds, concealed behind a layer of caveats: either they’re hoisted upon their own petard in some fashion or are forced to sacrifice themselves in a moment of self-clarity or, as a last resort, they’re killed by an external force related to the hero that also manages to save them from direct culpability. No Way Home attempts to suggest that, through the power of understanding and modern technological advancement, these villains can be cured, which is a quasi-revolutionary ideal coming from the genre that just wants these folks to be shuffled off to Arkham and kept there for the rest of their natural lives. It’s the closest thing to a brownie point that Watts gets here because it feels spectacularly Spidey-like — and, indeed, it was a key element of the best live-action film in the series, Spider-Man 2. It’s undercut by the fact that Watts refuses to explore any consequence of these actions aside from “bad guy fixed now,” and the revolt that occurs later on in the film, which is teased in the trailers, doesn’t really make much sense for some of the characters, no matter how great Dafoe is at motivational speaking for villains. But, even then, there’s no real suggestion that having these guys in the MCU is uniquely bad: we don’t see them committing crimes beyond attacking Spider-Man, and the public feels wholly removed from the story. This is perhaps due to the existential slip of these films away from being tales of regular folk with extraordinary gifts — it’s hard to be a street-level hero when you can retreat to a rich-ass penthouse on the East River when times get rough — but there are also other reasons.
See, No Way Home feels like the first Marvel movie forced to contend in-film with the societal havoc of COVID-19. I don’t mean this in the sense that Tom Holland is pictured downing Nyquil and using a pulse oximeter that he bought at a Duane Reade or the virus forced reshoots (Shang-Chi bore the brunt of that, with Daniel Deston Cretton coming down with the illness weeks into shooting) but, in comparison to most of the other Spider-Man films, even including the other MCU entries in the series, you can tell something is seriously wrong. The “Friendly Neighborhoods” that our hero protects are, for the most part, totally empty: The streets of the Greenwich Village, where the Sanctum Sanctorum lies, where they’d normally be bustling with some sort of quasi-bohemian life making its way across the concrete, are devoid of people, save perhaps a single extra in the background walking a dog. But this also speaks to a larger problem with Watts’s interpretation of the character, in that, after establishing him as a community hero with Homecoming, Marvel’s sought to remove him from that framework in each subsequent entry in the series. Perhaps this is due to some sort of cognizance that audiences aren’t as interested in seeing New York get saved from destruction in every installment or a reflection of the MCU’s global capture of ticket-buying theater attendees, but it’s an approach ill-suited to the dynamics of this character. One only needs to remember that the best moments of the Raimi films were ones where Spider-Man channeled the positive energies of his community into productive and empathetic actions and thusly embodied the spirit of New York — the rock-throwers pelting the Goblin from the Queensboro Bridge, the subway riders coming to his aid after a long fight with Ock (or, hell, even the crane operators coming together to help Peter get across town in Amazing Spider-Man) — and the fact that Marvel, for all of its analytics and desire to please, can’t grok that very simple idea is particularly telling.
Of course, there’s more to a superhero than the community they protect, even though that should be a major consideration, but some other intangibles are missing from the Spider-Man stew. I’d suggest that there are two on display here: Consequence and joy. With the former — and I’d argue it’s the most essential aspect of the whole character — Watts has successfully managed to make Peter Parker avoid nearly any, though some of that has to come with Feige wanting to introduce the character in a Captain America film. Folks hated the petulant, self-centered, and grumpy iteration of the character in the Amazing films, but at least those movies were defined by consequence. Ignore your girlfriend’s father’s dying pleas for you to stay away from his daughter, and you might get her killed. Here, consequences are either avoided entirely by the scenario (you’ve got a super-rich mentor, after all) or a climactic cliff-hanger for you to dangle in front of the audience to shock them. In Homecoming, after alienating his would-be girlfriend and being rewarded with an even-better girlfriend, Aunt May figures out he’s Spidey, and yet that’s not explored in any further film beyond him receiving her general encouragement and exploitation of his role; then, in Far From Home, after shit gets hairy in Europe and he learns that it’s ok to have immensely powerful technology if it’s being used by the right people, no oversight required, Peter’s unmasked to the world by the Bugle. Sure, we hear people yelling at him and see him get interrogated by Damage Control (who I guess have replaced S.H.I.E.L.D. as quasi-extra governmental investigators), as well as him being marched into school by cops in a bizarre echo of scenes from the Civil Rights Movement, but the inciting incident for him to visit Strange and try to undo all of this mess isn’t a villain targeting his family or friends, it’s that he and his bros don’t get into M.I.T. when they absolutely should have. Watts yadda-yadda-yaddas the true ethical and personal issues here — should someone continue their superheroics without the resources of an Iron Man if it means that their families will suffer? — and chooses the path of self-interest. A consequence is finally visited upon Peter by the end of the film, but it’s so half-baked and free of the responsibility endemic to the character that it has little impact beyond just being sort of a bummer.
Then we come to joy, which is the thing that makes all of those consequences worth it for Peter Parker. There are several different ways of interpreting this in context. There’s the joy of doing right, reflected in the faces of those who you have helped out and who you have managed to save despite impossible odds, and the influence that your good works have on them going forward, which acts as the other side of a feedback loop of the community rewarding you through good deeds and making your job easier. Then there’s just the basic joy of being Spider-Man, something the Raimi films captured better than practically any superhero film in living memory. You can jump high, lift heavy things, and traverse great distances on your webs, swinging between buildings in a way that Tarzan could only imagine. It is thrilling and adrenaline-filled stuff, the simplest of pleasures: celebrating your body’s capabilities and interacting with your environment in a way that only you can, made even more joyous when you’re able to share it with those you love. In No Way Home, trying to do so only makes Zendaya nauseated, and with a few pithy quips, you’ve normalized web-swinging into the mundane and frustrating, more akin to sitting in the backseat on a long drive without any Dramamine than being freed from the bonds of gravity itself, speeding through the heavens. If you’ve forgotten that or ceded that the PS4 video game will be able to capture that feeling better through immersion, you’re left with few options on how to stimulate your audience with wonder, and it’s unsurprising that Watts has to resort to bringing in other MCU characters, whose reality-altering powers provide you with new landscapes to fuck around in or to bring in characters from other films that were once able to organically evoke that joy.
Yet, subjected to the flattening filmmaking ethos of Marvel and any number of external limitations, they aren’t able to have the same impact. What made Spider-Verse so wonderful and liberating compared to other superhero films was that it contained all of these things: Consequence in plot and smartly-crafted joy, enhanced by the imagination-freeing possibilities of animation. In contrast, No Way Home just wants what the other films in the series had without the understanding or meaning, fully cognizant of its position as a cog in a larger machine that has no time or patience for any of that.