Everything we’ve seen so far in the trailers for Spider-Man: No Way Home takes place in the first 30 minutes of the movie. We’ll call it 40. This is a 2 hour and 28 minute movie, and all that footage we’ve been staring at, the stuff where we’re going “gosh, I hope that’s not all of it, I hope this isn’t everything,” is the opening. There’s so much more.
No spoilers here. I had the good pleasure of getting to see it, and it’s literally everything you think it is and everything you wanted it to be. Navigating this one is real interesting, though, because I want you to know how exciting it is and I don’t want to take a single thing away from you.
The Trailers Are the First Act
So I’ll use the trailers to steer. We all know Peter goes to Doctor Strange trying to get him to help change some things, because everyone knows who he is. That comes off the very end of Spider-Man: Far From Home, and spoilers for that one: Mysterio gives away Peter’s identity. This movie starts right there, smack in that moment, and it’s a roller coaster going forward.
The multiverse stuff, the Doctor Strange stuff, pretty much the story we see in the trailers is how the whole thing opens up. It’s funny. You think, oh, they’re going to show us stuff from the movie, and it’s literally the opening. I guess I’d call it the first act. All the trailers we’ve seen add up to about the first act. There are a couple of scenes that do come from later acts, but overall the basic premise is what you’ve seen. The villains all come into our world, for whatever reason and however that happens, and Spider-Man is stuck with a conundrum: these are all villains who died facing Spider-Man. That’s the fix Peter’s in, and he has to face them.
Tom Holland, and the Fatigue Question
He’s amazing in this, and that’s no pun intended. Tom Holland brings a breath to Spider-Man that is so refreshing.
There are people asking, are you starting to get a little bit of that superhero fatigue? No, I’m not. And if you are, you’re lying, or you just don’t like comic movies.
What Sony and Kevin Feige Pulled Off
Sony and Kevin Feige made a beautiful partnership here, and you have to know the history to see how beautiful.
We know for a fact that Sam Raimi’s first Spider-Man is amazing. The second one is arguably in contention to be the best Spider-Man movie of all time. Before this one. I genuinely feel like this movie becomes the best Spider-Man of all time. The Amazing Spider-Man with Andrew Garfield, I enjoyed. I did like them. Aside from Jamie Foxx’s really screwy blue Electro, I kind of dug what that movie was trying to do.
The way the rights work is that Sony was essentially trying to hold on to them, and in order to do that, every so many years they have to come out with a movie. That’s why they were like, okay, cool, we’re going to go ahead and recast, because it’s always easier to stunt cast. What lesson is that, boys and girls who’ve been in comics forever? That’s right. Rebooting a comic title. Comics have been doing that forever. If you want to get sales up on something, start an event, reboot the series, restart the numbering and give it a number one. That’s what they’ve done in the past.
Now look at the Marvel Cinematic Universe currently. We’re getting a glut of multiverse stuff, and at some point I need to do a comic book talk, or some sort of pop culture talk, about what’s going on in the industry. But what Kevin Feige has done, what everybody at Marvel has done, is introduce the multiverse in a big, bad way. And until Sony hitched their wagon to Marvel’s, to the MCU, this hasn’t been a cut and dry, super simple setup for them. They’ve had to fight tooth and nail for everything.
I don’t think I’m spoiling anything by telling you what this movie does with that. It threads those other movies together. It stitches them, if you will, into the tapestry that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe, even if only tangentially, just adjacent, and it says those movies existed as part of the multiverse. It’s beautifully done. In my opinion it single-handedly redeems Sony and absolves them of any problems or troubles they’ve had in the past, because what you’re saying, clearly, is that this is all the multiverse now.
Uncle Ben, Aunt May, and Flash Thompson
Tobey Maguire’s and Andrew Garfield’s iterations of the character, Spider-Man and The Amazing Spider-Man respectively, are different franchises, and they both had an Uncle Ben. You saw Uncle Ben, and you saw the tragedy that was there. When we went into the Marvel version, you didn’t get that from Tom Holland’s Spider-Man, and that’s perfectly fine.
You got a different iteration of Aunt May in Marisa Tomei’s Aunt May, too. You didn’t get granny Aunt May, or the other versions we’d had so far. You get a young, slightly different one. And unlike the other two, you don’t get big jock Flash Thompson in Tom Holland’s version. We’ve gotten smart bully Flash Thompson.
They’ve done a great job of what the comics have already done, which is threading together all these Spider-Man concepts and saying this universe collectively exists, and there have been other Spider-Mans in the past. It really does feed into what Sony’s trying to do with the Into the Spider-Verse franchise, specifically with Miles Morales and the things that are coming up.
It’s Not Spider-Man Endgame
What’s funny is I feel like this has stronger ramifications for the MCU than anything else we’ve seen.
Everyone’s tried to call this a Spider-Man Endgame. I get the scale they’re going for, because it’s so big. But the truth is that it’s not Spider-Man Endgame. Endgame was the fulfillment of something, the finish of something. Spider-Man: No Way Home is the embracing of the past and the kicking open of the door to the future.
I don’t know why Tom Holland was implying that this is the end of something. It is the end of the Home trilogy, whatever we’re calling it. But it brings a whole new set of things to the table. I remember leaving the theater thinking to myself, what are they going to do next? Clearly there’s something next, and I can’t wait.
Go See It, and Stay Off the Internet
You need to go out and buy your tickets, like, yesterday. I saw it by myself, and later on this afternoon we’re going to see it as a family for the second time: my wife, my daughter, my father-in-law, everybody I can come up with. It’s holding strong at 98 on Rotten Tomatoes, and I see why. I absolutely see why.
The spoiler review is the next one dropping, and I’m saving it on purpose for the weekend. My feeling is most people are going to see it Thursday, Friday and Saturday, so it goes up Saturday night. It’s going to be big and it’s going to be intense. I’m going to pull in Mrs. Know-It-All for a quick spoiler discussion, and I think it’ll be fun.
If you haven’t seen it, so help me God, stay out of the comments, because they’re going to spoil everything. If you’re sitting there going “I get to see it tonight,” get off social media. There are things you don’t want spoiled. You think you have ideas, and some of those ideas may or may not be true, but what you don’t know is going to blow your mind.
I’m bursting at the seams to talk more about this thing. And if knowing’s half the battle, then hey, you’re halfway to becoming the know-it-all that I know you can be. Remember, everyone loves a know-it-all.
If you’ve had your matinee, or you’re in a time zone where you’ve already gotten the chance, drop into the comments on the video above and let’s talk about it. If you haven’t seen it yet, see the movie first, then come find us there.
