Hey everyone. I don't use this blog as much as I used to since my creative projects the last couple years have been co-hosting a history podcast (A Mouthful of History if you haven't heard of it yet) and writing a book, but I saw the newest Spider-Man movie on Saturday and had too many thoughts to fit into a social media post, so I figured I'd post 'em here. Cool? Cool.
Overall, I very much enjoyed it. It's easily my favorite Spider-Man movie of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and probably a top three movie next to Toby Maguire's Spider-Man 2 and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse. I say "probably" because I still haven't definitively decided if I like it better than the first Toby Maguire movie, so we'll see how it ages for me. But either way, it was great fun and I thought it did a lot of things better story-wise than the other two MCU movies.
Rather than writing a long single post with a central idea, I figured I'd just make a list of what I did and didn't like. Spoilers, of course, lie ahead.
LIKED
Giving His Friends Something To Do
A good superhero movie rarely has a hero operating alone. There are exceptions, of course, but most good superhero movies show that even someone with powers needs people around them to help them be their best selves, as well as help them in a more immediate sense. Even mister loner himself, Batman, has Alfred to support him during tough times.
It can be hard to figure out how to write non-powered people in a superhero movie, however. You have to give them agency (that is, make them do stuff that is helpful in some way toward the outcome of the story), but there's not much they can do in a literal sense to help fight bad guys. This movie does a good job of giving Parker's girlfriend MJ and best friend Ned something to do, though.
It's great because while they're helping take care of Peter's mess, you also get to see them interact in a way that feels even more meaningful than before. Yes, the two of them had screen time in previous movies, but in this one you don't just get a sense of their personalities through their dialogue, but in their actions and what they try to encourage Peter to do during pivotal moments. It helps round them out in a way that made me feel like I knew them way better than I did before entering the theater.
Actual Stakes!
One of the biggest criticisms of the MCU movies from story-minded movie dorks like myself is that there aren't really any real dramatic stakes or meaningful risks. Perhaps the biggest strength of the MCU is that it is charming and fun and light, which makes for some fun viewing, but there aren't tough decisions that come with actual consequences. They talk about the idea of hard choices and sacrifice through dialogue, but it's not really demonstrated through the story because they're too busy making things fun.
Think of the Maguire Spider-Man movies. Maguire's Peter Parker constantly has to make choices between being a hero or making his life as Peter Parker better, and pretty much every time he chooses the hero route he has to make sacrifices: his relationship with Mary Jane, his continued difficulty holding down a job while barely having any money, his strained friendship with his best friend Harry Osbourne. Peter has to constantly make tough decisions with real consequences, often getting kicked while he's down for doing the right thing.
The MCU doesn't have much of that. Even when it tries to take on tough questions, it often fails because it seems afraid of having scenes that aren't charming and fun at all times. It makes for joyful moments, but I think it can also help explain why MCU movies don't stick with people once you leave the theater. Holland's Peter Parker very, very rarely has to make any difficult choices, and when he does, the consequences aren't really that meaningful.
That changes in this movie, though. When the villains are let loose, Peter has to make a tough choice between the easy way out (killing them) and the more heroic option (trying to help them, even if taking on that many bad guys is a real risk). He chooses the latter, and he loses his aunt in the process. Not only is the scene of her loss played without any jokes to undercut the tension, but Parker feels that weight throughout the rest of the movie (compared to a lot of MCU movies where, even on the rare occasion an important character is killed, the surviving characters are sad for the rest of the scene before making a joke and the movie moves on like the death didn't really happen).
Then, at the end of the movie, he chooses to save everyone by having everyone forget who he is!
The phrase "you can't have peaks without the valleys" is used for a lot of things. I think it applies pretty well to storytelling. You can have movies that are fun and charming, but if that's all they are, then you don't get a full symphony of humanity that makes them stay with you longer. This movie does that a lot better than most other MCU movies.
Seeing Tobey Maguire
When Andrew Garfield showed up on screen, my main thought was "damn it, I hope they get Maguire too." The Maguire movies weren't a central part of my childhood like they were for some other people my age, but I did like them as a teenager, and I've only grown more fond of their hard-earned sincerity as I've grown older. Seeing Maguire felt like seeing an older brother who was supportive and kind even if a bit dorky. My chest instantly tightened with emotion when he showed up.
For the rest of the movie, I was following Maguire as much as, if not more than, I was following Holland. In a world as cynical and complicated as the present, and in an MCU series that feels more like a fun distraction than a meaningful antidote to everything going on, it felt comforting to see him on screen doing his best to help the younger two Peters. The movie may have been weaponizing nostalgia to grab emotions from those of us in the audience who liked the OG Spider-Man trilogy, but considering the movie succeeded in a lot of its storytelling goals, it felt earned to me.
Redeeming Garfield's Spider-Man
Like I said above, I didn't feel much when I saw Garfield pop up on screen. I'd seen the first Spider-Man movie of his when it came out, and it was... alright? I honestly remember very little of it beyond some of its basic main plot points. I never saw the second movie because I heard it was worse, and the clips I saw seemed to back up that claim. Part of me wished it had only been Maguire that showed up. Garfield seemed like a third wheel who had been added simply to complete the Peter Parker set, instead of someone really worth having around.
But, damn it, Garfield really grew on me. It's a reminder that a movie with mediocre directing and writing isn't that actor's fault. Garfield is a bit darker and less traditionally nerdy than the other Peters, but director Jon Watts runs with that to give us Garfield's Parker as he should've been portrayed before. We get a Peter that is darker and more wounded than the other two, yet still with a dorky sweetness that defines the Peter Parker character. The result is a trio of Peters where each have their own unique personalities and each bring something to the table.
Also, c'mon, the scene where he catches MJ is great. I didn't even see the movie where Garfield's Spider-Man failed to save Gwen Stacy and this scene hit me in the gut.
Willem Dafoe and Alfred Molina
Two masters of their craft at the top of their game, having fun switching between hamming it up as ostentatious villains and earnest good men underneath who want to cure their demons. Dafoe's Green Goblin is something like the Joker in this movie; he is the most chaotically evil and he does his best to bring the dark side out of people as much as he can. Molina's Doc Oc, meanwhile, is the first other-universe villain we meet. He's also the only one who stays good throughout the second half of the movie.
Perhaps my favorite moment in the whole movie was Molina's Doc Oc, after he jumped in to help the Peters toward the end, see Maguire's Spider-Man and give him an almost Uncle Iroh-esque greeting. I smile pretty often during superhero movies, but the smile that moment put on my face was different.
DISLIKED
Sandman
Sandman in Spider-Man 3 is a sympathetic character who regrets his past and only does bad things in that movie's present to help his daughter. By the end, he has turned things around. In this movie we're introduced to him when he pops up to help Peter against Electro. Then, when he sees Holland's Peter zap Electro away and thinks he may have killed him, Peter... just zaps him too instead of explaining the situation?? And then he's basically bad for the rest of the movie???
The point, of course, was to create deeper conflict for Peter by adding an extra villain for him to fight. A central point of storytelling is that the more conflict there is, the better. Molina's Doc Oc was already the redeemed villain who helped turn the tide in the final battle, so they needed every other villain to be bad so that combined (Green Goblin, Sandman, Electro, that lizard guy) they constituted a real threat to the three Peters. But they didn't really do anything to justify the Sandman character as we know him siding with the bad guys.
All we get is a line saying he doesn't care about the other villains' redemption, he only wants to see his daughter. But he could have just as easily thought "well, if I help the Peters gather up these escaped bad guys, I can get home to my daughter quicker." That line of thinking not only makes more logical sense, it also makes more sense to who the Sandman character is after his redemption. Instead they muddied up a character's motivation for the sake of the plot, which was a weakness in the movie's otherwise good writing.
J Jonah Jameson
Everyone, and I mean everyone, was excited to see JK Simmons playing J Jonah Jameson again. Despite liking but not loving Spider-Man: Far From Home, the post-credit teaser with Simmons as Jameson was enough to pique my interest in this movie before I even knew what it would be about. That's pretty amazing for a role that was only a supporting character in the OG Spider-Man trilogy.
What made Simmons as Jameson so great, though, wasn't just the way he spoke, but how he gave the gruff, even ruthless Jameson a human core. Yes, he's an asshole and a terrible boss, but aside from being entertaining, you also see a more human side to him. He even refuses to give up Peter's identity in one of the movies when being threatened by a supervillain.
In this movie, though, he just shows up to be an Alex Jones type asshole without much else being added to him. Hell, we didn't even need to see his good side or otherwise have him be like the original Jameson, but getting to see more of him as a character/person in general would've been nice. Instead we just got a caricature, which felt like a waste considering what Jameson did with the role before.
Happy Hogan
I like the idea of a bumbling but good-natured character doing what he can to help without powers while also giving a more human face to SHIELD after Agent Coulson's death, but they've always had him on the backburner in the MCU Spider-Man movies. It just kinda seems like they could've not included him so that the half-hearted screentime he gets could go to further fleshing out some of the other characters and conflicts in the story? He's a fuller character in some of the other MCU stories, but here he just seems like a filler character in a movie that is already pretty crowded.
OG Aunt May
I completely recognize that this gripe isn't even reasonable or an actual reason to discount the movie. But, hey, I'm a dork, so I'm gonna go with it anyway.
Rosemary Harris, the woman who played Aunt May in the original trilogy, is still alive. She even did a digital commencement speech in 2020, so we know she's still fairly lucid despite being in her 90s. I would have absolutely loved it if they had a post-credit scene of Maguire returning to his universe and visiting his Aunt May. Again, not something to reasonably count against the movie for not having, but man, I can't help but wish it had been included.
Conclusion 
Overall, I liked this movie quite a bit. The strengths very much outweighed the weaknesses for me, which is all you can really ask for from a movie since no story will ever be perfect. It balanced a strong cast of characters, dramatic stakes, fun, nostalgia, and so many other moving parts incredibly well. Even if I thought a couple plates were dropped in the process, it was such an impressive balancing act overall that I left satisfied.
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