Thoughts on Spider-Man: No Way Home

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.

The Problem With Canto Bight

(WARNING: THIS POST IS NECK DEEP IN SPOILER TERRITORY)

Earlier today I finally had the chance to rewatch The Last Jedi (Movie Pass rules, y'all).  I enjoyed it the second time, just as I enjoyed it the first.  To me the movie is a well-made, exciting sequel to The Force Awakens that gets a lot of things right, though not quite everything.  Not everyone agrees, though.  Personally I think The Last Jedi is so divisive because it is somehow, paradoxically, both incredibly similar yet strikingly different from the Original Trilogy and The Force Awakens.  I could say more, but this post isn't about my opinion of the movie as a whole.

One of the most common criticisms of the movie is of the story thread involving Finn and Rose going to Canto Bight in order to find a codebreaker to help them mess up the tracking device that has allowed the First Order to track the Resistance ships.  A lot of people complained that this whole story thread was "pointless" because our two heroes don't succeed in delivering the code or otherwise doing something from that ship that ultimately helps them defeat The First Order.

Simply put, those people are wrong.  However, that doesn't mean there isn't a serious problem with Canto Bight.  There is.  But we'll get to that in a moment.

The real problem, obviously, is how these intergalactic war profiteers choose to dress.

First, let's tackle the fact that Canto Bight is significant.  The movie not so subtly explains that Poe's habit of repeatedly risking everything on incredibly risky plans to save the day is wrong.  We've gotten so used to one in a million gambits succeeding in most blockbuster movies that we don't know what to think when they don't, and that's exactly what this movie is trying to get at.  Finn and Rose failing means that the trip to Canto Bight is a lesson for the characters in service of the theme of the story.

Not just a lesson for Poe, either.  The whole movie preaches the (very basic, yet very important) message that past failure is something to be learned from.  This theme is the through-line of not just the Canto Bight story thread, but the entire movie.  Luke is stuck drowning in his past failures, until he decides to learn from his past while stilling moving forward and undoing the wrongs he has caused.  Kylo Ren wants to discard the past entirely, rather than learn from it, clearly on course by the end of the movie to repeat many of the same mistakes his grandfather did while he was Darth Vader (insert that saying about those not learning from the past being doomed to repeat it).  Rey still holds onto the idea of her parents as space wizard royalty, unable to accept the idea that her past isn't linked to the stories of galactic wizards and space monarchs that she grew up on, until Kylo forces her to confront the truth.

Canto Bight therefore serves to reinforce the thematic undercurrent of the entire movie, as it serves as a failure for Poe, Finn, and Rose to learn from.

So, yeah, it's pretty silly to say that this story thread is pointless.  That doesn't mean it's without problems, however.  And I think this problem is something that a lot of people intuitively picked up on but didn't know how to articulate, hence the vague accusations of it being "pointless" when talking about it.  The main problem here is a problem of character agency.

Damn it, not (secret) agent characters.  Character agency!

For anyone unfamiliar with the term character agency, it simply means how much a character's choices and subsequent actions affect the plot.  Not in the generic, big picture summary of a character (Poe Dameron fights the First Order as a Resistance pilot) but in the minute-to-minute minutia of the story.  Let's stick with Poe Dameron as an example.  We wouldn't say he has character agency because he is a fighter pilot.  Rather, we have to track his actions scene by scene.  In the opening sequence he destroys the turrets bombing the Resistance fleet, then goes against Leia's orders to retreat and destroys a giant spaceship at the cost of all of the Resistance's bombers (as well as many, many casualties).  From there he clashes with Holdo over what to do with the fleet.  He sends off Finn and Rose to their mission, then even stages a friggin mutiny, managing to hold control of the ship until the Canto Bight mission fails and Leia reclaims control of the ship.

I could go on, but I'll stop there.  The main point is that Poe is constantly an active participant in the moment-to-moment happenings of the plot, whether or not his actions produce their intended goals.  Nothing just happens to him, he is always making choices and acting on them in ways that have consequences.  The same can be said for pretty much all the main players of The Last Jedi: Rey, Kylo Ren, Leia (when she's awake), even Luke, as his initial refusal to do anything is itself a choice that produces important consequences.  Basically, character agency is about being an active participant in the plot.  How each character participates tells us about who they are, and the effects their actions have are what (should) drive the plot forward.

The main problem with the Canto Bight story thread is that Finn and Rose don't really have character agency once they get there.

Now, everything leading up to the Canto Bight side quest absolutely does give them agency.  Finn and Rose use their special knowledge as characters to figure out the existence of the tracking beacon and what they need to do to disable it, they choose to act on that knowledge to save the Resistance, they team up with Poe (who still hasn't learned his lesson on the dangers of betting it all on a risky gambit), they go to Canto Bight.  So far so good.  They're making big choices that both reveal about who they are as characters while moving the plot forward.

And even when we get there, it's not so bad because we get some good character moments.  Finn, who lived a suffocating, contained life as a storm trooper is floored by how marvelous Canto Bight looks.  Its glamorous, opulent atmosphere captivates him, but Rose tells him to look between the lines and see what that sort of opulence is built on: war profiteering, exploitation of the poor (including child slaves), and animal cruelty.  She then goes on to say she wants to bring it on down.

Time to seize the means of (galactic star destroyer) production!

Then they get arrested when they are on the cusp of finding the codebreaker, and everything goes downhill.  But it's really, really important to realize something here: getting arrested is not the problem.  It's that they don't actively make meaningful choices for most of the rest of the movie.  Rather, they become passive participants, merely along for the ride as things just sorta happen around them.

When they get arrested, they don't do a single thing to find Benicio Del Toro's hacker character.  No interesting choices or actions that tell us about their characters or push the plot forward.  Instead they miraculously stumble upon this hacker by complete luck and he breaks them all out (without any help from the two of them). After they turn the corner, they do nothing to evade capture from the guards because, surprise, BB-8 has tied up all the guards there!  Which, aside from magically getting them out of danger in a way that doesn't offer Finn and Rose any difficult or interesting choices, makes no sense when BB-8 required saving from Rey in the first movie against literally just one junkyard scavenger when Rey first met him.  So now Finn and Rose have both found their codebreaker and escaped without doing anything noteworthy at all to accomplish either goal.  Nothing here shows us about who they are as people or contributes to everything going on around them.  It's not at all earned.

Then, when they're going through the service tunnels, the only real choice they make is... free a bunch of animals instead of child slaves.  Yikes.  At least they made a choice that pushes the plot forward, I guess?  After that they engage in a cringeworthy Prequel Trilogy-esque chase scene on those space chocobos and are almost captured... until Del Toro and BB-8 bail them out, again.  On the ship Rose does exercise agency by choosing to give her pendant to Del Toro in payment for his services, showing the audience that as a character she is willing to part with things that mean a lot to her if it means protecting those she cares about in the present.  More choices/active participation like that would've been nice.

But then, when Del Toro's character is breaking the shit out of some codes, they get caught.  Again, getting caught is not the problem.  But their subsequent escape is not a result of anything they do.  They only get out because Holdo sacrificed herself to buy time for the escaping Resistance fighters.  They they escape after Finn beats Phasma (who has been rendered pretty unthreatening to the audience after being unceremoniously thrown into the trash heap in The Force Awakens) by being lucky enough to have a rising platform catch him.

But at least Mission: Create A Character As Cool-Looking But Useless As Boba Fett was a smashing success!

So, to sum it all up, the only time Finn and Rose have any character agency between first getting captured by security on Canto Bight to rejoining the Resistance is (1)when they choose to free the space chocobos and ride them through Canto Bight (cringeworthy) and (2)when Rose gives Space Hacker her pendant (actual good character moment).  In that entire span of time, those were the only two times Finn and Rose had meaningful agency.  That's why so many came away feeling this part was pointless, even though it certainly wasn't on a thematic level, a plot level, or on a character level for Poe (and even Finn and Rose in the beginning).

The point of this post isn't to shit on the movie (which, like I said above, I very much enjoyed; I plan to write a post about an aspect I really liked tomorrow).  Rather, I wanted to look at the part most people didn't like and analyze exactly why it didn't work.  Sometimes in discussing movies, we focus on saying why something we loved was awesome or why something we hated was terrible.  There's nothing wrong with that, of course, but I think it can be helpful to also pick apart specific things we thought did or didn't work in any given movie, regardless of whatever opinion we have of it as a whole.

Thanks for reading!

Conflict in Rick and Morty

I haven't watched very much television over the last few years.  Not because I consider myself above it, but because grad school and work have kept me busy, and what little free time I have is squandered elsewhere.  Usually the internet.  The only new television shows I've given a chance over the last few years have been Arrow, which I like, The Walking Dead, which I like when the writing team actually tries, and Rick and Morty, which has blown me away with its creative world-building, humor that ranges from unrelentingly dark to unapologetically goofy, and existentialist undertones that make us question what it is to be human.  Only two seasons in, this show has already joined Futurama and The Boondocks as my favorite episodic* shows of all time.

An entire book could be written about the brilliance of Rick and Morty, but like I did with Hayao Miyazaki movies before, this post will focus specifically on conflict.  In this case we'll look at the way this show approaches conflict, and how this approach gives it tremendous opportunities for thematic exploration in a way that most other TV shows could only dream of.

"Hiiiii, I'm a creative representation of the crushing despair

that comes with being unable to fulfill one's purpose on life!  Look at me!"

Regardless of medium, conflict is usually thought of as the driving force of any story.  Most plotlines can be boiled down to a character, or characters, facing adversity and finishing somewhere on the spectrum between success and failure.  The underlying idea is that you're watching characters face challenges and respond to them in an engaging way.  Sometimes they succeed in their goals, sometimes they don't.  Sometimes their goals change.  There are tons of different ways to structure and carry out a story, but what pushes everything forward is the conflict that challenges the character(s).

Rick and Morty takes that concept in creative, thought-provoking directions.  In an unhinged sci-fi universe with aliens, alternate dimensions, and technology far beyond our own, there are plenty of chances for titular characters Rick and Morty to face serious external danger.  And they do.  The interesting thing about this show, though, is that we often don't feel like the main characters are in serious danger when Rick is around.  Usually, with his trademark IDGAF attitude, he whips out some crazy invention that takes care of their problems.  The conflict comes not from their external circumstances but from more human, internal sources when everyone is trying to deal with the way Rick "solved" the problem.

Take the above clip, a seemingly normal pre-opening credits scene that many television comedies use for quick throwaway gags.  Here we have a simple conflict: Rick wants butter, but it's across the table from him.  In a lesser sci-fi comedy scene, we might see Rick invent some sort of makeshift robot arm to reach across the table.  The humor would come from the fact that, for a super genius, creating a complex tool is preferable to simply reaching over to get some butter.

Instead, Rick creates a self-aware robot that isn't entirely sure of its purpose in life.  It passes the butter for Rick, then learns that this is the entire reason for its existence.  Looking down at its robotic arms after this revelation, it mutters "oh my God" in despair, crushed by the realization that all it will ever be is a tool to fetch butter.  Rick nonchalantly responds "welcome to the club", implying that human existence isn't much more meaningful either.

This is all done as an opening gag.  Many TV shows will never reach the thematic complexity in the entirety of their run time.

Now, of course this is only a response to an insignificant conflict, not a major conflict that drives the episode.  But this little intro serves as a perfect microcosm to what often happens in this show: a problem emerges, Rick solves it with an incredible gadget, and we're left dealing with the moral consequences of Rick's actions.  To see what I mean, let's look at one of my favorite episodes, Big Trouble in Little Sanchez.  Of course, THIS MEANS SPOILERS.

TINY SPOILERS!

The initial driving conflict of this episode is that a vampire is loose somewhere in the high school of Morty and Summer, Rick's grandkids.  Rick transfers his consciousness into the body of a younger clone of himself in order to help Morty and Summer track down said vampire.  Together, Tiny Rick and his grandkids hunt down this threat before it claims the lives of any more people.

If Rick and Morty followed a more conventional format, the entire episode would be about them trying to take out the monster while trying to keep Rick's secret, who would of course have trouble fitting in.  Instead, Rick gains the approval of the school's kids instantly.  About five minutes into the episode the group has already taken out the vampire (who is never even seen in the episode) and less than five minutes after that Morty casually mentions the secret identity of his grandpa, to zero consequence.  The usual external conflicts that would normally drive this sort of episode are completely dropped by the wayside.

So what conflict drives the story after Rick and company breeze right through these external conflicts?  Well, Tiny Rick is a teenage clone of Rick, and that clone's brain has trouble completely absorbing some of the heavier/darker thoughts.  As Summer puts it: "when you put your mind into this body's young brain, it did what young brains do: it shoved the bad thoughts into the back and put a wall around them.  But those bad thoughts are the real Rick.  The fact that you're old, the fact that we're all going to die one day, the fact that the universe is so big that nothing in it matters, those facts are who you are.  So you're trapped in there, and you can only come out in the form of Tiny Rick's teen angst!"

On second thought, nevermind, this sounds totally healthy.

As Tiny Rick pushes back the dark thoughts that permeate normal Rick's mind, Summer tries to get him back.  Morty initially tries to avoid the problem because of how many points Tiny Ricky scores for his popularity with his crush, Jessica.  Eventually he acknowledges that Rick needs help and the two of them confront Rick.  The climax of the episode comes when they make him face his buried existential angst so that he can come to his senses and return to his old body.

What makes this direction for the episode noteworthy is that it forces us as viewers to grapple with our own lives, our own existential angst and personal demons.  Not by ham-fisted monologues about how we need to confront these issues, but by Rick having a small meltdown as soon as he acknowledges he has been hiding from these questions as a teenager.  As Rick despairs over his own mortality and all the uncertainty that comes with life, we as the audience are challenged to consider these questions ourselves in a direct and poignant way.

This is what happens more often with stories that are driven by more internal conflicts: we can take a moment to examine, and even confront, certain parts of our own feelings and thoughts as we watch fictional characters do the same on screen.  This post is not to say that all conflict should be internal or asking deeply human questions about who we are, that would be just as limiting as having only external, action-oriented conflict.  There's a full range of issues we face as human beings and a full spectrum of ways to represent that in the stories we tell.  But it's nice to see a show daring to be different, structured in a way uncommon for its genre, and asking these sorts of questions that aren't often asked, due in large part to how it structures its conflict.

Thanks for reading!

*"Episodic" shows meaning shows where each episode has its own standalone plot, as compared to serial shows where every episode is following a grand, overarching plot.