Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) Review

Official trailer

Spider-Man: No Way Home is the film that turned twenty years of Spider-Man movies into one event. Three actors who played the part, five villains from earlier films, and a spell that cracks the multiverse open. Jon Watts directed, Tom Holland leads, and Benedict Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange supplies the magic that starts the trouble. Willem Dafoe, Alfred Molina, Jamie Foxx, Thomas Haden Church and Rhys Ifans return as villains from the Raimi and Webb films, and Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield turn up as their own Peter Parkers.

It made about $1.9 billion in a pandemic year and sits high in IMDb’s user rankings. The rating on this page is theirs. Spider-Man has never been a character I care about, so nothing here pretends to be a personal verdict on the film. Coming at it from outside, I think it’s a clever piece of engineering. Bringing back every old villain and two retired Peters is a shameless move, and I admire the nerve of it even though the film is aimed at a crowd I’m not part of.

The Setup

The film picks up on the last shot of Far From Home, with Mysterio’s recording naming Peter Parker as Spider-Man to the whole world. Peter’s life collapses: reporters at the door, a federal investigation, and college rejections for MJ and Ned that have nothing to do with their grades. So Peter asks Doctor Strange to make the world forget. Strange agrees and starts the spell, then Peter keeps interrupting it with exceptions until the spell breaks open. What comes through the crack are people from other universes who know Spider-Man’s identity: Norman Osborn, Otto Octavius, Max Dillon, Flint Marko and Curt Connors. Peter’s problem goes from a public relations disaster to five supervillains loose in Queens.

The Nostalgia Machine

Structurally, it’s a reunion. Molina’s Doc Ock arrives with the same arms and the same theme. Dafoe’s Green Goblin hasn’t aged in twenty years and still gets the best lines. Maguire and Garfield come through the portal to a roar that studios spend fortunes trying to buy.

That reunion is also the film’s whole commercial argument. Audiences didn’t turn out for a new story about Peter Parker. They turned out to see three Spider-Men in one frame, and the film knows it, staging the moment like a curtain call.

There’s a cost to that, and it’s the standard cost of nostalgia in modern franchises: the film’s biggest moments belong to other films. Take out the audience’s history with Raimi’s 2002 picture and Dafoe’s return is just another villain walking through a door.

That dependency is what keeps me from warming to the film. A reunion only works on people who were at the first party, and a movie that needs twenty years of somebody else’s work to land its big moments is borrowing more than it’s building.

What It Does Well

Its old villains come across as people instead of trophies. Peter decides to cure them instead of sending them home to die, and that turns a crossover into an argument about whether a hero owes anything to the men trying to kill him. Curing the villains is the choice I respect most here. It hands Peter a moral problem where the premise only promised a crowd scene, and that’s a grown-up idea to hang on a crossover. Dafoe carries that argument. His Norman Osborn flips between a broken old man asking for help and something that enjoys hurting people, and the switch is frightening in a film that’s otherwise a parade of cameos.

It’s also the first of the Holland films to make Peter pay for anything. Aunt May dies because of his decision to cure Osborn instead of deporting him, and the line she leaves him with is the one the character has needed since 2016.

The Three Spider-Men

The rooftop scenes between the three Peters are the film’s most-quoted material, and they work because the actors play the differences instead of the joke. Maguire’s Peter is older and calmer. Garfield’s is still carrying Gwen Stacy. Holland’s is the youngest and the angriest.

Garfield gets the best of it. His Peter catches MJ in an echo of the fall he couldn’t stop in his own film, and it’s a more satisfying resolution than the film that owed it to him ever delivered. Garfield’s catch is the one beat that almost makes me care about these movies. Giving an actor a do-over on the fall that defined his own run is a generous piece of writing, and I think it’s the kindest thing the film does for anybody.

The risk with three leads is dilution, and the film mostly dodges it by giving each Peter one thing to do and one thing to resolve. Nobody’s arc is deep, but nobody’s arc is wasted either.

Holland, Zendaya and Batalon

Tom Holland has played this part since 2016, and this is the film that finally gives him something heavy to carry. The scenes after May’s death are the best acting in his run, and the last twenty minutes ask him to play a Peter Parker with nothing left.

Zendaya’s MJ is dry and guarded, always the smarter choice for this version of the character, and it pays off in the final scene when Peter stands in front of her and says nothing. Jacob Batalon’s Ned is comic relief with one useful trick, and the film doesn’t overwork him.

Marisa Tomei’s Aunt May gets the death the MCU had been saving, and the line she leaves Peter with has the weight Uncle Ben’s line has in every other version of this story. Whether the film justifies it depends on how much credit you give the five films that came before.

The Ending

The spell has to be finished, and the only version that works erases Peter Parker from everyone’s memory. MJ, Ned, his classmates, the city: nobody will know he existed.

He goes to tell them anyway, then doesn’t. He ends the film in a small apartment, sewing his own suit, alone and anonymous. That’s where the character started in the comics, and where the MCU had never allowed him to be.

The erasure is the smartest call in the film. Ending a two-hour celebration with Peter alone in a small apartment, sewing his own suit, takes guts from a studio that usually throws its heroes a parade, and it’s the one choice here that makes me curious about the character. It’s a hard ending for a film that spent two hours on fan service, and it’s the reason plenty of viewers rate it as high as they do. The reunion is the spectacle. The erasure is the price.

Why the Score Is So High

An 8.2 on IMDb puts this above most superhero films ever made, and part of that is timing. It opened in December 2021, when audiences were coming back to theaters, and it played like an event.

The rest is the reunion. User ratings measure enthusiasm as much as quality, and a film engineered to make a specific audience cheer will always score well with that audience. Whether it holds up for viewers with no attachment to the earlier films is a different question, and one the score can’t answer. That’s the usual gap between a crowd rating and a critical one.

Critics came in lower and warmer than the users did, somewhere around ‘the best of the Holland films’ without calling it the best superhero film ever made. Three years on, that looks like the fair position. The reunion still works. The plot that holds it together is thin, and the film needs five earlier movies to do most of its heavy lifting.

Craft Note

Is Spider-Man: No Way Home worth watching?

If you’ve followed the Spider-Man films since 2002, IMDb’s 8.2 tells you what that audience thought of seeing all of it collide. The villains are the best part, Dafoe especially, and the ending costs the hero more than these films usually do.

There’s no rating from me on this page, and the number above belongs to the crowd. Judging the choices alone, I’d give it real credit for Dafoe, for the cure plot and for an ending that costs Peter everything, and I’d hold back for how much of its punch comes from other people’s movies.

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