Spider-Man: No Way Home

A Course Correction Dressed as an Event

Superhero/Action ‧ 148 minutes ‧ PG-13 ‧ 2021 ‧ 4 min read

"With great power, there must also come great responsibility."

Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) is directed by Jon Watts and brings Tom Holland's Peter Parker face to face with villains and alternate versions of Spider-Man pulled from across the multiverse. Time has not been kind to it. Once the golden child of the MCU, it's now often subject to heavy ridicule, with people going “I told you so” before defending the other corporate Spidey franchise instead.

The actual take on this film is simple: it is okay. Unlike the mess of Far From Home, No Way Home takes a closer approach to the Peter Parker character, which seems strange given all the multiverse shenanigans going on around him. For the first time since 2017, it feels like the writers have allowed Peter to have a backbone again. This film's Peter makes mistakes of his own volition, defies heroes, helps villains, and is punished for it.

This film even finally has a use for Aunt May, who up until this point had been dragged through the mud in Far From Home. Here she gets to be the moral center of the story instead of a background presence, and her death becomes the actual emotional engine that pushes Peter into the ending we get.

The multiverse stuff is truly the weakest part of the film. It states that this is a “celebration” of the character on film, but all the stylistic choices and actions are still MCU-ish. Neither Raimi's nor Webb's style pokes through here, which is a shame. Everyone gets flattened into the same MCU house style.

The travelers in the third act do what they do best. The older Spidey stands heroically and makes soft jokes, the middle child laughs out loud as his own arc is quickly wrapped up so fans of his can pretend he was good all along. There's real symbolism in the older Spidey stopping his younger self from becoming a killer, making him go back to his essence with the fabric suit and coffee and late-night saves.

No Way Home is a course correction for the character while also being a solid film on its own. In a better world, this would have been the second film, with no multiverse stuff, letting Peter's fall and rebuild happen without needing two other Spider-Men to prop it up. But what we have is a film that finally remembers Peter Parker exists. Spider-Man: No Way Home gets a 2.5 out of 5.

(We must use what we have to try and make sense of the world.)