Spider-Man: No Way Home (Pascal Pictures, Marven Studios, Columbia Pictures, Sony, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday at 9 p.m. I ran Charles the movie Spider-Man: No Way Home, third in the current sequence of Spider-Man movies starring Tom Holland as the web-slinger. Directed by Jon Watts from a script by Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers (their names were separated by an ampersand in the credits, indicating that they worked on the script in direct collaboration instead of in sequence) and with Kevin Feige, who began the current cycle of Spider-Man films, as one of the 12 listed producers, Spider-Man: No Way Home is a film that’s pretty confusing from the get-go if you haven’t been religiously following all the films in the current Marvel Cinematic Universe. Spider-Man began as a character in Marvel comic books in the early 1960’s, created by Stan Lee and the reclusive Steve Ditko. The gimmick was that in addition to being a super-powered hero he was also a teenager – his powers stemmed from being bitten by a radioactive spider in a science lab – raised by his Uncle Ben and Aunt May and subject to the usual social pressures of being a high-school student, and a nerdy one at that. Actually, I thought the Spider-Man comics got more interesting when Lee and Ditko let him grow up, especially when they had him enter college and deal with grown-up emotions like alienation and loss – so it’s been somewhat disappointing to me that each new filmic incarnation of Spider-Man has made him younger.

The films with Tom Holland in particular returned him to high school – Holland is actually 26 but he looks 17, his stated age in the films – and cross-fed him into the rest of the Marvel universe. He’s appeared in films with Captain America and Iron Man, and in this movie Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch, who also plays him in his own vehicles, including the current Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness0 has an important supporting role. So does the Multiverse itself, basically the old parallel-worlds concept which appears to have been invented by Jerome Bixby in his 1954 short story “Mirror, Mirror.” The idea is that there are several universes, each with their own versions of Earth, and their histories are roughly similar but with important deviations that become apparent when the different Earths come in contact with each other. (I’m hedging my bets here because I don’t want to be accused of “first-itis” and attribute to Bixby a concept someone else may have thought of earlier.) Bixby later adapted his story into a well-regarded episode of the original Star Trek TV series, also called “Mirror, Mirror,” which featured a parallel universe in which the benign United Federation of Planets was an evil empire, Captain Kirk had a secret machine which could obliterate his enemies, and Mr. Spock had a beard.

Actually, the first half of Spider-Man: No Way Home was a sheer delight, a return to the era in which superhero movies were campy and fun before they took on the dogged seriousness that has sunk a lot of superhero films since. (Exceptions include the 1989 Tim Burton Batman, which achieved a superb balance between camp and real menace; and the 2018 Black Panther, an auteur masterpiece directed and co-written by Ryan Coogler which, as I’ve said about it before, transcended the usual run of superhero movies the way Citizen Kane transcended the run of movies classic-era Hollywood was making about newspapers.) The plot deals with Spider-Man having his identity revealed as Peter Parker and being victimized by a hate campaign launched against him by Daily Bugle publisher J. Jonah Jameson (J. K. Simmons). In the original comics Jameson was Peter Parker’s boss – Parker was a photographer who would use a self-operating camera to take pictures of himself as Spider-Man in action – and Betty Brant was a fellow Daily Bugle employee and Parker’s first girlfriend. In this version the Daily Bugle is no longer a print publication but a Web site, and Brant (Angourie Rice) is one of his newscasters. She’s been assigned to find ammunition for the hate campaign Jameson is waging against Spider-Man for the murder of X-Man Mysterio in a previoius Marvel movie. (Even those of us who haven’t seen that earlier film can assume Parker killed Mysterio in self-defense and to protect the world against Mysterio’s evil scheme involving drone attacks against civilian populations.)

The campaign has reached such a fever pitch that when Parker, his girlfriend Mary Jane Watson (Zendaya) – who works at a coffeehouse under the name “Michelle Jones” – and his best buddy Ned Leeds (Jacob Batalan) all get rejection letters from MIT, which they’re eminently qualified to attend but the school registrar (Paula Newsome) says they won’t be admitted because of “the current controversy” surrounding Parker. Unhappy that not only he but the people he cares about are suffering from his notoriety, Parker seeks the aid of Dr. Strange to wipe out all memories anyone has that Peter Parker and Spider-Man are one and the same. Only he starts thinking of other people he wants to be able to remember, including Mary Jane, Ned, his Aunt May (Marisa Tomei, considerably younger than the character is usually played) and two other people, and his calls for the changes while Dr. Strange is in the middle of casting the spell cause it to go awry. He unleashes some of Spider-Man’s previous super-villains, including Electro (Jamie Foxx), Sandman (Thomas Haden Church), The Lizard (Rhys Ifans), Dr. Octopus (Alfred Molina) and the Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe), all of whom make use of the portal Dr. Strange has inadvertently opened between universes to make it into our world. Parker brings them into the security condo in which he, Aunt May and her current boyfriend Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau, who directed the stand-alone Iron Man films) live.

Hie intent is to cure them of the conditions that turned them villainous so when he and Dr. Strange send them back to their original universes, the Spider-Men in their universes won’t have to kill them. Fortunately the portal also brings back to earth the previous two Spider-Men in Columbia’s film cycle, Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield. Along with Dr. Octopus, whom Spider-Man was able to cure before the Green Goblin pulled the plug on any remaining cures and who is therefore now on the side of good, the three Spider-Men are able to vanquish the villains and administer the cures. Midway through the movie, it takes an odd turn into pathos as our Spider-Man loses Aunt May, whom the Goblin kills in their fortified home, and later it turns out that all three Spider-Men have lost important people in their lives: Spider-Man i lost his Uncle Ben and Spider-Man II lost his previous girlfriend, Gwen Stacy. (In the original comics the sequence of Parker’s love interests was Betty Brant, then Mary Jane Watson and then Gwen Stacy.)

I liked the gimmick of uniting all three of the actors who’ve played Spider-Man in the Columbia sequences and only wish they could have found room for the first live-action Spider-Man, Nicholas Hammond (who was born in 1950, is still alive and played Spider-Man in a 1977 TV-movie that later spawned a TV series; I’m presuming rights issues have prevented these shows from being reissued), whom they could have brought back as an éminence grise. I also liked the way they worked in the entral premikse of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – not a movie I would have exopected to see referenced ini a superhero film – at the end, including an eerie echo of the scene in which the leads of Eternal Sunshinere-0meet after they've been indoced to forget each other and intuitively sense a connection even thugh they have no consciousness of ever having met. Though I don’t think Spider-Man: No Way Home is the greatest Marvel movie ever made – at least of the ones I’ve seen, Black Panther towers over the competition – it’s a fun film, relatively unburdened by the heavy-duty “seriousness” that has afflicted all too many recent superhero films and with some real moments of pathos and loss stuffed in between the action highlights which are the main reasons people pay to see movies like this.