Making that sweet sweet corporate lemonade.
Right at the top, we should talk about the writing of this movie. Our screenwriters are Christ McKenna and Erik Sommers known for some of the best episodes of Community, the first two Marvel Spider-Man movies and the Jumanji reboot. What these two excel at is synthesis and adaptation, the ability to take existing material and turn its seeming limitations into features. The intellectual property of Spider-Man is in a unique place in the realms of moviedom due to the odd financial position of its corporate parentage. Way back in the day before Marvel created its own universe with Iron Man (2008), it was licensing its characters to other movie studies. Its most popular character, Spider-Man, was licensed to Sony, whose first movies in the deal included the Sam Raimi trilogy in the early 2000s that featured Tobey Maguire as Spider-Man and such villains as the Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe), Doctor Octopus (Alfred Molina), and the Sandman (Thomas Haden Church). These were enormously popular movies, but as soon as Raimi and Maguire seemed to be done with the franchise, Sony rebooted it with Andrew Garfield in the title role, Marc Webb directing, and such villains as Rhys Ihfans as the Lizard and Jamie Foxx as Electro. That is, Sony didn’t continue the story, they restarted it. In the first Andrew Garfield movie, Peter Parker is bitten by a radioactive spider etc.
Why? Well two reasons. First, Sony’s contract with Marvel allowed it exclusive rights to make Spider-Man movies just as long as they made at least one Spider-Man movie every five years. Second, Spider-Man’s defining feature is that he is an endearing teenager going through everything for the first time. These two factors combine in Peter Parker getting bitten by a spider in a new blockbuster movie every ten years or so. In 2018, someone at Sony had the great idea of meeting their corporate largess in story-form head on. The resulting animated movie was Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse, which explained the multitude of variations of Peter Parker’s story over the years with the pseudoscientific application of a physics theory called the multiverse. The idea being that there are a multitude of universes and that there is a Spider-Man for each of them ranging from the traditional Peter Parker-Spiderman to Miles Morales as Spiderman (Peter Parker, but black) to Gwen Stacy as Spiderwoman to Peter Porker as Spider-Ham (a spider that was bitten by a radioactive pig) etc. This worked so well, that Marvel used the multiverse as a plot red herring in Spider-Man: Far From Home, and now in Spider-Man: No Way Home fully engages with it. There is indeed a multiverse and it includes all the villains from the Sony franchises of the last twenty years and...all the Spider-mans.
The last sentence was kept well underwraps by Sony and Marvel the past year with much credit to them. I expect now that everyone has seen this movie, it isn’t much of a spoiler anymore. Anyway back to the writing. With great ability, the screenwriters have sorted out the last twenty years of Spider anthology and put together a movie that makes it seem like the whole thing was planned from the very start. Even more so, they end this movie on a note that allows the whole thing to start all over again in the hands of Sony. It is an especially adept way to maintain and extend a giant money making machine. Chris McKenna and Erik Somners deserve to get paid a lot of money.
For the obvious reason, this movie lacks the originality of the previous movies. Like Infinity War and Endgame it feels more like the culmination of plenty of other movies, not something stand alone. It’s a nostalgia tour and one’s appreciation of it would likely be increased or decreased by one’s appreciation of the older movies. For myself, I only saw the Raimi trilogy and the latest Marvel movies (the ones with Tom Holland as Spider-Man) to the exclusion of the Andrew Garfield movies. I’ve become a little more interested than not interested at all in the Garfield movies now.
To illustrate the enduring appeal of Spider-Man one needs only to briefly summarize the plot. Peter Parker has been outed as Spider-Man by Mysterio and is now the subject of intense press speculation. Since Peter is just a humble kid, he would rather not have his private life and that of his sweet Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) and girlfriend MJ (Zendaya) intruded upon. So he goes to Dr. Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) and asks him for a spell that will make the entire universe forget that Peter Parker is Spider-Man. The spell goes haywire and instead of everyone forgetting that Peter is Spider-Man, people from other universes who know that Peter Parker is Spider-Man are pulled into this one, namely villains from past movies. So now we have the same villains from the Raimi and Webb movies in this one and because Marvel is made of money, you get the same actors coming back too. In an inferior movie, this would result in a simple plot of Spider-Man fighting and defeating five villains instead of one. But here, the story takes a really nice, dare I say, cute turn. Once Peter Parker realizes what all of these villains have in common, in the previous movies they all die fighting Spider-Man, he goes out of his way to try to help them. Why, because he has the ability to do so and as Aunt May says in this movie (and this is the first time it is said in a Tom Holland movie), “with great power comes great responsibility.”
That line is as effective as ever and the context in which it is spoken (different yet the same) speaks to the seeming timelessness of the Spider-Man story. For me at least, it has not yet become cliché, instead I got chills. I made this point before in a different Spider-Man movie review and I think I’ll make it again. As Llewyn Davis said, If it isn’t new and it never gets old, it’s a folk song. The same applies to Spider-Man.
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