Finally decided to watch it.
What happens when you scrape together a shit ton of old stale crap and dump it all over the MCU Spider-Man franchise? You get 'No Way Home'. Being reminded of all those bad movie versions of iconic Spider-Man villains does not make for a good movie.
The metallic version of Green Goblin was always bad. No one needed to be reminded of Jamie Fox's race-swapped Electro (funnily enough, pairing electric powers with black characters was considered a racist trope back in the nineties). Did they ever explain why Octavius wasn't a shredded bullet sponge? Did the Lizard even have a role to play? I can't even recall the motivation for Sandman from the 'original' movie or what compelled him. And where was Venom? (Aside from the end sequence bit part.) They were obviously going for a 'multi-dimensional' Sinister Six approach. Venom would have at least made having three Spider-Men worth the time.
What else sucked?
- Somehow coming up with solutions to all these 'supervillains'' problems within a couple of hours in a high school laboratory.
- Why would MIT be a problem? Stark Enterprises via Happy would probably remove this obstacle with the snap of a finger. Why would he turn to Dr. Strange for a solution?
- And why was Dr. Strange rushing into dangerous spells without carefully planning the perimeters? It went wrong because Dr. Strange allegedly had to modify the spell mid-casting. He was also a medical doctor, which means he should know that good preparation is one half of a successful surgical procedure.
- When things went wrong, they didn't go back to Dr. Strange and instead tried to solve it themselves.
- Where was Wong? He may have decided to stay out of things, but once the fabric of reality was ripping apart, he should have returned.
- Where were the Avengers? This screamed an Avenger problem as soon as the Sinister Six appeared. In the comics, Spider-Man always had help dealing with all six.
Tobey Maguire looked like shit by the way.
Yeah it's been like, twenty years. He's been retired for a reason lol. This was a movie for nobody.
They were going to be sent back at the moment of their deaths or something. What was the point of redeeming them?
There's no point in anything in this movie. It's thrown together schizophrenic nonsense.
The movie was too long, too convoluted, and made no sense.
All of a sudden we're supposed to care about reforming the villains? Why? That was never Spider-Man's MO. Would have made more sense if DareDevil was involved somehow because he actually DOES want to reform people, and it's the common tension between him and Frank because of Matt's faith. For Spider-Man, it just made no sense.
Aunt May dies while trying to convince him to reform Green Goblin.... just... why?!?!
It would be different if this was something present in the other films (to be fair, the other films were also bloated and boring and goofy, so maybe there was a theme of reforming villains and I just missed it?) but sacrificing people to save the villains came out of nowhere. It was like the writer's had to think of something to create the tension and a reason to bring all the villains together, otherwise they would have had to write something really smart to explain how and why Spider-Man would be interacting with them and not the Avengers (which is a good point you made).
The thing is, I'm willing to forgive weak plots if a movie is at least entertaining throughout, but this film was not that. Other than the Green Goblin fight in the apartment complex, all the other fights were overwrought and pointless. The fight with Doc Oc on the bridge was overtly long and had Spider-Man just swinging around and doing stuff but none of it was meaningful. Why should I care Spider-Man is doing a thousand flips and Doc Oc is flinging cars around?
It reminds me of John's Woo's old motto, "Every bullet needs a destination". It's how he frames his action set pieces, and it makes sense from a practicality point of view when it comes to in-universe dangers and audience engagement. If every bullet has a destination, the hero is at risk of getting shot because his cover is being slowly chipped away by gunfire, or every explosion has intent, so someone has a risk of being wounded or damaged, or every punch has a purpose, so damage isn't static; it scales.
In a lot of these cape-slop movies the action doesn't mean anything, and the stakes are all contrived because the movies aren't written to tell compelling, logically-progressive stories, but to hit whatever beats the studios want in order to set up a sequel, add or remove a character, or sell toys. That's exactly how it felt watching Spider-Man No Way Home... they even found a way to undermine Uncle Ben by giving his famous line to Aunt May as a way to really drive home the female empowerment narrative.
Making dr.strange a stupid head was my least favorite part
The "where is everyone else" is a real problem in the MCU in general. Now that every film is connected when other heroes don't step in during the events of standalone movies, it feels weird.
The Infinity Saga did a good job of keeping things localized in the solo movies: Thor was in Asgard with gradual slippage onto Earth, Guardians are nowhere near Earth, Ant Man fights at the Atomic Level. Toomes and Beck were small time and never really grew "dangerous", nothing unlike local crime bosses being tackled by the city PD. If things scaled too large, the consequences would be seen in the other movies.
And with that communication device in his suit directly linked to Stark's satellite network, it does seem a bit off. Or that he wouldn't at least call upon Stark's network as back-up. A couple of AI-piloted Iron Man suits or something.
Too many options.
So you know nothing about Spider-Man and didn't watch the film, got it.
Peter Parker is one of the smartest characters in the comics, he's up there with Reed Richards, Bruce Banner, Tony Stark, and the more recent DEIverse additions that includes Black Panther and Moon Girl. He invented not only his webshooters in most versions of the comic, but the webbing used in them.
Both previous versions of Spider-Man explicitly spell out they know how to cure Green Goblin and Lizard because they have either been working on it for years [Green Goblin], or already done so [Lizard - and again highlighting just how smart Peter is at having done this in the first ASM film].
Doc Ock only needed the AI in his arms controlled, which he himself managed at the end of Spider-Man 2 through sheer willpower anyway, so using the entirety of Stark Tech to come up with a chip to do just that isn't the biggest leap since that's the general premise of Tony and Ironman anyway.
Sandman literally shows up helping Spider-Man when they both meet Electro, and only really runs when shit turns south in the apartment. He was at best an anti-hero who repeatedly makes bad judgement calls and gets labelled as a villain because of it.
As for Electro, same problem with most villains, Sinister Six lineup in particular, too much power, goes insane. Green Goblin is the same, as is Doc Ock. The human brain is not built for these things and when it happens things go bad. Something that's a fairly regular point throughout Marvel comics, and the whole point of the film in trying to cure the villains who for the most part never asked for any of this to happen to them.
Green Goblin: Took the serum on his own, his fault, and one of the few to actually be in that position.
Doc Ock: Lab/experiment accident breaks the control chip, arm AI takes over.
Sandman: Wrong place, wrong time, gets turned into living sand.
Electro: Falls into a vat of eels.
Bad things happen to them, and bad things follow, but for 3 of the 4 said bad things happening to them were not because they chose it to happen. That's why Peter is trying to redeem them.
He's messing with the timelines of several multiverses. It just doesn't make sense.
And it's a high school lab. They aren't in the habit of carrying chemical and biological agents capable of the things Parker wanted them for. It's stupid.
Why even bother goign to MIT? Hes spiderman nott some engineering student
Probably for the 100k college experience per year.
Also he knows Happy and Pepper, like he wouldn't be hired by them in some hero contractor type deal.
It was more fun than I expected but not something I'd ever watch again. Definitely a turn your brain off and just enjoy the spectacle kinda movie
Yeah, it was several layers of stupid, mostly saved by the extraordinary effort to make everything seem polished. Except for the lousy CGI for Sandman, of course.
No capeshit
The truly amusing part was the Goblin was cured and sent back... only to say ".... oh." and get impaled by his glider.