With his identity now revealed to the world, Peter Parker (Tom Holland) finds his whole life upended. It’s no longer fun or easy to be a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, but Peter finds a way out when he asks Doctor Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) to cast a spell to make the world forget. Cocky as ever, Doctor Strange agrees, but after the magic spell backfires, Spider-Man gets more than he bargained for when the multiverse drops some of its worst villains (Willem Dafoe, Alfred Molina, Jamie Foxx, and more) into his world.
As there usually is with this sort of movie, there’s a tension between how much to review and how much to preserve over and against spoiling the film. Suffice it to say that the marketing has well and truly revealed that a few familiar faces are returning in the form of spider-villains past, so it’s fair game to talk about what a joy it is to see the likes of Dafoe and Molina in particular. These performers remind us how iconic their original turns were while layering in something new, turning fan service into an art form; there are reprises of famous lines and moments, but deployed with a winking reverence instead of simply putting coins in a jukebox.
There’s more to the film, as there often is with a Marvel movie, that shouldn’t be spoiled, and many fans (myself included) will have anticipated at least some of it. My sense is that the things we didn’t predict will land a little better than the things we did, if only because we’ve had years to try to guess what No Way Home might do – and, in some ways, a film this highly anticipated can end up feeling a bit like a composite of all guesses on the internet. Kudos, though, to Kevin Feige and the rest of the Marvel crew for sifting through the fan service and the cameos to find an emotionally resonant core for this iteration of Spider-Man.
That core, finally, brings Tom Holland’s Spider-Man the closest he’s ever been to the original Stan Lee and Steve Ditko comics. Where the preceding films had treated Peter Parker as a kind of protégé for the technocratic Tony Stark, outrigging him with enough gadgets and super-suits to make Batman blush, No Way Home strips that back for the post-Endgame world and gets into the poignant purpose behind Spider-Man. After years of fumfering around the quotation (and I’m including Andrew Garfield’s duology in that indictment), we finally come back to the idea – and No Way Home actually gets the line right – that “with great power, there must also come great responsibility.” I won’t spoil how the refrain comes up, nor how elegantly it’s hammered home in one of the better-acted scenes of the film, but it’s a point that this Peter Parker has sorely needed to learn.
One thing that’s held the Holland trilogy together has been the supporting roles played by MCU heavy-hitters Robert Downey Jr. and Samuel L. Jackson. For No Way Home, it’s Benedict Cumberbatch as Doctor Strange, but for the first time the relationship isn’t one of veneration. Instead, when they meet, both Peter Parker and Stephen Strange are flawed characters, arrogant and cocky (in the way that Cumberbatch does better than nearly anyone else in the MCU), and by the end of the film, Peter has, remarkably, learned from Doctor Strange’s negative example and pursued a better, harder path. One hopes that Doctor Strange has learned just as much too, though in his example let’s not forget, “the warnings come after the spells.” (See you in The Multiverse of Madness, eh?)
In the way that Avengers: Endgame reminded us all why we like Marvel movies, No Way Home fairly becomes an ur-text for why Spider-Man stories matter and why we have spent twenty years watching films (of admittedly variable quality) about this amazing, spectacular hero. We’re rooting for this impossibly optimistic kid who keeps trying to do the right thing, even when it’s the hard thing, even when it costs him. After twenty years, there’s more to him than just corporate synergy or pure nostalgia, and one feels that – finally – the creators of this film care just as much about the character we do. After an overfull Spider-Man 3 in 2007 and the desperate grab for franchises in 2014’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2, No Way Home feels like building the future and honoring the past all at once, not jumping ahead to what some Hollywood bean counter thinks will maximize profit but rather acknowledging and celebrating Spider-Man fandom itself. It’s terrific, it’s fun, and it’s emotional, and I can’t wait to see it again.
