Zendeya

(Video On-Demand, June 2022) While there’s no denying that I liked Spider-Man: No Way Home, I’m also thoroughly vexed at some aspects of the film, what it represents and how it’s at the cutting edge of a bizarre blend of fannish devotion and Hollywood profit maximization. Despite a pre-release no-spoiler campaign that was useless the film started to screen, Spider-Man: No Way Home is going to remain famous for being that one Spider-Man film that acted not only as a capstone to the first Tom Holland trilogy, but also as an epilogue to the previous two Spider-Man film series– in bringing into one single film a bunch of other Spider-Man versions (i.e.: Tobey Maguire and the underrated Andrew Garfield versions) and a handful of villains cherry-picked in those films as well. One imagines a secret narrative R&D lab deep under the Hollywood sign in which the mandate “make more money from fans” led to the discovery of multiverses as a handy excuse to do whatever they could to justify the premise. Some of it definitely rings false – the use of Doctor Strange as an incompetent sorcerer leaves a bad taste, even if the lamp-shading can be amusing. Other details also don’t quite fit – I thought I was misremembering a few details about the earlier films at times, but no – it turns out that the continuity snarls were real and noticed by others as well. Of course, little of this – the weak dumb plotting, the continuity mistakes, the sometimes slap-dash execution – is meant to matter when – hold on to your spiderwebs, fans! – there’s nothing less than three Spider-Men played by their original actors, and the best-known villains of the series to boot. We’re meant to be impressed. Sometimes even touched when the film does for a few contrived emotional moments. Until we remember that there’s nothing that pounds of dollars won’t resolve if the actors are sufficiently motivated and if the lawyers are happy. In this regard, No Way Home acts as a capstone on a perverse portrayal of “intellectual property” as delivering on fannish desires for crossover events. It’s easy enough to see how we got here through the all-devouring MCU – what’s less clear and possibly frightening is where we go from there, transforming the multiplex into the biggest-budgeted TV show in history, incomprehensible unless you’ve consumed everything that came before that time. I sound crotchety and cantankerous, so let’s spend at least a few sentences talking about what I did like about the film: Tom Holland, Zendeya and Marisa Tomei, clearly. Also, Garfield is a great Spider-Man who had the bad luck of starring in less-than-good films. While the overall plotting is weak, some of it is actually ingenious in making sure to maximize the presence of characters from three cinematic universes. I won’t begrudge some choice bits of dialogue, and it’s impossible for me not to like a good old-school pick from De La Soul as musical background to the credit sequence. The MCU style is shown to be a much better fit for the characters, and there’s no denying the feeling of closure for the previous two series – and maybe this one as well. But how much if this is earned, and how much of it is cheap manipulation? Much of it, I suppose, will depend on how many times the same trick is going to be re-used in the next few years.