Spider-Man: No Way Home, one last spin on the web (review)
Critical essay without (too much) spoilers.
Attention, event evening Sunday evening on TF1: one week later Far From Homethe channel is programming in the clear for the first time Spider-Man: No Way Home, by Jon Watts. With nearly $2 billion in global revenue, this Sony-Marvel co-production was a hit at the turn of 2021-2022.
Its success was notably due to the promise of a superhero reunion never before seen in the cinema. In live action, in any case, since New Generation/Across the Spider-Verse based on this same concept of multiverse in animation. In this context, it is difficult not to spoil anything at all in our review of the blockbuster worn by Tom Holland and Zendaya, but that is nevertheless what First tried to do upon his release.
Here is our opinion, almost guaranteed without spoilers!
Kevin Feige: 'Traveling across the Marvel multiverse is very, very dangerous'
Difficult to talk about Spider-Man: No Way Home without depriving of its pleasure the public who surely tried to navigate the promo of the latest Marvel, itself vacillating between the corporate injunctions of absolute mystery and the spoilers widely distributed by the promo itself. In short, all this to say that we know from the film poster that Spider-Man (Tom Holland) will face supervillains who appeared in the first five Spider-Man films, therefore Sam Raimi's first trilogy with Tobey Maguire (initiated in 2002) and the two 2010s films starring Andrew Garfield. This is due to a problem with a poorly cast spell by Doctor Strange, which turns the multiverse upside down and which will also cause… Hmm. Here, we are really entering dangerous territory – in fact, thinking about it, it would seem that any attempt at critical discourse on the film cannot avoid mentioning major key elements of the plot – these famous big spoilers. What to do, then? We'll try to take it easy: but if you ever want to stay absolutely blank, stop reading now. And here is the trailer to make you want to go see it as quickly as possible, just in case.
So where were we? Spider-Man has his identity revealed at the end of Far From Home, and he is accused of having killed the good Mysterio. Seeing his life collapsing, just like that of his close friends, he asks Doctor Strange to cast a spell to erase Peter Parker's name from the minds of the entire planet. Fate messes up, the multiverse cracks, and bad guys arrive: yes, the film does reappear Octopus (Alfred Molina), the Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe), the Sandman (Thomas Haden Church), plus the Lizard ( Rhys Ifans) and Electro (Jamie Foxx). But not Venom (Topher Grace) or Harry Osborn (James Franco). And other surprise characters, obviously: in theory, it's great since cinema is taking advantage of a technique – the transitions of characters from one series to another – that we thought was reserved for comic strips, a medium who doesn't have too many budget concerns to worry about. But there you have it, these references and cameos are certainly delightful, but the film has difficulty using them to do anything other than a big fan service. These characters belong to other productions, therefore other writings, the actors have taken between twenty and ten years in the teeth and here they are brutally flattened to the neat formula of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (a pitfall that the pretty Spider-Man: New Generationalso based on the meeting of characters and multiverses, did not have to manage).
Speaking of cleanliness, Spidey tries less to defeat his super-adversaries than to cure them, each carrying his superpowers like a nasty disease. Is the illness a pathology, a nasty cold that can be corrected with serum? We can see this narrative process, basically not very elegant, as a flirtation with revisionism, an attempt to correct and resolve the films before which had the affront of not following the good old Marvel formula -the one of story arcs producer favorites being the redemption of villains who were never so bad in the end (yes, even Thanos). Too bad, because this parallel earthquake remains a good idea for cinema: the reappearance of two other key characters gives rise to a scene that is undoubtedly extraordinarily moving. We dream of what a more daring franchise would have made of this dizzying cinematic possibility of being able to seize its past incarnations: but here we are, we are in the MCU and we must sacrifice to its paradigm. Holland remains charming, Zendaya is wonderful, Cumberbatch is great, the humor is as inconsistent as his characters, everyone has a good time and the action scenes are even funny enough to keep the attention (a nice scene of highway where Spidey almost does real superhero work, and a chase in the “mirror dimension”)…
Beyond its clash of multiverses which still occupies almost the entire film, No Way Home should also be seen as the conclusion of the Spider-Man trilogy with Tom. Another paradox to resolve? No, because in that regard, things are going pretty well: Marvel has serious experience in the field of super melodrama, and fans will be in heaven – especially in the ending scene, sufficiently open and fragile for us to dying to tell it to you, but there, really, we would be entering the path of the most hardcore disclosure – a real path of no return, in short.
Too much fan service in Spider-Man: No Way Home?
