Spider-Man: Far from Home

The Good:

We have been taking our kids to Spider-Man movies for a long time.  When our sixteen-year-old was his little brother’s age, we took him to Spider-Man 3.  I remember he was frightened of the Sand Man (because he was so big and loud) and fixated on the Harry/Peter storyline.  (“He was his brother, but he betrayed him.”)  

By the time our daughter was that age, Andrew Garfield was Spider-Man.  (She was also concerned about his reckless web-slinging around town.)  Now we have Tom Holland.  

It’s pretty impressive that the Spider-Man franchise has been a major (and regular) summer box office presence for seventeen years.  Most franchises come and go, but Spider-Man is sticky, perpetually hanging around.

Thanks to Marvel, comic book movies have changed a lot in that time.  I remember when Spider-Man 2 came out, everybody was raving that it was the greatest comic book movie ever, the rare sequel that surpassed the original.  But this second Spider-Man feature with Tom Holland doesn’t feel like a sequel.  It’s something else now, the end of Phase 3, the transition into Phase 4.  This is what it feels like, not an attempt to bring popular characters together into a second story, but instead one more installment in an enormous multi-part saga.  You’re not just thinking, “Who will Spider-Man face this time?” or “What will happen to Peter?”   Now you’re asking, “What will the world do now that so many original Avengers are gone?” “What will be the next Marvel movie after this, and what role will Spider-Man play in that?”  “How is everyone coping with Tony Stark’s death?”

Honestly that last question drives the movie as much as anything else.  They probably could have more honestly titled it Spider-Man:  Tony’s Dead.  (If only those Andrew Garfield movies had taken place in the MCU!  Had Tony seen them, he would have known not to make friends with Peter since literally everyone who gets close to him dies.)

Robert Downey Jr. is like a ghost haunting this movie.  Somehow, Spider-Man’s story has become a continuation of Iron Man’s.  The entire plot of this feature is driven by the actions, choices, whims, desires, inventions, failings, loyalties of a dead Avenger.

But we still get plenty of Spider-Man flavor.  Most of the time, we follow the high school trip hi-jinx of Tony, his fellow science club students, and the lovably pathetic teachers chaperoning them.  (Martin Starr and J.B. Smoove push these two to the edge of believability with their wackiness, yet somehow manage to make them sympathetic, funny, and sweet.  I would not want to be the one chaperoning this trip as it descends into what begins to seem like a surrealist nightmare.)

My mother thought the movie spends too much time with the kids, but even she thought both sets of young couples have winning chemistry.  Angourie Rice makes a great addition to the mix as Betty Brant.  I also enjoyed Remy Hii’s bafflingly insecure Brad Davis.  (There’s nothing sexier than ratting someone out!  MJ’s later comment about this behavior is one of the funniest moments in the movie.)  I was glad to have the charming Jacob Batalon back as Ned.  Everyone’s favorite lobby boy, Tony Revolori returns as Flash, too.  A few moments of insight into his character make me wonder if Flash will play a greater role next time around.  Zendaya is great as MJ.  It’s easy to see why Peter would like her. The characters pair beautifully. 

My mom leaned over and whispered to me during the movie, “Marisa Tomei is looking good!”  She sure is! She manages to make May Parker a huge presence in the film even though Aunt May is not even on the same continent as the main events of the story.  Her interactions with Jon Favreau’s Happy Hogan are so fun to watch that I started to want a spin off about the two of them.  

Meanwhile the behavior of Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury and Cobie Smulder’s Maria Hill seemed a little weird to me.  Those were good performances, too, as it turns out.

I also enjoyed the European tour element of the movie.  Who doesn’t love a good European vacation?  (But the idea of having that filthy canal water in Venice leap out and attack me gives me a panic attack even now!  I always remember the bit of trivia that Katharine Hepburn’s one fall into a Venetian canal ended in an incurable eye infection that she had for the rest of her life!  Florence for me, thanks!)

Best Scene:

Independently, my daughter and my husband highly praised the moment when Happy looks at Peter and sees Tony. I don’t want to spoil anything for those haven’t seen the film, so I won’t say anything more specific than that, but I agree that the moment is stirring. It works well.

But for me, the best scene in the movie comes when Peter gains a particular accessory and learns the meaning of a key acronym. I felt like another member of the MCU was making a cameo without actually appearing in the film. I could hear his voice, even though he wasn’t actually speaking. Frankly, it was a bit eerie, but it drove home just how significant these Marvel movies have been to American pop culture. After watching more than ten years of careful world building and painstaking character development, we really know these people. The audience has internalized these characters. They’re a part of us forever, truly iconic like Darth Vader or Mickey Mouse.

I like the rest of the scene, too, just because it’s fun and beautifully illustrates Peter’s anxieties about being unready, inadequate, unworthy. He does seem a bit out of his depth here. But he handles it.

Best Action Sequence:
In one scene, Peter is desperate to tell Nick Fury something and finally encounters him. As we watch, the scene is relentlessly suspenseful and ultimately leaves us wondering. Did Peter tell Nick Fury the information? (Just when we think we know the answer, the movie pulls the rug out from under us again and again. These shenanigans really never stop. They continue into the post credits.)

All of Peter’s mind-bending fights look pretty cool. I most enjoyed watching the battle in London because we happened to see the movie on our twelfth anniversary. The first thing we did on our honeymoon was take the tube to the Tower of London, then walk across the Tower Bridge looking for our hotel on the South Bank. So naturally, the movie’s last big showdown caught and held my attention.  I kept trying (fruitlessly) to find our hotel.  (The South Bank has really grown up in twelve years!)

Honestly, I may have like the attack on the bus best.  Peter creates an awful lot of problems for himself in this movie!  That’s basically the theme of Spider-Man: Far from Home.

Best Scene Visually:
The school newscast illustrating and explaining “the blip” is both funny and informative.

But probably the most compelling scene in the entire film comes in the post credits.  That first post credits scene is really something.  It gives us one thing that I think pretty much everybody wanted (consciously or not).  I was overjoyed about one development.  I thought, “Ah, now everything is as it should be.”  But another turn of events is pretty sinister with huge implications.  (My mother disliked the entire idea of that turn and everything it promises.)

The Negatives:

My husband thought Mysterio was awesome and particularly loved his trippy powers. My mother thought Mysterio was lame, just on the weak side, a bit lacking. I was going to say my own opinion is somewhere in the middle, but to be more accurate, I spent most of the movie vacillating between those two extremes.

I have no complaints at all about Jake Gyllenhaal’s performance, but I found him far more appealing as Mysterio than as Quentin Beck (which I guess was the whole point).

I wish we could have spent more time with Beck’s character. He has a fascinating origin story that makes tons of sense and once again hearkens back to earlier MCU movies. But the character seems to change so quickly. Why?

I mean, I’m with him to a point. I understand his feelings and some of his desires. This all seems more than reasonable. But then as we learn more about him, we see a pretty radical disconnect between his mission statement and his plans.

I feel like Marvel dropped the ball on keeping this character shrouded in mystery when they announced Jake Gyllenhaal had been cast. The news items I read about Gyllenhaal’s casting were pretty blunt about what to expect from his character. The headlines were all, “Jake Gyllenhaal Cast as Next Spider-Man ____.”  So hopefully the movie was not expecting to fool anyone.

That said, I’ll admit that I expected a different course for Mysterio during the film. I acknowledge that his origin story and some of his motivations are very clever, but I thought something would happen to Beck, that a change would be gradual. In fact, he just is the way he is, and we don’t really understand why. Just because he can be? That’s not very satisfying. He seems like a character with so much (unexplored) potential. Mysterio is a great name for him. We’d probably all enjoy spending a little more time with him, but too bad.

It is true, though, that some of his goals and the things that he says–particularly the final thing that he says–are chillingly relevant at the moment. But I wish we knew more about him.  (Maybe one or two of the myriad conspiracy theories about the character floating around the internet will turn out to be true.  That would be fun!)

Another problem in this film is that the stakes sometimes seem weirdly low. Peter is often involved in rescuing his friends, but they never seem all that endangered. This MJ seems fully prepared to rescue herself, and even Ned has his wits about him. 

Maybe part of Marvel’s problem is they put too much thought and care into their work. Watching, I knew, “They’re not going to kill off Happy Hogan because somebody has to be there to bring Morgan Stark cheeseburgers.” From one point of view, it’s a relief to know that unlike Game of Thrones, the MCU is more invested in satisfying audiences than in giving them something unexpected at all costs. But it does kill the suspense. 

The movie doesn’t have much of a choice, though.  It has to lower the stakes.  I mean, we all just watched Infinity War and End Game.  First, half the universe dies…for a while.  Then, those people come back, but some fan favorites meet a more permanent demise.  Marvel can’t just keep upping the stakes.  (“This time we’ll temporarily kill everyone in the universe!”)  There’s nowhere left to go.  Especially if they’re winding up for a whole new global plotline covering another twenty movies, then they’ve pretty much got to bring those stakes way back down.  So nothing in Far from Home feels terribly urgent.  This is more a movie about Peter figuring out what he wants than about saving the world.  That’s okay, but don’t go to this movie expecting an enormous threat.

I do have some more specific questions that I will try to touch on here without spoilers.  What exactly are the boundaries of the gift Peter is given?  What exactly does this do?  How much does it control?  Where are these resources coming from?  What can’t it reach and why not?  Happy is still flying around on a jet doing whatever he wants, and presumably Pepper is somewhere raising her child in comfort and safety.  Where is the government though?  I’d like a clearer explanation here.

Also what we learn in the final post credits scene about a particular character raises so many questions and makes us realize we’ve been taking far too much for granted for the past decade.  Subsequent movies had better give us answers.

Overall:

I liked Spider-Man: Homecoming slightly better because Michael Keaton is so great as the Vulture.  This Spider-Man outing, however, puts more of a spotlight on MJ, who is a very fun character.  Jake Gyllenhaal is a great addition to the MCU, too.  (Remember that time he almost played Spider-Man?)  More than anything, Spider-Man: Far from Home piqued my curiosity about where the MCU is headed now.  For the first time I can remember, I’m not completely sure I know which Marvel movie is coming out next.