Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021)

[Mike Blakesley]

I haven't watched too many of the Marvel movies lately, but I have always been a fan of the Spider-Man titles, usually because those movies just have the one hero in them - and therefore, they're less complicated.

This new one, as most people already know, (SPOILER ALERT!!!) brings Spidey in line with many other Marvel movies in that it introduces approximately four dozen villains, multiple Spider-Mans, and I don't know what all else, but I had no idea what was going on for about 95% of the run time. It also has the required magical box that all the characters have to find, use, steal, defend or otherwise protect.

I don't know what it is with these movies. I usually cannot make sense of them. The show is doing gangbuster business here and everyone's raving about it, but I just. Don't. Get. It.

I did enjoy the humorous bits, and the interplay between the various Spideys was great... but I just don't have the bandwidth in my head to accommodate all these various characters, villains, heroes, side stories, who's dead, who's alive, whether somebody is a good guy or a bad guy, what universe it is, what century it is, what planet it is, etc. I have enough to handle with everyday life, I would prefer my movies to be a little easier to digest. The amount of energy people must have to invest to keep track of all the goings-on in the MCU makes me wonder: What kind of daily necessities of life are they ignoring to give themselves time to think about all this stuff?

I am more than happy to make the bank deposits, however. I long ago realized that what I think is great doesn't always match up with with the people like. So this is one of those cases, I guess.

The action scenes were terrific as expected, and I enjoyed the cast -- although not as much as the previous two movies in this trilogy. The sound mix was good if unspectacular.

I'll give it three out of five stars. One extra given the level of business it's doing.

[James Wyrembelski]

I just. Don't. Get. It.

Same.

I give this 5 stars simply based on the fact that the dialogue is intelligible through the entire film. Bravo.

[Martin McCaffery]

I just. Don't. Get. It.

Shorter Mike: Damn kids, get off of my lawn (but leave your money)!

[Mike Blakesley]

Yeah but what's amazing to me is the number of non-kid people that are coming to this movie. We're getting pretty much ALL ages, all the way up to various senior citizens. It's a gen-u-wine phenom, I guess.

I agree with James about the dialogue. Easy to understand everything. Chris Nolan should watch this and learn.

[Martin McCaffery]

From a 60 year old female friend of mine: "I enjoyed Spider-Man, but it was also terrible. Marvel mishmash, but sometimes that is just all you want."

[Bobby Henderson]

Cinema: AMC Patriot 13, Lawton, OK
Screen: #7, IMAX Digital, Seat J15
Format: Dual 2K Projection, 5.1 audio
Presentation Problems: Audio not as loud as usual.
Movie Rating: 3.5 out of 4

I finally got around to watching Spiderman: No Way Home on the local "IMAX" screen we have in town. The theater is only around 6 or so years old but is starting to show its, um, age. Some of the fault goes to the pigs living in my town and how they vandalize the living hell out of things. Assholes. With that aside AMC is dragging its feet on other maintenance issues. The exterior Carmike-themed "Patriot Cinemas" building signs have issues, such as missing channel letter faces. Hell, one still existing sign problem is even visible in Google Maps/Earth:
Google Earth

I'm getting side-tracked. Aside from the theater's aging issues I did have a pretty good time watching this movie. It was a lot of fun. But that took some deliberate work in advance to avoid spoilers, including not looking at this discussion thread at all until AFTER I had seen the movie. Just my opinion, but a movie review that includes spoilers is utterly worthless for the purpose of movie reviews: telling a possible customer if a movie is worth seeing or not. Spoilers ruin it either way. I usually try not to include any in my reviews. And if I do I hide them in the spoiler tag. But in the new version of the Film-Tech forum it appears the Spoiler tag no longer works.

One of the biggest strengths of this movie is also possibly one of its biggest weaknesses. For anyone to get the most out of this show they will have needed to see the three Tobey Maguire Spiderman movies as well as the two Amazing ones with Andrew Garfield to make sense out of this very "meta" Spiderman installment.

My memory of the Tobey Maguire Spiderman trilogy is a lot better than the pair of movies with Andrew Garfield. I had all but forgotten about Rhys Ifans and "The Lizard" villain he played from the first of those two movies. Of course the newer version with Tom Holland is kind of diluted since it looks like Tony Stark takes as much credit for the capabilities of Spiderman as Peter Parker after the bite from the radioactive spider.

I think the Liberty Mutual Insurance commercial where "Doug" lets himself get bit by a spider to be like Spiderman is fucking hilarious. "Did it work?" Then they stuff Doug into the ambulance.

Dr. Otto Octavius (Alfred Molina) has been my favorite villain out of all the Spiderman movies. That is THE movie where I think Marvel finally hit it just right on the big screen. So it was pretty cool for him to have such a pivotal role in this movie. The 2004 Spiderman 2 movie was on a whole other level above the first installment in 2002 with Willem Dafoe playing the Green Goblin. Of course Dafoe didn't disappoint in this movie either. Anyone could have seen one near-tragic incident near the end coming from a mile away though.

SPOILERS

Given various villains from the previous Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield Spiderman sagas were being brought into this movie I sort of anticipated both Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire to also show up too. Thankfully I wasn't disappointed. It was kind of fun seeing three Peter Parkers from different metaverses trying to work together or even keep track of who was who.

What point was there in killing off the Aunt May character in this movie? I guess I understand the point in Tom Holland's Peter Parker character being able to share the same pain as the other two Spidermen for losing Uncle Ben. But the ploy didn't have much of a pay-off. I like Marisa Tomei. They should have kept her around, dammit. Then again there are rumors this was Tom Holland's last outing as the web slinger.

END SPOILERS

It has been well-known that in this new "phase" of movies Marvel was going to dive deep into the metaverse. But by also by acknowledging and re-purposing two previous Spiderman sagas into the current one it's also very "meta" on another level. Almost a sort of fourth wall break level. It's almost like a joke about sequels and re-makes. Yeah, we've re-made these movies multiple times and now as a sort of clever joke we're going to repackage them all into one! With Doctor Strange and his spells as a linchpin it still sort of works. If you can keep up that is.

[Frank Cox]

I'm playing this for my "I've finally reopened the theatre" movie and I'm happy to have discovered that it's not dead yet.

While I'm sure I've missed out on the really big crowds for Spiderman, I'm getting a pretty good turnout anyway and everyone who comes to see it seems to like it.

Personally, I've been kind of superhero-ed out for the past number of years: you need a scorecard and a program to keep track of who did what and when and why, and how the events in the current movie link to the three previous ones and.... and...

I'm sure there are fans who know exactly how everything ties together and if that's their thing, fine.

This movie does have lots of action and doesn't get too bogged down with "legend" so I was entertained. It's ok for what it is, much better than some of the superhero movies.

And of course I'm really happy to have my theatre back up and running again. Yay, now I can have my life back. Finally.

[Mike Blakesley]

Personally, I've been kind of superhero-ed out for the past number of years: you need a scorecard and a program to keep track of who did what and when and why, and how the events in the current movie link to the three previous ones and.... and...

Same here. I have almost zero interest in watching the latest super-extravaganza. I feel sorry for all the other people who like to go to movies but there's hardly anything besides this kind of stuff that does any business, so we wind up bypassing a lot of titles that might interest them.