Spider-Man: No Way Home Has a Peter Parker Problem
Spider-Man: No Way Home. Image courtesy of Marvel and Sony.
Spider-Man: No Way Home is a mega-success. For it to have made so much money, in so many countries, even during these pandemic times is a testament to the awesome hold that this simple story of a boy with spider powers has on the hearts and minds of the entire world. It also kind of hints at how badly Sony was managing this IP, turning what hould have been a license to print money into a faltering franchise before Marvel entered the picture.
And I liked No Way Home, for what it is. I really appreciate the difficulty of pulling all the old Spider-Mans and villains from other dimensions into this one, the cameos from the Netflix shows. It was a fun moment, getting everyone back together again, contracts and studios and legal hurdles be damned. I also very much like that they are building up the existence of the Multi-verse so they can take the Loki series, and Doctor Strange and other properties into increasingly weird and wild directions. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse helped lay the groundwork for all this, and now the live action films are carrying the weight. That’s cool. It opens a lot of possibilities for future films.
I have written before that I like Tom Holland’s take on Spider-Man, and the Marvel-Sony collaboration has so far been fruitful. There’s been a nice balance between Peter’s high school coming of age story-line, and the super hero stuff. But this template is starting to show a little bit of wear and tear, and there was an obvious quibble that jumped out at me while watching No Way Home: in each film Peter Parker gets himself into trouble by doing something incredibly stupid, and then spends the back half of the movie resolving it.
In Homecoming, it wasn’t actually that bad. He disobeyed Tony and tried to fight Elderly Batman on his own, which Tony warned him could get people killed. But you expect super heroes to push back against such strictures and fight bad guys. That’s their whole reason for being, so it was hard to fault Peter there. Then in Far From Home he does something much stupider, which is give the awesome power of a drone space missile system to some doofus wearing a biodome who he had just met.
The entire plot of Far From Home was complete gibberish, so you have to kind of roll with it, but looking back Peter was starting to develop a very bad habit of doing insanely stupid things just so he can have a redemptive arc in the third act. I don’t really mind if my super hero movies don’t make complete sense, but when the writing is obviously forcing something over and over that makes the character into actually quite an idiot, it begins to stick out.
The worst example was in No Way Home, however. A bunch of villains have been sucked into your world and you have them all captured and ready to be returned. Perfect. Let’s call it a day. But what does Peter actually do? He lets them out so he can cure them of their evilness, and as a direct result of this inexplicably stupid decision Aunt May is killed. This isn’t like some run of the mill teenage super hero oopsie. He gets his only aunt killed. And for no reason, except to redeem some super villains from other dimensions that he doesn’t know and will never see again.
From a story perspective I understand what the writers were doing. Instead of having a generic good vs evil showdown they flipped the script so that the audience ends up kind of rooting for the villains to be repurposed and saved. And it gives the actors, some of whom were arguably given very little to work with in previous installments, more to do. And then of course, it gives Peter another redemptive arc in the third act where - with the help of some unexpected companions - he cleans up the mess he made.
But it just kind of bugged me that he had to suddenly lose all sense in order to set up this redemptive third act and give the villains a bit more to do with their parts. Could they not have thought up a better inciting event that didn’t involve Peter making a colossally (and obviously so) wrong decision that ends up getting Aunt May killed? It just seems like these story structures are getting a little repetitive, with the writers thinking up increasingly over-the-top bad choices for Peter to make just so he can save the day (from the mess he himself created) during the climax.
Hopefully, in the next film, they don’t go back to that well.
