Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021)
Directed by Jon Watts
Peter Parker is unmasked and no longer able to separate his normal life from the high-stakes of being a super-hero. When he asks for help from Doctor Strange the stakes become even more dangerous, forcing him to discover what it truly means to be Spider-Man.
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32 films that influenced Spider-Man: No Way Home
What critics say influenced Spider-Man: No Way Home
Anyway, there’s some sort of problem, involving portals and alternate realities and a Mirror Dimension, which looks like outtakes from Christopher Nolan’s “Inception,” and . . .
If anything, he doubles down on it, dialling all three up to eleven – the action is amazing (especially when Spidey is duking it out with Doctor Strange in an Inception -inspired mirrorverse), the humour is note perfect (there are some genuinely brilliant meta gags) and the emotion...well, let's just say that long-term Spidey fans would be well advised to bring tissues.
Indeed, while "No Way Home" offers plenty of splashy MCU action — including a trippy fight set in the "Inception"-style Mirror Dimension from "Doctor Strange" — it’s the character scenes that are most consequential.
His run in the role has been categorized by looming mentor figures and larger MCU maintenance; if Homecoming (and, to a lesser extent, Far From Home ) doubled as Iron Man movies, this one feels like half a Doctor Strange story, adding a skirmish in the Inception - ish mirror dimension to an already crowded two-and-a-half hours of plot and spectacle.
Watts’ virtuoso camerawork and Michael Giacchino’s lively score help too while the special effects are just as visually impressive (the trippy Inception-like set-piece comes to mind).
Arguments between Avengers being what they are, Spidey and Strange duke it out in a magical realm where the scenery goes all Inception y on them, then Spidey steals a magic doodad and sets off to cure the bad guys.
As you’d likely recall, the concept of the Spider-Man multiverse was utilised to staggeringly impressive results in 2018’s Oscar-winning animated delight Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse .
On that note, it’s easy, but also somewhat unfair, to compare No Way Home to the animated 2018 film, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse , which itself had a level of singular, standalone magic to its vibrant world and memorable characters.
Granted, the idea should be familiar to anyone who saw 2018’s animated “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,” which introduced the thrilling possibility that virtually anyone could be Spidey.
Like 2018’s animated Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse , Spider-Man: No Way Home unites multiple Spideys: Tom Holland’s MCU-approved version, of course, as well as—public press tour denials to the contrary—Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield’s prior iterations.
What I will say is that, from there "NWH" largely ditches the idea of being a "Far From Home" sequel to, instead, be a film that wants to replicate the success of Sony's 2018 Oscar-winning animated film "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse."
The only real issue is that we've already seen all of that before, namely in 2018's fantastic animated flick, "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse."
Using characters from the non-MCU films not only enables the franchise to establish the existence of the multiverse, a concept that will have major implications for future MCU films, it’s also an act of fan service that will be appreciated by anyone who’s enjoyed a Spidey film since Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man debuted in 2002.
The concept of assembling the likes of Iron Man, Captain America, Hulk and more in a big screen canon used to be an extreme pipe dream, but that idea seems exceptionally simple and obvious now that we are nearly a decade past the release of 2012’s The Avengers and have experienced everything that the MCU has accomplished, from Captain America: Civil War to Avengers: Endgame .
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The concept of assembling the likes of Iron Man, Captain America, Hulk and more in a big screen canon used to be an extreme pipe dream, but that idea seems exceptionally simple and obvious now that we are nearly a decade past the release of 2012’s The Avengers and have experienced everything that the MCU has accomplished, from Captain America: Civil War to Avengers: Endgame .
He still has some learning to do on his quest to be more than that "Spider-boy" Tony Stark first met in 2016's "Captain America: Civil War."
Tom Holland excels a lot in his role as Peter Parker/Spider-Man and this is easily his best one ever seen since he first donned the iconic Spidey suit in Captain America: Civil War (2017).
The Spider-Man who swings away in the final frame of "No Way Home" is not the one who first answered Tony Stark's call in 2016's "Captain America: Civil War," and that's a great thing.
The latest film, Spider-Man: No Way Home , has a lot of stakes to it, serving as not just a continuation of Holland’s version of the character, but also moving forward the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which Spider-Man officially joined in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War .
Holland was only 19 when he landed this role (he made his scene-stealing first appearance in 2016’s “Captain America: Civil War”).
Call that the street-level challenge of Spider-Man: No Way Home , which brings up the second and cruder Samuel L. Jackson line going all the way back to Pulp Fiction of “You’re sending The Wolf? Shit, negro, that’s all you had to say!” Bringing that forward to this occasion, The Wolf is Marvel czar Kevin Feige.
It’s “Risky Business” for the Avengers set, only instead of Tom Cruise dancing in his underwear it’s Tom Holland swinging around on spiderwebs.
“Spider-Man: No Way Home” takes its inspiration from the blockbuster success of the animated “Into the Spider-Verse,” which toyed with the physics concept, sampled on “Star Trek” and embraced like the Holy Grail in comic books, that there are infinite universes, infinite versions of life on Earth and in the cosmos and infinite Spider-Men.
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"No Way Home" turns out to be a bit of a Christmas movie as well, with an intriguing “It’s a Wonderful Life”-esque vibe giving new perspective to its central character.
The 2016 Ghostbusters flirted with creating a world where the 1984 Ghostbusters never existed, yet the actors from the same stricken film were asked to play along as a constant distraction of what 2016 wasn’t — a problem wisely fixed in Ghostbusters: Afterlife.