Spider-Man: No Way Home (Jon Watts, December 17, 2021) Movie • Page 82

Jealous

 

Tree-nos was right

 

I thought this was very ok but personally disappointing because I thought Shang Chi was very good and reinvigorated some excitement for the MCU and then this was just mehhhhhh.

 

That movie was great if you like clapping at the screen in the theater instead of caring about any kind of story

 

I enjoy clapping at the story like a real gentlemen

 

A few of the big story beats in this don’t work. Why is Holland Spidey ready to kill Green Goblin suddenly at the end after he’s already had a couple character moments with May and the other Peter’s where we understand him to be past that desire for vengeance? He’s quipping and focused on the plan the entire final battle until he’s one on one with Dafoe and to say explicitly he wants to murder him, which doesn’t fit with the character journey, feels like they just wanted the moment of Tobey intervening and then getting stabbed.

Also the idea of “curing” these villains doesn’t hold up particularly well to critical scrutiny, the Peters craft these solutions to “fix” them but all it does is take away the physical supervillain powers/elements, ignoring the psychology of what’s driving these characters and their motivations. I get the plot justifications of it but for a surprisingly (for Watts/the MCU) nuanced thematic arc, there’s not actually any nuance. Doc Ock’s mind changes like a flip switched, and there’s no tension to him showing up in the final battle. Would have played better if even after being “cured” the MCU Peter and friends still weren’t sure where his head was at, and then you can have him meet up with Electro at the final battle and legitimately support him until he meets Maguire Peter, where you could write a way more resonant turn to helping the heroes against the sinister four or five or whatever.

 

For Osborne and Ock, it was like a Switch was flipped. They were both generally good men (or an ok man in Osborne’s case) until taking the Goblin serum and having the inhibitor chip damaged, respectively. Fixing their villain powers fixed their minds also. Same goes for Lizard, really. To the extent that isn’t dramatically satisfying, those are issues carried over from their original films, not a problem created by this one.

Sandman was never really a “bad guy”, at least from the time we saw him in SM3. He was a criminal but he was already trying to be better. He basically killed Uncle Ben by accident iirc (haven’t seen the movie in a while). He just wanted to see his daughter again.

Electro was really the only one of the group who seemed to actually enjoy his abilities and wasn’t interested in becoming “good” again.

 

Osbourne was still greedy and a negligent father to Harry before the serum, and this Ock was fresh off losing his wife and that didn’t play into anything he did

 

We see that Osborne wants to be a better person already when he briefly regains control of himself. He just needs help getting rid of the Goblin persona. And Ock’s hatred for Spider-Man is partially a result of Spider-Man being “responsible” for his wife’s death by trying to interfere with the reactor and shut it down, so really it played into everything he did.

 

If a theme of redemption and second chances and doing the right thing despite the burning desire for vengeance are the arena you’re playing in, Doc Ock has all that going on and for it not to explicitly be a part of his arc in this film is baffling. The “cure” idea mostly works with Dafoe, and kind of works with Electro, since he’s never fully on board with the idea of giving up his power, though if we’re supposed to carry the arcs of previous films into this one his is the weakest partially because he’s a completely different person in this movie, but Ock is a clean slate once the arms are fixed and that’s an easy way out, dramatically.

 

Ock is still going to go back and have to sacrifice himself to save the city so really he still gets that same payoff anyway

But the Raimi movies already made it clear that Osborne and Octavius are not the ones actually choosing to cause all the death and destruction in those movies. It’s their evil personas, the Goblin and the arms. Once you remove those personas, they aren’t supervillains anymore. That’s simplistic but it’s simplistic because the Raimi movies were simpler by design. If you have a problem with that, it’s a problem that goes back to the original movies. This movie can’t just rewrite that aspect of them.

 

Right but their villainous impulses come from their psychology and the things they’re going through. Which is why there’s a great opportunity for this film, not another film that already exists, to further reinforce the story it’s trying to tell by using its own unique story of redemption with Ock and its weird that it didn’t do so when Alfred Molina and Tobey Maguire both meet in this movie. You know the instant Ock shows up at the Statue of Liberty which side he’s on, there’s no tension, no character arc reaching a climax, it’s just a fakeout that lasts half a second

 

I don’t think it’s true that their villainous impulses come from their psychology. The villainous impulses come from the serum and the damaged inhibitor chip. It really is that simple (by design, Raimi was keeping it simple on purpose). Their psychology caused them to create the conditions whereby Osborne takes the serum (pride and anger at the project being taken out of his hands) and Octavius has the chip damaged (blind belief in his own genius to the point that he’d turn on an experimental fusion reactor in an apartment in Manhattan with nobody wearing any safety equipment), but without those two events neither man would be a supervillain. We literally see in this movie that Osborne becomes a “good guy” when the Goblin isn’t in control. He isn’t still a villain because of his psychology. The Goblin is the villain. Just like with Octavius, the arms are the villain, he himself isn’t.

Also the reason why we know right away what side he’s on at the statute of liberty is precisely because *we remember from SM2 that the damaged chip is the only thing making him evil.* Fixing the chip turns him into a good guy again.

But anyway I don’t even know why I’m wasting my time here.

 

100%

 

Y’all are remembering the Raimi movies as being way more complex than they actually were lol (and again, that’s not a bad thing, it was by design)

 

The Raimi movies are simple but they’re not Power Rangers, Ock and Dafoe’s characters are motivated by what they’ve been through and yes, grapple with the external forces that influence them negatively, but everything they do is in service of the things they’ve experienced and that’s where the motivation comes from. It makes this film stronger if, when faced with a cure, that struggle isn’t so simple, which is why Dafoe is the best part! Ock had potential to be really great in this too, they just opted not to delve into it with him

 

K

 

Didn’t Doc Oct change from villain to hero in an instant in SM2 as soon as the arms were no longer in control? I don’t see any difference between that and NWH. Both set it pretty clear that no arms = no villainous intentions.

 

Yup.

 

Yeah they were an advanced AI IIRC that were able to use him for their own devices once that inhibitor chip fried

 

i liked Molina’s performance a good amount but i agree the writing for his character was a bit odd, which is par for the course in these three movies

 

If you haven't read Siddhant Adlakha's recaps of all the live action Spider-Man movies they're great, and his No Way Home review articulated why the climax didn't work for me

but why the ending still kind of does

https://www.ign.com/articles/spider-man-no-way-home-peter-parker-most-difficult-choice-spidey-saga

though taking three movies to get Peter to a status quo where he makes a choice that Maguire's Peter makes in his first movie is part of why I've found the MCU's version of him so frustrating

 

It's laughable this is now #8 on IMDB and #31 on Letterboxd of all time. Chill out guys lol