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OUR RATING:
5/5 Stars
WHAT IT'S ABOUT:
After Mysterio revealed Spider-Man's identity to the entire world, Peter Parker is pushed to seek the help of Dr Strange to create a spell that would make the world forget this fact. As spells are wont to do, it goes very wrong. As a consequence, villains from across the multiverse (and previous Spider-man movies) suddenly find themselves in the middle of Peter's world, the world we know as the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
WHAT WE THOUGHT:
It feels an awful lot like, over the past couple of years, there have only been two real conversations centred around the world of film. First, after the pandemic gave streaming services first rights to brand new film releases and people got more and more used to watching even fairly big blockbuster releases on their TVs, laptops, Tablets, or, heaven help us, their phones, the question has been asked time and time again what place there still is for increasingly expensive visits to the cinema.
The second conversation, of course, revolves around the Marvel Cinematic Universe itself, as big-time director after big-time director has decided to come after the MCU for not just ruining cinema but for not being cinema in the first place. Sure, huge blockbusters have been a staple of cinema since Star Wars blasted onto our screens forty-five years ago. A great many of those blockbusters fall well short of even the worst MCU films, but, apparently, it's not Michael Bay's Transformers or the increasingly imbecilic Pirates of the Caribbean movies that are ruining cinema but the likes of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Thor Ragnarok.
As I sat through the credits of this, the eighth live-action Spider-Man film of this still very young century, waiting, as always, for the latest tease for what's to come in the saga of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, these discussions once again came to mind. I realised then that not only had Spider-Man: No Way Home given a most definitive answer to both whether the MCU is "real cinema" and whether we still need actual cinemas, it proved that maybe there is such a thing as a stupid question, after all.
I want to give away as little about the film as humanly possible, but let's just say that No Way Home is a true love letter to Spider-Man and a culmination of everything that came before (in a way unmatched by anything outside of Avengers: Endgame). So, when the audience around me broke into an explosion of cheers and wild applause multiple times throughout the film – and sometimes clearly choking back a tear or two – it spoke to me not just of how very, very, very good the film itself is, but something more profound about the cinema experience and superhero movies as well.
Spider-Man: No Way Home is an exceptional Spider-Man movie and as good a piece of blockbuster filmmaking as you could hope to find outside of a very small handful of established classics. Director, Jon Watts, is far from the MCU's most visually exciting filmmaker, but what he lacks in style, he more than makes up for in control.
Spider-Man: No Way Home is now showing in cinemas.
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