Spider-Man Far From Home - Spidey needs to go back!

Just saw this. I think I liked Homecoming more - haven’t settled my opinion on FFH yet other than it’s a good movie with some dumb stuff but overall at least it avoids sucking. No match for Endgame but what is?

I liked touching on consequences of people reappearing unchanged after 5 years. At least there’s some acknowledgement that the situation is weird and awkward and a lot of people need to adapt.

It definitely felt like a transition into a new phase of the MCU and a new stage of Spider-Man / Peter Parker’s character development.

not weird at all, they are making sure it’s in theaters for July 4th holiday viewers

TLDR: Perfectly solid Marvel movie, somewhat meh as a Spider-man movie. Homecoming was a much better Spider-man tale. I probably would have enjoyed this one more if they had just come clean and called it what Disney and Sony are clearly going for - “Iron Man Junior.”

I said months ago that Peter Parker touristing around Europe didn’t seem very Spider-man, and the final product didn’t change my mind. Fighting giant city-destroying monsters isn’t very Spider-man, either. Perennial underdog Peter Parker having not one but two gigantic, rich, technologically-advanced organizations (Stark’s and Fury’s) on call also doesn’t feel very much like classic Spider-man. Nor does the fact that in this movie Spidey remains virtually silent throughout most of the fight scenes feel like him: there’s virtually no sign of his trademark quips, and what ones there are (“Going up!”) are throwaways that could come from any summer action hero.

(As an aside, the people behind this version of Spider-man seems to be obsessed with making every single one of his supporting cast act as comic relief, when in fact he’s the Marvel hero who needs it the least. As the recent video game illustrated brilliantly, Spidey acts as his own comic relief.)

Mysterio was pretty good - top third of MCU villains, say - but could have been as great as Homecoming’s Vulture. Mostly it’s the writing and dialogue: it’s perfectly functional but you never suspend disbelief and buy fully into the characters. When Spidey and Mysterio talk after the first fight, you don’t feel anything other than what was doubtless in the original script outline: INSERT SCENE WHERE PETER AND MYSTERIO BOND. And when Mysterio tries to undermine Peter’s confidence - which is pretty much his entire schtick, character-wise - it doesn’t feel especially devastating.

That said, the mid-movie Mysterio sequence was one of the few places that felt like classic Spider-man, the other quintessential Spidey bits being the very end set in NYC as well as the mid-credits scene, for obvious reasons.

The rest of the movie wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t Spider-man. It’s about a guy’s attempts to live up to the legacy of Tony Stark - Iron Man Junior, like I said. It’s about a guy who is expected to fill big shoes, and whenever he tries to do anything different, either fate or the people who expect him to fill the shoes intervene.

That’s a perfectly good character arc, but it’s not Spider-man. Classic Peter Parker is quintessentially the person who has to make it on his own, who has to find his own way, the guy who makes it up on the fly, because his support network is either missing or, as in the case of classic Mae, doesn’t fully understand him.

And we don’t need the “big shoes to fill” character arc in the MCU, because we already had it. That was the driving force behind Tony Stark - trying to live up to/outdo/be/not be his father.

Poor MCU Peter Parker - even his character arc is a hand-me-down from Tony Stark!

Wow, yeah, everything HumanTon just said totally resonates with me. The way they lean on Stark tech in the Holland Spider-Man movies has always been a disappointment, along with taking the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man out of his neighborhood in both movies (this one much more than Homecoming). And I do think it means his personal arc in these movies isn’t the one that best fits Peter Parker and Spider-Man.

I dunno, I agree with everything you said but I like this anyway. It’s a different story but it’s the same essential Spider-Man elements. Tough choices, awkward social interactions, a regular guy (kid) trying to live up to impossible expectations.

Just because he isn’t struggling to pay rent and make web fluid off the same freelance photographer paycheck doesn’t mean this isn’t a Spider-Man movie. Besides, we saw that movie already 20 years ago.

I really, really liked both of the fights against Mysterio. The first one felt like it was lifted right from the pages of a comic and was probably one of the best, truest super hero fights I’ve ever seen in a movie. And the second one showed Spidey at his full potential, when he’s in tune with his powers and is nearly unstoppable. When he used his spider sense to take down the drones in the tower bridge I was absolutely thrilled. It was awesome.

I’m excited to see where they take this. Will Flash Thompson fill the Harry Osborn role? Is Gwen Stacey ever going to come into the picture, or Felicia Hardy? I think she was briefly shown in Homecoming. Honestly I don’t care about any of the other marvel movies coming up other than Spider-Man. Unless they make another Thor.

I thought this was a top 5 MCU movie.

But maybe spoiler out the references to specific plot events or take the discussion to the spoiler thread?

Agreed. We can’t rehash the same Spider-man story so soon after the classic movies, and it wouldn’t work with the current state of the MCU. I am afraid that they’ve made Spidey too capable though. He has too many resources to draw on after this movie, and that’s a problem if you want to tell his tales, unless you buff his enemies.

Yeah this might be the first Marvel movie where the end-credits made me think less of the movie I just watched. Otherwise, I found it worthwhile for advancing Spidey and those around him.

, Spider-man 2 was fifteen years ago, though.

It’s a bit ominous that the movie kept going on about “an Avengers-level threat” when every single one of Spidey’s famous rogues’ gallery … isn’t.

A whole lot of the Spidey-verse I still haven’t seen on the big screen becomes irrelevant if the series becomes “Spider-man, Agent of SHIELD (and also Stark Industries.)”

But it…wasn’t?? Without veering too far into spoiler territory, it was precisely one of Spidey’s rogues’ gallery.

And for my money, I liked the European setting. It’s something we haven’t seen in Spider-Man movies before. The Sam Raimi movies may be pushing two decades by now, but when they’re as iconic as those were, it’s going to be difficult to reboot them…especially when they were just rebooted seven years ago. The more reboots you have, the less tolerant your audience is going to be to newer reboots.

I had the same thought - except for taking place outside of Queens, it was really almost a beat for beat traditional Spidey tale.

Sure, my point is that the movie basically sneers at the idea of fighting things that are less than Avengers-level threats, and also establishes that SHIELD is ready to assign Peter to what they believe to be such threats. The movie is pushing the angle that Peter is now in the big leagues.

Reverting from fighting giant monsters with two giant organizations at his side and going back to fighting street-level threats like Scorpion would feel odd, which makes me fear that’s not the direction they’re going.

What about a vs Lenin movie?

Bah. Venom autocorrected but I’ll let it stand.

I would so fucking watch Spiderman vs. Lenin.

Venom probably won’t happen because of the stupid Venom reboot Sony did. So now we won’t have a Venom that’s acceptable to Marvel, and Sony probably won’t allow them to reboot it again.

Never underestimate the desire of a company to make some real money. They may very well allow Disney to take a crack at it in the future.

Peter himself rebelled at this idea, opting right the fuck out at every chance until he had no other choice.

Technically it wasn’t SHIELD assigning Peter, it was the Skrulls. And they basically admitted that “things went sideways.”