*What it says in the title—spoilers ahead!*
Like week, I went in depth on my favorite spoilery aspect of Spider-Man: No Way Home, which is, of course, the three Peters. Today, I want to talk a bit more about my reactions to the rest of the film, a.k.a. everything that wasn’t about making all my Crisis on Infinite Earths-style spider-verse dreams come true.
When it comes to speculated appearances, not everyone who was rumored pops up. We don’t see Kirsten Dunst’s Mary Jane or Emma Stone’s Gwen, and unless you count Venom in the mid-credits scene, we stop one villain short of a Sinister Six. But in addition to the villains from other universes – Green Goblin, Dr. Octopus, Sandman, the Lizard, and Electro – we do get that much-rumored cameo from Charlie Cox as Matt Murdock. While I still don’t think that role required a sighted actor, Cox has always been very good as Matt, and it’s fun to see the MCU proper finally welcoming in characters/actors from the Netflix shows. Matt is great in his short scene, mostly lawyer-focused with one quick bit of Daredevil mojo for the viewers who’ve been waiting for it. Like I said last week, I’m glad I went into the movie without confirmation on any of those casting rumors—I might’ve been all but certain that we were going to see Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield, but I was a lot less sure about Charlie Cox, so it was a delight to see Matt make the jump to the big screen.
As I said in my review, the villains are mostly used well. The story never feels crammed, and the dawning realization that they were all pulled out of their universes shortly before their deaths sets up a realistic conflict for Peter, who of course is a good kid who wouldn’t want to just send them back to die. At the same time, it’s understandable why that puts him at odds with Doctor Strange. Strange isn’t as unfeeling as he sometimes presents himself as, but he’s quite a bit more mercenary than Peter when it comes to focusing on the big picture, and as long as the villains’ presence in the prime universe prevents him from being able to end his misfiring spell, they’re putting reality at risk. I completely get why Doctor Strange would be all, “too bad, so sad, send them back,” just as Peter naturally doesn’t want to do that.
His ultimate plan, to “cure” the villains before returning them home in the hopes that it will allow them to change their futures, might be a little hokey, but I appreciated the sentiment behind it. In 2022, it’s nice to see a superhero film where the answer is to try and help/rehabilitate the baddies rather than kill them or throw them in jail. Yes, it’s a fairly simplistic solution, but it works for me, and it jives with what Spider-Man is all about. Plus, this is the aspect of the film that took my general multi-Doctor-special impression and turned it specifically into “The Day of the Doctor,” which amuses me. As the three Peters make plans to divide and conquer in order for cure the villains, which could lead to some more compassionate conclusions for Tobey and Andrew’s old foes, I could practically hear Matt Smith saying, “This time, there’s three of us!”
By the way, this is the sort of tactic that can just work if you squint when it comes to the Maguire and Garfield Spider-Man franchises. In those days, villains were mostly flawed but non-evil people who completely lose it after a botched experiment and/or falling into a big vat of something. In those cases, if you remove whatever technology has fused to them and interfered in their brain, or reverse the biological reconstruction that’s polluting their thought processes, they can regain control of their faculties and might make better, non-villainous decisions. That’s not really something that works with modern MCU villains. While not all of them are uniformly well-executed, they tend to be people driven by motives rather than baddies “created” by botched experiments. You couldn’t “fix” Killmonger or Hela with a handy syringe to erase their trauma and remove their rage.
Aunt May’s death is disappointing to me, but I do think it stops short of being a classic fridging. Peter Parker’s story has always has this element of trauma and regret, and although the MCU Spider-Man films have made a few very vague allusions to the idea of Uncle Ben, they never showed that loss or Peter’s part in it. I would’ve argued that we just didn’t need to see that origin story again, since it’s still plenty fresh in our minds from the Maguire and Garfield franchises, but transposing that story onto Aunt May works too. What I find interesting about this plot is that, even though it involves the famous, “With great power comes great responsibility,” line, Aunt May’s death shakes out in a very different way. In Spider-Man’s traditional origin story, Uncle Ben is an unexpected casualty when Peter ignores his advice and stands aside when someone is in trouble. But here, Peter has already taken Aunt May’s advice to heart—it’s at her urging that he realizes he has to try to help the villains instead of just sending them back. She dies, not because Peter has a moment of selfishness, but because he’s being selfless, and things go very wrong as he tries to help. Because of this change, the line takes on a different meaning. As Peter holds the dying Aunt May, he’s not cursing himself for not listening to her, as Tobey and Andrew did with Uncle Ben. Instead, as he blames himself, she weakly insists that trying to help others is still always worth it.
The one plot point that really doesn’t work for me, though, comes at the end. Because the spell has gotten out of control and sending the “cured” villains back is no longer enough, Doctor Strange has to cast a new spell, one that causes everyone to forget Peter (Strange and Peter’s goodbye is really nice and feels more earned than I would’ve expected for those two characters.) Before MJ and Ned forget Peter, he swears to them that he’ll find them and tell them who he is, and they’ll be able to rebuild the relationships they once had. MJ is freaked, terrified that something will go wrong and they won’t find their way back to each other, but Peter promises they’ll be together again.
So, of course, that doesn’t happen. He finds MJ and Ned, with a speech prepared explaining himself and their past, but when he sees how content and uncomplicated their lives are without him, he makes the decision that they’d be better off not knowing. And look, I get that he’s trying to protect them. But that’s not his decision to make. He knows how upset they were when he said goodbye to them, and he knows that they wanted to be told the truth again. It makes me mad that he took that choice away from them, and if there’s a fourth movie in this franchise, 1) I want that remedied quickly, and 2) I want MJ to take serious issue with how Peter directly opposed her wishes here.
