Spider-Man: No Way Home
A Christmas Miracle
Sometimes I forget that Spider-Man is really just a kid from Queens trying to do good. And never did we get that reminder so much as when Peter Parker tries to consolidate his morals with the right thing to do, which more often than not, refuses to work hand in hand.
The consequences of Spider-Man: Far From Home, when Mysterio reveals Peter Parker’s identity, becomes the catalyst for all of Peter’s problems in the third installment of this Marvel/Disney franchise. It was a rough cliffhanger at best, a gut-wrenching reveal for our teenaged hero and one that made audience members tremble in their seats with fear while also creating the conflict and inciting incident for the next film without it even being out yet.
Now everyone knows he’s Spider-Man thanks to livestreams and Tik Tok. And what do they do about it?
They villainize Peter Parker in spite of all the good he’s done and continues to do. The very people he protects out of the goodness of his heart see him as a threat and give him the hero’s welcome every Vietnam vet received upon return to America.
In a world of superheroes and supervillains and ultra powerful beings, the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man is an easy enough target to pin one’s hate on because he is reachable. He is someone from Queens they can blame for their problems and even though he is just a kid, he ran amok with the Avengers and that makes him dangerous.
This entire movie begins with Peter trying to grab a semblance of the life he had before Mysterio outted him to the world. College admissions. High school life. Relationship and superhero problems all comingling and mixing messily as people deny him the right to a private life.
Peter, seventeen year old that he is, is desperate for what he had before. This snowballs when he realizes he, Ned, and MJ have been denied to MIT for being vigilantes and the people loves around him are being negatively affected because he is the one and only Spider-Man.
This pushes him to a new solution to his problems since he can’t fix it himself: Magic.
Peter seeks out his old friend Doctor Strange and asks him to erase everyone’s memories of him being Spider-Man. Which immediately backfires because Peter probably has ADHD and the heart of a golden retriever, because he wants EVERYONE to forget him except for Love Interest 1, Best Friend 1 + 2, Mom Figure, and the likes of his small, personal group (I find problems with Wong walking away from Strange attempting this spell and from Strange himself trying to show off whilst knowing the implications of his actions without fully confiding these details to his underage peer seeking help. But I digress).
This effectively breaks the Multiverse. Different Spider-Man villains find their way into Tom Holland’s universe and wreak havoc for a bit.
Peter Parker, ever the do-gooder, immediately finds and captures them and, on the urging of his Aunt May, tries to rehabilitate them. There’s a lot to be said about trying to fix broken people and how they cannot be made into projects for those with savior complexes, but in this scenario with this ensemble of villainy, a little R&R and lots of tech makes things better.
Until the Green Goblin proves that some insidious machinations run deeper than a costume. Destruction and death follows their little rehab session in Happy’s condo and we get those tragic last words “With great power, comes great responsibility,” and we say goodbye to Peter’s final familial guardian.
His moral compass shatters in that moment because his do-good attitude got his last remaining relative killed. That means this Peter Parker is on the edge of becoming the Punisher.
The only thing stopping him is a quick therapy session with none other than Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Men thanks to the help of his friends Ned and MJ.
Together, they manage to find treatments for each of their respective villains and the final showdown is truly a stunning visual mantelpiece the rest of the series has to build on.
In this final fight, Tom’s Peter has a moment, his lowest of lows where he can get his revenge and wreak hurt on the man who has wronged him, but…he doesn’t. He saves him instead.
And then in order to save the world that has been nothing but cruel to him, that has slandered his name, and called him a murderer, he makes sure that no one, past or present, will know Peter Parker. The unorthodox spell Strange had wrought in the beginning has come undone in this final battle and the only way to keep villains and monsters across the multiverse from converging on New York is to erase himself from everyone’s memory.
Yet is that even a question for selfless, tragic Peter Parker? What is sacrificing himself, if it means the world can keep on living? Saving himself has never been a solution and from this point on, with anonymity staining his hands, who’s to stop him from putting everyone else’s needs before his own?
As sad as this movie was, this has been a cultural reset for our Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man. An ending to an era, but the time for that boy from Queens to become his own hero on his own terms.