Review of Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) by Skeptec — 17 Dec 2021

This movie is ridiculously mediocre. With the large amount of praise allow me to explain with spoilers. The story makes no sense. Spiderman has to get together all of the anomalies from other dimensions so Dr. Strange can make a spell to send them back? So, he gets together all of these villains who are from other dimensions, and he makes this spell, and he's about to hit it and Spiderman decides he doesn't want to because he kills them in other universes. Ok. Understandable. He's a hero. But wait. We find out he didn't get all of them together. There were 2 spidermans who were also from another dimension in this dimension. Wait. Why weren't they needed for Dr. Strange to make that spell? Wait. They don't all have to be in the same place at all for this spell to work either? Then why did we round them up in cells? I'm so confused. Okay, let's ignore all of that. If you saw this movie, remember when Aunt May dies, Spiderman very clearly gets shot in the shoulder. Somehow he instantly heals from that and we hear nothing of it again. He just chills on a rooftop, logistically bleeding out. But the movie just kind of forgot they made him get shot in the shoulder.

Dr. Strange gets defeated in his own mirror world, where he controls everything and is invincible. Tobey survives being stabbed & surviving like it's nothing ruining a high stakes, tragic, heartfelt death scene that could only have logically been stopped because they need him for a future multiverse movie one would presume. (Dr Strange and the MoM anyone?) Electro makes previous Spiderman go unconscious with a single zap, and moves at the speed of light so he can only dodge him with his Spidey sense. This electro is even stronger due to Tony Stark's technology, but cannot kill a Spiderman or even make them unconscious with a solid minute of screen time zapping him.

Let's talk about how out of character the news guy became. He went from needing to literally show up and use helicopters to aggressively film spidermans every move, to suddenly upon hearing spiderman taunt death onto his opponents at the statue of liberty being completely absent. What the heck happened? The writers didn't want a character they made to inconvenience your climactic end fight so they had to make the character act in ways he normally wouldn't. That's just garbage writing.

I'm not even going to touch on how illogical this spell is when people remember spiderman, but don't remember peter parker. It's just confusing as to how the story would have gotten to where it is without that memory when it comes to people like Happy, Aunt May, his friends, etc. and the more you think about it the more you'll want to rip your hair out so let's skip that garbage fire.

The entire movie was designed to give fan service at the cost of a great story like we had in the previous movie Far from Home.

The redeeming qualities are the great fight scenes, seeing 3 spidermans we're familiar with interact and share the screen together, and Willem Dafoe's amazing oscar level acting in this movie. I give it 3 or 4 stars out of 10.