Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021)

The premise

At the end of Far From Home, Peter Parker (Tom Holland) was framed for murder and unmasked as Spider-Man in front of the whole world. His life is upended, and so are the futures of his friends MJ (Zendaya) and Ned Leeds (Jacob Batalon).

Peter goes to Dr. Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) and asks for a spell that will make everyone forget he is Spider-Man. The spell goes wrong, the multiverse cracks open, and visitors from other realities start turning up in Peter's world.

How it handles time

Nobody travels through time here. The film's business is other universes, and it gets there through a wish. Wikipedia traces the story to an idea similar to It's a Wonderful Life (1946), with Peter making a wish about his public identity. That idea is what brought in Strange and the multiverse.

The mechanism is a spell with one weak point: Peter. He keeps asking for exceptions while Strange is casting it, and the changes corrupt it. Strange contains the spell, but by then people from other universes who know Spider-Man's secret identity have already been pulled in. On paper, that's a clear rule.

Everything past that rule is soft, and the writers admit it. Chris McKenna told TheWrap that the documents defining what the spell does, and what "the box" does, were still being written during production. For the forgetting, Erik Sommers said they considered a Back to the Future-style fade from photos, then dropped it because it raised too many questions, such as whether Peter would still have a driver's license. McKenna settled for "Obviously, some sort of magical redaction has occurred."

Strange also knows less than you'd expect. The film was first written to follow Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and when the release order swapped, he lost his firsthand experience of the multiverse. McKenna told Variety that this "makes it even more frightening … because it's the fear of the unknown."

Why this spell crossed universes at all gets two answers. Marvel supplied one afterward, when Kevin Feige said that "Loki and Sylvie did something at the end of [Loki] that sort of allowed all of this to be possible." The writers didn't plan that. Sommers told TheWrap the story was already set when the Loki finale aired, though the finale "really helps" because "it shows that there's trouble in the Multiverse." Asked whether the timing lines up, McKenna said, "I don't know, I don't know."

What works

The film knows the difference between a crossover and a story. McKenna said it "wasn't going to be just curtain calls for everybody," and that it "told the story of this Peter Parker right now." I think that's why it still works once you know the surprises.

Holland holds it together. Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote that "Holland remains the best of the cinematic Spider-Men," and he credited Zendaya with the "heart and smarts and warmth" she brings to every scene. Nicholas Barber at the BBC praised a screenplay that "interweaves teen-angst soap opera and cosmic calamity," which is a fair description of the first act.

Cumberbatch's Strange makes a good foil. In McKenna's words, he's "the voice of reason going, 'You don't mess with the fate of an individual.'" Michael Giacchino's score reworks his own Doctor Strange themes.

The audience reaction was enormous. It was the first live-action Spider-Man film to earn an A+ CinemaScore. It was also the highest-grossing film of 2021, and at the time the sixth-highest-grossing film ever. It won the Saturn Award for Best Superhero Film and was nominated for the Oscar for Best Visual Effects.

What doesn't

The plot only starts because Peter can't stop talking during a spell. Hannah Strong of Little White Lies found it "grating seeing the same character repeatedly fail to learn any lessons." I'm kinder than that, but I see her point in the first hour.

It's also proudly built out of earlier movies. Jake Cole of Slant called it "pure fan service, a greatest-hits mashup of Spider-Man's cinematic legacy." Robbie Collin of The Telegraph said it is what these films always are, "source material for its own advertising campaign," but "in this instance, it's little more." Richard Lawson of Vanity Fair felt the "brand Frankensteining" left "really no time for quirk and texture."

Not everyone felt the emotion, either. Bilge Ebiri of Vulture wrote that "even the film's more intimate moments fall flat." Benjamin Lee of The Guardian was more generous: "It's flawed for sure but still moves with more deftness than most."

Final score

Overall: 8/10. A crowd-pleaser that points its fan service at one Peter's growing up, held back by a careless setup and a lot of borrowed nostalgia.

Paradox Meter: 2/5. One clear rule (the spell pulls in whoever knows), surrounded by magic the writers kept vague on purpose and a cross-universe explanation Marvel supplied later.

If you liked this

2019 · Film

Avengers: Endgame

8/10Paradox 3/5

Read the review →

2016 · Film

Doctor Strange

7/10Paradox 3/5

Read the review →

2022 · Film

Everything Everywhere All at Once

9/10Paradox 3/5

Read the review →

• Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022): the direct follow-on, which this film was first written to come after. (not on the site yet)
• It's a Wonderful Life (1946): the story grew from an idea similar to it, with Peter making a wish. (not on the site yet)