Reel Entropy

8/10 Spider-Man: No Way Home is everything you want from it. No expense has been spared, no stone is left unturned, no fan is left unserviced. If you have a question about this movie, the answer is “Yes!”

This is the first major crossover movie, a type of comic book issue where characters from multiple titles come together in a way that promises to reorder the continuity, which was unheard of in a feature film just 10 years ago, since legendary director Martin Scorsese put his foot in his mouth about Marvel movies in 2019, and entering the theater for Spider-Man: No Way Home feels to me like venturing into enemy territory in a way that no other film ever has. Everyone’s in costume and screaming in anticipation, and the movie’s great and we all have a wild good time, but the sense that they aren’t here for what I’m here for has never been clearer. The sense of an oppressed cultural minority finally getting its day on the silver screen, which first happened in the ‘70s and ‘80s, has somehow carried through to a generation that grew up with these characters dominating our Saturday morning cartoons and holding a vice-grip on the box office that would make the Parker brothers blush, has only increased over time as that “cultural minority” has become a greater and greater share of the mainstream.

Since that two month span in 2008 when Iron Man announced serialized comic book-style storytelling would follow it into theaters and The Dark Knight established movies about men in tights could put conventional movies to shame anyway, comic book movies haven’t been mergers. They’ve slowly become competitions for which storytelling conventions, which theories of audience behavior, will dominate. Spider-Man: No Way Home is “for the fans” in a way that no other movie, even a comic book movie, has ever been.