Spider-Man 3: No Way Home

[Kaitou D. Kid]

Or himself...Peter's entire origin is about the fact that being brilliant and intelligent doesn't mean you are above making mistakes or dodging responsibility, or the fact that innocent people pay the price for that. Peter's past that beat in his character arc.

As a side-bar, this always irked me with adaptations that usually frame some mentor figure for Peter to aspire to as a father figure, so that they can hit the beat about power-and-responsibility by having the mentor turn evil or revealed to have feet of clay as with Molina's Ock in Spider-Man 2 (which is probably the start of Peter "shopping for substitute daddies" trope though that was only there for a few scenes at the start), then Curt Connors in TASM-1, then the PS4 game, and Tony Stark in the MCU.

616 Spider-Man comics never really did those kind of arcs because it was redundant, the character already has that guilt issue he's grappling with, you don't need to redo that all the time because it's boring, and it's stupid and hampers your character.



It's because of casting. Robert Downey Jr. is too big a star for someone as lowly as Tom Holland (a character actor with some independent movies and who, even in his MCU movies, has never carried a movie on his own) to be shown on-screen to challenge him. Tom Holland is fundamentally a character actor, i.e. someone who largely plays off other actors and bounces off them, rather than effectively lead a film entirely on his own presence.

If you look at all the choices made in the MCU movies, it's largely done to ensure that Holland Spidey almost always has a two-hander (i.e. scene with him and another actor) bouncing off one another character. Why does Spider-Man have an AI companion to interact with? Well the director Jon Watts said that he wanted to simulate the comics where Peter narrates on panel and he found this a way to do that (why he didn't use a voiceover, which literally does just that, is beyond me), but the actual answer is to ensure that Tom Holland is always in that "aw shucks whiny-explainy mode" of gushing and excitement before someone with more knowledge. It's a way to ensure the character is constantly in a state of immaturity. All the big character scenes in the MCU movies has Holland having on-screen interactions with established actors and character actors -- so it's Holland and RDJ, Holland and Michael Keaton, Holland and Gyllenhaal, Holland and Favreau, Holland and Samuel L. Jackson* -- and so on and so forth. Next movie will likely have Holland and JK Simmons (i.e. Whiplash II), Holland and Cumberbatch, and Holland and whoever the villain will be.

* (This isn't to you, Kaitou, but to anyone else don't @me that Fury in FFH is a Skrull...not important, what we see on screen is the actual Samuel L. Jackson browbeating the actual Tom Holland).

I never thought about it that way, but you're right about Spidey's origin being all about how brilliant people can still make mistakes. Damn, what an awkward thing to point out about a Spider-Man whose origin we're not even entirely sure happened.

I liked the use of the AI to replicate the monologues, but a voice over would have been better. Part of that might also be because they thought it would look out of place since nine of MCU films have done voiceovers.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

I never thought about it that way, but you're right about Spidey's origin being all about how brilliant people can still make mistakes. Damn, what an awkward thing to point out about a Spider-Man whose origin we're not even entirely sure happened.

Nowadays movie people think in extreme tendencies. So to do the origin you have to do it and redo it, or simply not mention it. A middle-approach i.e. referring to Ben occassionally, or having May and Peter discuss Ben one or two times, simply doesn't commute. They also made Aunt May into a complete joke of the character in the movie and utterly wasted Marisa Tomei's talents all so Jon Favreau gets to mug on screen.

[Frontier]

Nowadays movie people think in extreme tendencies. So to do the origin you have to do it and redo it, or simply not mention it. A middle-approach i.e. referring to Ben occassionally, or having May and Peter discuss Ben one or two times, simply doesn't commute. They also made Aunt May into a complete joke of the character in the movie and utterly wasted Marisa Tomei's talents all so Jon Favreau gets to mug on screen.

People complain about the ASM films wasting Sally Field but I can't say Marisa Tomei's been much better.

[Jewel Runner]

We can use the bolded part to justify Peter admiring any scientist from Marvel, including Norman Osborn.

Also, the issue isn't simple admiration but blind admiration. Even if something like that can be justified with Spider-Man, he never has his T'Challa moment where he finally stops putting his idols on a pedestal.

And this is where it becomes hard to take this seriously.
For one Norman Osborne wasn't a superhero who saved the world multiple times, and then blind admiration?
What's supposed to be blind about it? Tony's not only an accomplished scientist but a superhero who's saved the world multiple times, there's no reason not to look up to him

[Frontier]

And this is where it becomes hard to take this seriously.
For one Norman Osborne wasn't a superhero who saved the world multiple times, and then blind admiration?
What's supposed to be blind about it? Tony's not only an accomplished scientist but a superhero who's saved the world multiple times, there's no reason not to look up to him

I just don't think they handled it in the movies very well, at least in a way that didn't compromise Peter or Spider-Man's character and mythos.

[Jewel Runner]

To be quite blunt whether you liked it or not means very little to me.

[Frontier]

To be quite blunt whether you liked it or not means very little to me.

Fair enough. We're all allowed our opinions .

[Revolutionary_Jack]

People complain about the ASM films wasting Sally Field but I can't say Marisa Tomei's been much better.

Sally Field actually had a lot of good acting moments in those movies. Whatever my issues with the TASM movies, for the most part they were well cast. It's just that the writing, the direction, the visual aesthetics, and overall conception of the project didn't quite know how to handle and bring stuff to a close with any of the cast.

In the case of Marisa Tomei as Aunt May, it's a good example of what happens when a movie casts based on the online chatter that would come, and then read the online chatter that comes after they announce the casting, and then put the online chatter into the movie in a kind of looping echo chamber. MCU decided to recast Aunt May, and they went with Oscar-winning actress Marisa Tomei who has played many roles dramatic and comedic over a long multi-decade career. Now Marisa Tomei is also quite attractive and a bit of a sex symbol for people of a certain generation so you have memes and jokes about Aunt May being hot...and in the entire movies we have May being hit on constantly, with Peter constantly being asked about his Hot Aunt, and so on and so forth...and it gets stupid. Because what you have is a constant self-congratulation and high-fives being played on screen at the expense of emotional truth. SO much so, that it's Jon Favreau's Happy, a f--king Iron Man supporting cast transplant (remember IM is the character whose rogues and supporting cast in comics isn't fit to shine the shoes of...Frederick Foswell, leave alone an apex supporting player) becomes the emotional rock for Peter in those two movies (since Tony isn't there.) And okay, one or two jokes would have been fine but it's like the only trait for the character.

When you cast Tomei as May Parker you could have mined the potential. May Parker is now Italian-American so that meant you could update and reinterpet May to a wider range of movie references than what the comic started with. You could have Tomei give the famous "gumption" speech from the Lee-Ditko era. So much wasted potential. Jon Favreau isn't a tenth of an actor that Tomei is, and I can't fathom why Happy Hogan got more lines and dramatic scenes with Holland Spidey than May did.

[Frontier]

Sally Field actually had a lot of good acting moments in those movies. Whatever my issues with the TASM movies, for the most part they were well cast. It's just that the writing, the direction, the visual aesthetics, and overall conception of the project didn't quite know how to handle and bring stuff to a close with any of the cast.

In the case of Marisa Tomei as Aunt May, it's a good example of what happens when a movie casts based on the online chatter that would come, and then read the online chatter that comes after they announce the casting, and then put the online chatter into the movie in a kind of looping echo chamber. MCU decided to recast Aunt May, and they went with Oscar-winning actress Marisa Tomei who has played many roles dramatic and comedic over a long multi-decade career. Now Marisa Tomei is also quite attractive and a bit of a sex symbol for people of a certain generation so you have memes and jokes about Aunt May being hot...and in the entire movies we have May being hit on constantly, with Peter constantly being asked about his Hot Aunt, and so on and so forth...and it gets stupid. Because what you have is a constant self-congratulation and high-fives being played on screen at the expense of emotional truth. SO much so, that it's Jon Favreau's Happy, a f--king Iron Man supporting cast transplant (remember IM is the character whose rogues and supporting cast in comics isn't fit to shine the shoes of...Frederick Foswell, leave alone an apex supporting player) becomes the emotional rock for Peter in those two movies (since Tony isn't there.) And okay, one or two jokes would have been fine but it's like the only trait for the character.

When you cast Tomei as May Parker you could have mined the potential. May Parker is now Italian-American so that meant you could update and reinterpet May to a wider range of movie references than what the comic started with. You could have Tomei give the famous "gumption" speech from the Lee-Ditko era. So much wasted potential. Jon Favreau isn't a tenth of an actor that Tomei is, and I can't fathom why Happy Hogan got more lines and dramatic scenes with Holland Spidey than May did.

We really missed out on them addressing the fallout of her finding out he's Spider-Man only to jump into her being completely cool with it.

[Kaitou D. Kid]

Nowadays movie people think in extreme tendencies. So to do the origin you have to do it and redo it, or simply not mention it. A middle-approach i.e. referring to Ben occassionally, or having May and Peter discuss Ben one or two times, simply doesn't commute. They also made Aunt May into a complete joke of the character in the movie and utterly wasted Marisa Tomei's talents all so Jon Favreau gets to mug on screen.

I always said that the problem with Uncle Ben not being mentioned is he doesn't come up where he would naturally be mentioned. Aunt May tells her son (essentially) to stay away from crooks with guns like she is a suburban mom and not an urban woman that lost her husband to violent crime a few months ago. Also Tony and Happy hit on May willy-nilly and Peter is never like "Give her some space dude, she just lost her husband." Also we never see May's reaction to learning that Peter is Spider-Man and why he does what he does, which is pretty important. Saying the film was a followup to Endgame isn't an excuse - Daredevil Season 3 opened with a flashback to when Karen found out Matt is Daredevil even though the season was a continuation of The Defenders.

On my first viewing, I actually really liked their take on May. My theory was that she was faking her happy-go-lucky attitude for Peter's sake so that he doesn't know she is grieving over Ben (kinda like how MJ used to act or like how Peter acts while in costume). I also liked the idea of a parent being more carefree than their Millenial/Zoomer child, which is an interesting trope reversal and one that fits the times.

That was until FFH rolled around, when it became clear that May was nothing more than an obligatory character and Power Rangers parent. She is there simply because she has to be.

Even more depressingly, May is the only working-class influence this Peter has in his life since both Uncle Ben and Steve Rogers are nowhere to be seen. And FFH portrays her as a total klutz and borderline irresponsible parent, while Happy and Tony are portrayed as men of wisdom.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

For one Norman Osborne...

It's Osborn. No "e". Norman isn't part of a reality show about celebrities.

Tony's not only an accomplished scientist but a superhero who's saved the world multiple times, there's no reason not to look up to him

Tony invented Ultron, a robot responsible for casualties in the 6 figures and he's called out for that in CIVIL WAR by a civilian woman in that film. He spent the first forty years of his life as an arms dealer. For Peter Parker to blindly admire Tony raises questions as to which Tony he admires...the arms dealer genius before he became Iron Man (which all told is a very recent event in the public memory of the character), the Ultron-building megalomaniac, the dude who's constantly wrong (i.e. telling Congress his technology is unreplicable only for Ivan Vanko to humiliate him)?

For a character like Peter who's meant to be a working-class voice or connected to the ground where it's established already that Stark is a divisive polarizing figure, having him be uncritical and fawning over Stark raises way too many questions.

[Frontier]

It's Osborn. No "e". Norman isn't part of a reality show about celebrities.



Tony invented Ultron, a robot responsible for casualties in the 6 figures and he's called out for that in CIVIL WAR by a civilian woman in that film. He spent the first forty years of his life as an arms dealer. For Peter Parker to blindly admire Tony raises questions as to which Tony he admires...the arms dealer genius before he became Iron Man (which all told is a very recent event in the public memory of the character), the Ultron-building megalomaniac, the dude who's constantly wrong (i.e. telling Congress his technology is unreplicable only for Ivan Vanko to humiliate him)?

For a character like Peter who's meant to be a working-class voice or connected to the ground where it's established already that Stark is a divisive polarizing figure, having him be uncritical and fawning over Stark raises way too many questions.

Peter doesn't even need to worry about money problems or school because he's got Stark resources now.

[Jewel Runner]

It's Osborn. No "e". Norman isn't part of a reality show about celebrities.



Tony invented Ultron, a robot responsible for casualties in the 6 figures and he's called out for that in CIVIL WAR by a civilian woman in that film. He spent the first forty years of his life as an arms dealer. For Peter Parker to blindly admire Tony raises questions as to which Tony he admires...the arms dealer genius before he became Iron Man (which all told is a very recent event in the public memory of the character), the Ultron-building megalomaniac, the dude who's constantly wrong (i.e. telling Congress his technology is unreplicable only for Ivan Vanko to humiliate him)?

For a character like Peter who's meant to be a working-class voice or connected to the ground where it's established already that Stark is a divisive polarizing figure, having him be uncritical and fawning over Stark raises way too many questions.

It raises no questions at all, you're doing literally nothing but ignoring anything good about Tony or anything good he has done, and exaggerating the bad things about him just so you can make it look like a bad thing someone would find him to be admirable.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

It raises no questions at all, you're doing literally nothing but ignoring anything good about Tony or anything good he has done, and exaggerating the bad things about him just so you can make it look like a bad thing someone would find him to be admirable.

Citing a scene that happened on-screen in CAPTAIN AMERICA CIVIL WAR isn't "exaggerating the bad things about him".

Look, either we talk about movies as movies, i.e. filled with scenes, dialogue, visuals, and characterizations or we talk about RDJ's Iron Man, the Instagram-Social Media sensation. I am interested in the former and not the latter. Still if you care only about the latter, that's fine. But the point is you can't do both.

If you relate, as it seems to me, to these movies and to the cast as social media phenomenons and so on, that's fine. If you are interested in engaging them with movies, then you need to make a case defending stuff as movies, and not accuse other people about disliking stuff (because again this isn't social media).

The MCU has established Tony Stark consistently as a character with baggage, with issues, who is controversial in-universe. There's a popular TV Show called WandaVision on streaming right now, and this week gave us a powerful disturbing scene reminding us the consequences and horror of Tony Stark's arms dealing and who suffered while he spent the first 40 years of his life d--king around with his life.

I always said that the problem with Uncle Ben not being mentioned is he doesn't come up where he would naturally be mentioned. Aunt May tells her son (essentially) to stay away from crooks with guns like she is a suburban mom and not an urban woman that lost her husband to violent crime a few months ago. Also Tony and Happy hit on May willy-nilly and Peter is never like "Give her some space dude, she just lost her husband." Also we never see May's reaction to learning that Peter is Spider-Man and why he does what he does, which is pretty important. Saying the film was a followup to Endgame isn't an excuse - Daredevil Season 3 opened with a flashback to when Karen found out Matt is Daredevil even though the season was a continuation of The Defenders.

On my first viewing, I actually really liked their take on May. My theory was that she was faking her happy-go-lucky attitude for Peter's sake so that he doesn't know she is grieving over Ben (kinda like how MJ used to act or like how Peter acts while in costume). I also liked the idea of a parent being more carefree than their Millenial/Zoomer child, which is an interesting trope reversal and one that fits the times.

That was until FFH rolled around, when it became clear that May was nothing more than an obligatory character and Power Rangers parent. She is there simply because she has to be.

Even more depressingly, May is the only working-class influence this Peter has in his life since both Uncle Ben and Steve Rogers are nowhere to be seen. And FFH portrays her as a total klutz and borderline irresponsible parent, while Happy and Tony are portrayed as men of wisdom.

Agreed. There's a bit of that when Marisa Tomei tells Peter that she never liked Tony anyway and that she's glad Peter's not interning any more at Stark Industries.

The issue of the lack of reaction to May learning Peter's Spider-Man is a good example of the issues in the film.

As a side-bar, that scene where May walks into Peter without his mask is ridiculous. In the comics, it's mentioned specifically that his Spider-Sense warns him anytime he's changing in and out of his costume, and Green Goblin had to use gas to cancel that to spy on Spider-Man during his quick-changes.

[Kaitou D. Kid]

Citing a scene that happened on-screen in CAPTAIN AMERICA CIVIL WAR isn't "exaggerating the bad things about him".

Look, either we talk about movies as movies, i.e. filled with scenes, dialogue, visuals, and characterizations or we talk about RDJ's Iron Man, the Instagram-Social Media sensation. I am interested in the former and not the latter. Still if you care only about the latter, that's fine. But the point is you can't do both.

If you relate, as it seems to me, to these movies and to the cast as social media phenomenons and so on, that's fine. If you are interested in engaging them with movies, then you need to make a case defending stuff as movies, and not accuse other people about disliking stuff (because again this isn't social media).

The MCU has established Tony Stark consistently as a character with baggage, with issues, who is controversial in-universe. There's a popular TV Show called WandaVision on streaming right now, and this week gave us a powerful disturbing scene reminding us the consequences and horror of Tony Stark's arms dealing and who suffered while he spent the first 40 years of his life d--king around with his life.



Agreed. There's a bit of that when Marisa Tomei tells Peter that she never liked Tony anyway and that she's glad Peter's not interning any more at Stark Industries.

The issue of the lack of reaction to May learning Peter's Spider-Man is a good example of the issues in the film.

As a side-bar, that scene where May walks into Peter without his mask is ridiculous. In the comics, it's mentioned specifically that his Spider-Sense warns him anytime he's changing in and out of his costume, and Green Goblin had to use gas to cancel that to spy on Spider-Man during his quick-changes.

Homecoming May was definitely better. I love her speech to Peter after he loses the suit. FFH May is a caricature by comparison. I feel FFH doubled down on everything I didn't particularly like in Homecoming.

I'm guessing she didn't trigger his spider-sense because Peter doesn't interpret her as a threat. His spider-sense didn't go off when Ned was in his room either. And FFH kinda argues he has to be in a certain mindset to pick up on it (which I also didn't like).