“The best thing in fiction is a smart character making a bad decision for the right reason.”
—Matt Bell
One of my favorite series is Frank Herbert’s Dune. “Smart characters making bad decisions for the right reasons” could practically be the tagline for Herbert’s millenni-spanning narrative. For all that its scale is epic, Herbert really finds his story in his characters’ flaws and misjudgements, made all the more compelling by how eminently capable they all are. Instead of being frustrated with them, you’re fascinated by them. We should have more stories like that.
Spider-Man: No Way Home is not one of those stories.
No Way Home comes from the school of thought that believes that all plot must be generated by smart characters making stupid decisions for stupid reasons, a genre I’m really tired of.
Let’s examine 3 key scenes.
Scene 1—Peter gets Dr. Strange to magic his problems away.
PETER: I just learned in the last film the consequences of trying to shirk my responsibilities as Spider-Man, but what if, just a thought, I magically mess with the fabric of the universe and/or people’s minds (without their consent) to solve what has turned out to be a remarkably minor problem, relative to how bad it seemed like it was going to be. Also I haven’t even for a second considered any other solution or talked to anyone else about it.
DR. STRANGE: Sure, I’ll just do this very complicated and dangerous spell without making sure you, a teenager who knows nothing about magic and is clearly acting impulsively, know exactly what the consequences will be and are ok with that, and then I’ll blame you when it goes wrong.
MOVIE: This scene is played for laughs. HAHAHAHA. But actually this is the inciting incident and is very serious. But we’re not gonna like, call attention to that in a way that is interesting or meaningful, we’re just making this funny because this is the part of the movie where things are funny, per our contract with Marvel/Disney, long may they reign. Also it’s Peter who needs to learn that with great power comes great responsibility, not Dr. Strange. The guy with all the power in this scene. Who is being irresponsible. Nope, it’s Peter. Who spends the whole movie feeling responsible. For things he was self-evidently powerless to stop (ish, but you get the point).
Scene 2—The villains have been captured and now Dr. Strange is ready to send them back to their universes.
PETER: I feel bad that these guys I just met are gonna go back to their universe to get killed, a thing which was going to happen anyway before they were magically teleported against their will into this universe, so I should risk my life and the lives of everyone I love to try and help them, a thing I am unreasonably certain is possible (also I’m just going to let them wander around my friend’s apartment while I do that because that seems fine).
NOT DR. STRANGE (but should’ve been): [explains that the implication of the multiverse is that there’s already a universe where these guys were cured and don’t die, and also even if you do cure them there will still be a universe where they do die, so the best-case scenario is basically a cosmic wash, and the worst-case scenario is you lose everyone you love.]
ACTUALLY DR. STRANGE: It’s their fate and I said so.
MOVIE: Peter is obviously right and good here and Dr. Strange is just a big ol’ meanie.
Scene 3—Technically multiple scenes, basically the whole end of the movie.
MJ (previously) : Hey next time just ask us before you decide to mess with arcane forces you don’t understand.
PETER (previously): Sure, yeah.
PETER (now): [Does not do that] (Really, there’s a whole other rant to be written about how this movie/Peter treats MJ, it’s pretty terrible.)
PETER: May was right, you should always help people no matter the risk.
ALSO PETER: Everyone I love is better off without me despite them explicitly telling me they’re not.
MOVIE: These lessons are totally consistent and not contradictory. Also don’t think about the fact that the spell definitely affected every Peter Parker in the multiverse, without their knowledge or consent (including our pals Toby and Andy, who were…right there). Or that the original spell, even if it had gone off without a hitch, would have also done that. Really just don’t think about the ethics of magic at all. Dr. Strange definitely doesn’t. Also feel sad now. But wait also don’t.
(Really, the ending is so emotionally and thematically inconsistent it’s mindboggling. Because it’s not just that the ending is way heavier than what the movie can carry. It’s that it kind of doesn’t even try? Like, TomPeter ends this movie having functionally lost everyone he’s ever loved, and the last scene is just like, “Well, at least he’s still Spider-Man.” Excuse me what? No? The whole problem in the first place was that his being Spider-Man was interfering with his friendships, and we’re supposed to be happy that now the one thing he wanted to distance himself from is the only thing he has? At best that is incredibly dark, and that’s definitely not how the movie treats it.)
What makes all of this especially annoying is how unnecessary it is. You could make pretty much the same movie without any of these problems.
First, just get rid of the whole identity/murder thing, it absolutely does not matter and is just used as a plot device, and it’s taking up valuable screen time. Start with the Doc Oc fight (obviously under slightly different circumstances, the vice chancellor of admissions for MIT doesn’t need to be there). The fight goes the same way, Strange steps in and saves the day, explains to Peter that there’s been a crack in the multiverse for some reason, he needs his help to fix it, etc. It really, and I cannot stress this enough, DOES NOT MATTER why the multiverse stuff is happening. I don’t care. Make something up that sounds good. If it somehow ties into the themes of the movie, great, if not it’s one line of dialogue and we move on.
Now, for when Peter decides to help the villains, a few different ways to handle that, but the most obvious one is that TomPeter meets AndrewPeter and TobyPeter first and they realize they have a chance to save these people, some of whom they actually care about and all of whom (presumably) they would rather not have to kill/indirectly cause the death of, and so they convince TomPeter to help them. That way TomPeter actually has some personal investment (and, indeed, external pressure) rather than just some abstract sense of morality that arguably doesn’t even apply for the reasons stated above. Maybe they even convince Dr. Strange, and he’s the one holding onto the box as an insurance policy in case things go wrong. (It doesn’t matter why the box exists, Dr. Strange made the box to deal with the multiverse problem, whatever.)
Obviously they take precautions while they’re trying to cure the villains because they’re nice but they’re not idiots. TomPeter and TobyPeter fight about whether to trust Norman Osborne but Tom convinces Toby they need the help, so he’s not restrained when Goblin takes over again. One of their cures doesn’t work as intended and the other villains start to lose faith in the process, giving Goblin an opening to secretly conspire with them to escape. (We can spend a little extra time setting this up because we didn’t have to waste 20 minutes on Peter and his friends not getting into MIT.)
Also, not entirely convinced that Aunt May needs to die, but if she does (or maybe just severely wounded to the point Peter doesn’t know if she’ll live) she doesn’t say “with great power comes great responsibility” since, you know, that line was a best not relevant to that scene and at worst was basically just blaming him for her death? Incredibly forced either way. Feel free to try to come up with a context for May to say the line where it actually makes sense, but otherwise just let Toby say it. Also maybe it’s weird that TomPeter is joking around with the other Peters right after his aunt just died? But then switches right back into grief/anger mode? Kind of weird? Maybe? So in this version he’s had time to joke around beforehand, so if we do have to kill off/mortally wound May we can have TomPeter’s attitude be consistent with that fact going forward.
The rest of the movie happens pretty much as is, with the exception that as the villains interact with the universe more freely it starts to weaken the barriers between universes, so once most of them (minus Goblin) are cured Strange is like “we can’t wait around for Goblin, they have to go back now” then Goblin shows up, box blows up, cracks weaken further, etc.
The final fight concludes, but instead of TomPeter sacrificing everyone in the multiverse’s memory of every Peter Parker without asking anyone’s permission, Chekhov’s Wong shows up and he and Dr. Strange are able to work together to patch the hole in the multiverse. There should still be some consequences here, but since most of this wasn’t TomPeter’s fault they probably shouldn’t fall solely on him.
One thought: we could actually kill off Toby instead of just immediately making it clear he’s fine like some fucking cowards. That’s about the level of tearjerker ending this movie might be able to earn—what it does not earn (in either the original or my rewrite) is the “everyone in all of existence has forgotten who I am, the people I love will forever see me as a stranger, I have sacrificed everything I was fighting to protect and I am truly alone” level.
Or maybe the ending’s ambiguous. Maybe when the dust settles not everyone’s cured, or we’re not sure if they’ll remain cured once they return to their own universes. Maybe there’s a post-credits scene that’s like a montage of all the villains post-cure and how great everything’s going, and it ends with Norman and it seems like everything’s fine, until the final shot when he looks in a mirror and we get just a glimpse of Goblin looking back. You know, if you’re that deathly allergic to resolving a story.
I hope you can see how these fairly simple changes tell the same story in a way that doesn’t rely on pointlessly stupid decisions but also doesn’t make Peter a Mary Sue who never does anything wrong. Conflict can still happen even when people are doing their best—and I would argue that’s when it’s the most interesting.
Now here’s where I tell you that this version of the movie could never exist. It’s impossible. Because Far From Home ends with Spider-Man’s identity being revealed and him being accused of murder, so now the next movie has to deal with that.
Which isn’t necessarily bad if the next movie wants to be about that (The Fugitive but Spider-Man is a solid pitch), but this one clearly didn’t and instead used it to set up what it actually wanted to be about—which is setting up Dr. Strange 2. Because Dr. Strange 2 is about the multiverse, so this movie has to be about the multiverse. Real rock-and-a-hard-place situation. Rock and a strange place. Rock and a (Dr.) strange place.
So now what seemed like it was going to be a huge problem (the identity crisis) has to be relatively minor so that it’s not distracting from the main problem (the multiverse breaking), but also they have to be tied together otherwise you waste the first 20 minutes of your movie resolving a plot that doesn’t matter. So we get the relatively small stakes of “my friends and I didn’t get into the college we wanted” (which, again, he spent precisely 0 minutes attempting to resolve before leaping to the worst possible option) leading to death, destruction, and the multiverse almost collapsing.
This is where I find myself agreeing with Martin Scorsese—well, sort of. Saying MCU movies aren’t “cinema” is stupid because now you’re just arguing about arbitrary definitions. Heck, if cinema is just movies that make you feel things then just going by how sad the ending of Now Way Home made me, and then how angry I was at being made to feel that sad by something that didn’t earn the right to do so, No Way Home is a cinematic masterpiece. If there’s one thing the MCU does well it’s making you feel something, whether it deserves that emotional investment or not.
What I agree with is that the MCU is a fundamentally different project than any other blockbuster franchise, and its problems are fundamentally different as well. Jurassic Park or Friday the 13th might turn out a less-than-stellar installment because they’re just running on the fumes of name recognition and not really putting that much thought into it. What’s frustrating about the MCU is that they do put thought into it; they’re not just cheap, vapid popcorn movies, or at least they’re trying not to be. But that attempt at the individual film level to actually tell a meaningful story is constantly in conflict with the top-down dictation of the franchise as a whole.
We could have had a good version of Spider-Man: No Way Home. But the MCU was systemically incapable of making that version because they mandate intertextuality, sequel-bait, and sticking to the plan over good storytelling.
p.s. There are a few moments that are kind of blithely insulting to the previous Spider-Man movies and just, like, the general concept of Spider-Man in a way that I found really condescending and cynical. For example, when Otto says his name and everyone laughs at him. They’re not laughing at him, they’re laughing at Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, Sam Raimi, and Alfred Molina. Guys, you’re in the basement of a wizard named Stephen Strange. Shut up.
p.p.s. Loved Toby, obviously, but was surprised by how much I liked Andrew Garfield. Willem Dafoe was also great. And no one else should be allowed to play J. Jonah Jameson who isn’t JK Simmons. He owns that role.
p.p.p.s. Kind of weird that Sandman was just sand the whole time. Like, we know he’s capable of looking like his regular human self. I guess they wanted to have a clear visual cue for when he gets cured, but he’s sand at that moment anyway because he’s fighting, so it would’ve been fine, there’s no good in-world explanation for it.
p.p.p.p.s. Was kind of getting Ruby Bridges vibes from that first-day-of-school scene, and, uh, nope. Just, nope.
p.p.p.p.p.s. The thing I want to know, and will probably never know, is why Far From Home didn’t end with something that was actually setting up what No Way Home is actually about. My suspicion is that it would’ve been way too risky to set that up before they knew whether they could get everyone they’d need to pull it off, but that’s pure speculation. If that is what happened, might I suggest not setting up a sequel if you don’t actually know what it’s going to be about yet.
p.p.p.p.p.p.s. Stupid characters making good decisions for the wrong reasons is also entertaining.
p.p.p.p.p.p.p.s. Also if Wong showing up at the end is somehow inconsistent with Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings I don’t care and that just further proves my point.
Certain of Eventual Failure 