The trailer for Spider-Man: No Way Home has confirmed a theory that I already had about the MCU Spider-Man movies: the engine of the story is two people fucking up.
One of those people is always Peter Parker, with Tony Stark filling the other position in the previous two installments. With Tony gone, there is a space to fill and this time it belongs to Doctor Strange. No Way Home is here to progress the multiverse arc that was introduced in Loki, and I like the idea that this happened because both Peter and Strange got a little overconfident about the nature of magic as a source of good after defeating Thanos.
The reasoning is solid – Peter was outed as Spider-Man in Far From Home, and wants to go back to a time where his secret identity is still secret, so he goes to the guy in charge of the Time Stone. I know that some people will complain that these characters are being stupid, which they are, but it isn’t out of character for them to be so. Peter is desperate, and Strange’s defining characteristic is his arrogance. This, combined with the events of Loki, gives us our first taste of the multiverse on Earth. Which means that timelines that never existed before start to bleed into one another.
I personally like that this is Peter’s mess to clean up. This has nothing to do with Tony creating villians through iffy business practices like Vulture and Mysterio, which then became Peter’s problems to solve. The walls of Peter’s dual identity have crumbled as are the walls between realities. What comes next is going to be epic – possibly the most ambitious Spider-Man live action film yet. We have Doc Oc returning from Spider-Man 2 but there is also the spherical bomb that announces him in this trailer. Ask any fan and they will tell you that this doesn’t belong to the good Doctor. So who else is on the way?
No Way Home is set to be the biggest Spider-Man film yet, and I for one cannot wait.
If you enjoyed this article and want to see more stuff like it, please check out the rest of our MCU retrospective, and consider supporting us on Ko-Fi!
By Kevin Boyle
(header image via Variety)
No But Listen 