Spiderman: Far From Home is among the best cinematic outings for our beloved web-slinger.
However.
One of the guidelines I have for myself is not only to compare a movie to what has come before, but to really look at a movie as it stands on its own two feet. I have less of a hard time with bad movies than I do with almost-great movies, because I see the potential for what could have been.
Unfortunately, Far From Home falls into the Almost-Great category. And that’s frustrating.
Don’t get me wrong. Far From Home is a really good movie. Like I said, it’s among the best of the Spiderman films. My frustration comes from the fact that it falls short of what it could have been.
To start with the minor gripes: Far From Home starts very slow. The first half of the movie feels a little like a drag, and the back half is loaded with most of the good stuff. We need the first half to set up what occurs later, of course, but the movie feels lopsided because of it.
Also, I’m not sure how anyone - however well-versed or not they are in the lore of Spiderman – could not have seen the major reveal of this movie coming. It is so blatantly obvious – even in the trailers - that I really believe even if I didn’t know my Spiderstuff I would’ve known what was going to happen.
That being said, the way the reveal plays out is good, if a little cheesy. It leads to some truly awesome and visually arresting moments for our hero, akin to some of the delirium/nightmare sequences from the Batman: Arkham games.
In Far From Home, there was an opportunity to really examine the fallout from the events of Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. No one, and I mean absolutely no one, is as well-positioned to look at the post-Endgame MCU as Peter Parker is.
Unfortunately, I don’t think they got there the way they should have. I think they had a golden opportunity, and it was somewhat squandered.
Instead of an emotional examination of the effects the events of the previous two Avengers movies would have on the world, we are given a hardy-har-isn’t-this-weird-and-funny high-school news program that makes light of the situation.
Instead of an actual examination of the monumental void left by those who didn’t make it out of Endgame, we get an entire first half of the movie that’s mostly dedicated to Peter Parker dealing with mundane teenage high school problems. And before you say it, I get it: he IS a teenager doing teenage things. And I understand he’s making up for lost time BECAUSE he “blipped.” But no other teenager has gone through what Peter Parker has gone through. We should see the effects of that more than we did.
Most importantly, instead of a villain who is the crushingly dark, sinister reflection of a mentor for Peter Parker, we get a fairly standard revenge-fueled bad guy. This is the film’s biggest mistake: they didn’t lean hard enough into that angle.
All of this is done well. None of this is executed badly. But the important parts of this story or not given the weight or the gravitas that they needed to have an impact.
Even Peter Parker himself seems weirdly immune to any kind of emotional consequences of what he’s been through in previous movies and what he goes through in this film. None of it really seems to matter, and the world doesn’t seem all that bothered by what has happened to it.
So while Far From Home is, in fact, among the best of the Spiderman films, it still falls short when you measure it against its own potential. In the end, Spiderman: Far From Home is really good. But it should have been even better. And that, to me, is disappointing.
Thanks for reading.
-a.
Originally published July 11th, 2019