This marks the first film that we’ve watched in the cinema since the pandemic started and I suspect that this will be the case for quite a few people. We really should have gone earlier to watch Dune but that was just after things started opening up again. Anyway we still waited until after the early rush of people to catch this and by now spoilers are everywhere so I won’t care about it that so much. This features a huge slate of characters, which ordinarily is a bad idea but director Jon Watts somehow makes it all work. I have major gripes about the nature of evil as presented here but in all other respects this is a top tier action movie and a wonderful return to form for the MCU.

With Peter Parker’s identity as Spider-Man exposed, he and his friends and family have to put up with intense scrutiny and public attention. Although legal charges against him are dropped, the controversy over his actions as Spider-Man still causes the college applications of himself, MJ and Ned to be rejected. Frustrated, Peter goes to ask if Dr. Strange can do something about it. Strange’s solution is a spell that makes the whole whole forget that Peter Parker is Spider-Man but the spell fails when Peter asks for more and more exceptions to ensure that his friends and allies still remember him. The repercussions of this are felt when Doctor Octopus appears and attacks Spider-Man. This version of Peter Parker has never met Otto Octavius before and the villain is confused as well when he doesn’t recognize the face underneath the mask. Dr. Strange explains that the misfired spell summoned people who all knew the secret of Spider-Man from parallel universes and he needs to gather them all up and return them to their home parallels. Once Peter meets more of these displaced villains, he realizes that sending them home means sending them to their deaths and as per his aunt May’s advice wants to try helping them instead.

Since the whole world already knows it, I won’t be bothering to hide the fact that this film is all about bringing back familiar characters from the Sony versions of the Spider-Man cinematic franchise. This is effectively mining a rich vein of media from some twenty years ago for characters, story beats and references and is practically certain to please fans. Despite the profusion of characters, the film moves smoothly by assuming that the fans are savvy and not trying to over-explain things. I haven’t seen the second Andrew Garfield film myself that doesn’t really matter as I still knew enough to be moved by his sense of accomplishment in saving MJ. Pretty much every character gets enough screen time to establish themselves at least a little with the exception of the Lizard. I really liked some of the small moments as well, like Wong being promoted to Sorcerer Supreme and the reaction of the principal and teachers at Peter’s school. I believe that this merging isn’t seamless as the timelines are weird and the changes should invalidate some of the films but it works well enough to feel satisfactory and provide closure.

The action scenes here are solid as well though the climax with everyone is predictably too chaotic to hold much weight. My favorite fight is Dr. Strange versus Spider-Man as it’s great to see the Mirror Dimension again and the two aren’t really trying to hurt each other at all. For the most part, the non-combat interactions are far more fun and entertaining than the combat ones from MJ and Ned reacting to Octavius’ name to the Spider-Men geeking out over Tobey Maguire’s biological webs. My main issue with the film is that it pushes hard for the message that everyone deserves redemption but then reduces that redemption to technological fixes. Even if it’s true that Spider-Man’s gallery of villains is full of otherwise ordinary people who have been warped by some weird science accident, it makes light of evil to treat it as an affliction that can be readily fixed. It would have been better if, for example, Electro kept being unrepentant and the Garfield Spider-Man has to promise to bring him to justice when they get back home.

Still, this is a far better film that I expected, probably the best of the post Endgame MCU titles and it’s quite mind blowing when you contemplate how many things have to go right to pull this off. This includes getting the studios to work together, getting so many performers on board, writing a script that makes sense while incorporating everything they want and so on. I even like how it cleverly ends with a kind of soft reset for the character so the studios have plenty of options on where next to take the character. However good this film is, at this point I feel that the Spider-Man character is overused already especially as we have the Miles Morales animated version coming up next soon but I fear we will have many more Spider-Man films in store for us.