Review of Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019) by Trevorsview — 18 Jul 2019

None of them are any good, but the other Spider-Man films at least manage to each stand out in a meaningful way. Spider-Man: Far from Home only stands out because it takes place somewhere outside New York; compare that to the other versions with Maguire and Garfield, especially the brave stylistic Into the Spider-Verse, which beautifully summarizes the comic hero’s spirit. This latest addition to the reboot madness is just hopping across major cities at a pace that moves too quickly yet too slowly.

Considering this came out straight off the coattails of Endgame, one may think, “How could Disney ever top that?” Here’s the answer: They can’t. But they should have done better than this, literally everything seen here happened way better before, even from Marvel Studios. You’ve got your red-caped superhuman generating matter-bending green glows. You’ve got your Nick Fury. You’ve got your extremely awkward humor. You’ve got your mass destruction in the middle of a city without authorities to escort people to safety. You’ve got your new 100% CGI shiny super suit. You’ve got your other new black super suit made almost alien-esque against fireworks. You’ve got your CGI-heavy climax. It’s no secret right now that director Jon Watts got his priorities wrong. Although his wonderfully trippy hallucination starring Tony as a zombie balances against the visual highlight of a Czech night party, it also breaks the needed tone of bittersweet grief.

The multiple major cities shown across Europe throughout the feature get breezed past as Peter Parker and his class vacations in each one. Think back to how Crazy Rich Asians tempted the urge to visit Singapore with its irresistible montages of crustaceous street food. The only touristy thing Far from Home does to breathe life into Europe fittingly looks put together by a high school student project: a montage of the class taking pictures of themselves (and the teacher before dropping his very expensive camera into the harbor).

While on this trip, Peter must go against a giant fire monster at night and has no fears or problems doing so. Yeah, he fought Thanos and all, but had grownups around then, he’s pretty much going solo here. Although there’s Nick Fury, he’s just there to be mocked as his intense talks with Peter keep getting interrupted for laughs. There’s also the new guy, Mysterio, who acts like a potential mentor to Peter by treating him to a lemonade… out of a bendy straw. Mysterio is a badly written character only motivated for anything by a craving to fill Iron Man’s legacy, and resorts to achieving that via overpowered technology that might as well star in Barry Sonnenfeld’s Wild Wild West.

Mysterio’s not nearly as bad as Mary Jane though; her supposedly sweet scenes with Peter become too discomforting to watch seriously. Between every version of the wallcrawling web-slinger, Peter’s love interests never found a foothold, and this is no exception. Like seriously, why are these two losers attracted to the other? More time delves into Peter’s new suit customization than into why he likes Mary Jane!

Then there’s Ned, while Jacob Batalon still gives a pretty good performance, his character just stands around solely for laughs, due to having less material to work off of than in Homecoming. He does get a girlfriend after knowing her for only a few hours, but that’s the only memorable thing done by him.

Although, the melodic aura of societal grief over Tony Stark remains present; acknowledging the candlelit street memorials, these twenty-three movies of the MCU now feel like one complete unit. Plus, an “in memoriam” section attempts to mourn the latest deaths, informing of something after the Blip (as they call it) happened: It had been five years since Infinity War’s events, which means those who came back were still the same age as five years ago. For example, if there were two high school freshmen, one got blipped and the other did not, five years later, the resurrected one would still be a high school freshman and the survivor would be a college sophomore. Pretty clever!

Then again, less time is spent on grieving and more time is spent on the not-so-successful humor of students wearing glowsticks and groaning over a sudden plan to attend a nearly empty opera house. Marvel really needs to stop hating fine art for once and stay focused on the story!

Okay, let’s face it: Everything Marvel does is at the end of the day pointless. So of course, that means Spider-Man: Far from Home lands among the year’s most pointless features. Peter Parker deserves much better than being demeaned over and over by Tony; thank goodness he will demean no one else again. Thank goodness too no one will any longer watch Steve’s mere stupidity.