By Kayla Loveless, Staff Writer
Caution: This review will contain multitudes of spoilers, so if you haven’t seen Spider-Man: No Way Home, make your way to the movie theater!
The latest Marvel film, “Spider-Man: No Way Home” has been long awaited by millions around the globe, and has continued to break box office records since it came out on Dec. 17.
The movie begins by continuing where we left off in “Spider-Man: Far From Home,” the second film in the MCU trilogy. Spider-Man’s identity is revealed to be Peter Parker, a 17-year-old from Queens.
Immediately, Peter begins to receive interrogation from the police. I think this movie would have been over a lot quicker if Peter Parker knew how to answer questions. His answers consisted of a lot of stuttering and not a lot of “Hey, by the way, Mysterio is the one who created the drones that took out London!”
He moves in with Happy, Tony Stark’s best friend and bodyguard (also his Aunt May’s ex-boyfriend), for precaution against the public, who still hate him for killing Mysterio. Again, dude, just have a press conference and clear the air. I’m begging you.
Amid this chaos, Peter still has to attend his senior year of high school at Midtown High. Imagine the whole world finds out you’re a superhero and you still decide to go to math class. Peter and his friends MJ and Ned’s dream school is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and his final straw seems to be when they are ultimately rejected from the school because of his “controversies.”
Instead of, I don’t know, making a call to MIT about his friends not being able to attend, Peter goes searching for Doctor Strange, a master of the mystic arts. Or just a wizard, if you don’t want to get too technical. He asks for Strange’s help in getting the world to forget who he was.
Doctor Strange suggests a forgetting spell, to make everyone forget who Spider-Man was. Peter didn’t realize that everyone would forget who he was, like MJ or his Aunt May. He interrupts the spell, making Strange lose focus and causing it to go haywire.
Luckily, Strange traps the spell, so nothing could go wrong… Or so he thought. This is one of those points in a movie where you think that the characters are dumb for not knowing what’s coming to them. I mean, he just cast a magic spell to make the entire world forget something.
This mistake introduces the idea of the multiverse, and calls anybody who knows a Peter Parker in their universe to come to our world. Peter quickly meets and battles with Doctor Otto Octavius, AKA Doc Ock, from “Spider-Man 2,” starring Tobey Maguire. They are then transported to Doctor Strange’s dungeon, where Doc Ock is imprisoned.
Peter is tasked with finding the rest of the people who slipped through the cracks of their universe. After successfully capturing them, Peter is informed that they were on their way to their deaths by their Peter Parkers. He decides that he wants to help them, and fights off Doctor Strange, who wishes to send them back to where they came from.
Strange has a point in wanting to send them back to their universe, but would it really be Tom Holland’s Spider-Man if he didn’t want to help the villain?
This decision leads to the tragic death of Peter’s Aunt May. Before her death, she spoke the famous words to him, “with great power, must also come great responsibility.” While Peter is heartbroken from grief, his friends search for him, finding two other Peter Parkers before their own.
These other two Peters, played by Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire, help Holland’s Peter with his sadness of losing Aunt May. It was an incredibly touching moment, and I think it brought a great element of sadness to the film.
The final battle takes place at the Statue of Liberty after the three Peters finish the experiments that will help cure the four remaining villains. Doc Ock was previously cured in Happy’s apartment before things went downhill.
During the battle, they successfully cure the villains, but cracks were forming in the universe, and everyone who knew that Peter Parker was Spider-Man was about to come through. To prevent an onslaught of people from other universes being unleashed onto Earth, Peter suggests that Strange makes the entire world forget that Peter Parker ever existed, and there’s a heartfelt moment between the three Peters. He promises to find MJ and Ned and to make them remember him.
After mustering up the courage to speak with MJ at her place of work, we are left with her and Ned still unaware of Peter’s existence. I can’t help but think that this is Peter protecting them. He is aware of the danger that they are put in whilst knowing him, after having just experienced it.
He made his way back to his new apartment, where we learn that he has completely made a new spider-suit from scratch. The movie ends with him swinging around in the winter weather in New York.
The bittersweet ending to this movie truly tied it all together. I can say with confidence that this is one of my favorites, if not my top favorite Marvel film ever. You can tell the writers and directors listened to the people and really brought it together in the way that they thought would be accepted wholeheartedly by Marvel fans.
Sophomore Kayla Loveless can be reached at 24lovelesska73@daretolearn.org.
