Review: Spider-Man: Far From Home Flaunts Marvel’s Foresight and Future (Spoiler-Free)
(This is a spoiler-free review; that being said, certain aspects of the story are difficult to discuss around, so the super spoiler-adverse should avoid anyway.)
When you release a film like The Avengers, a film that defies expectations and smashes records to gross $200 million on its opening weekend, you should know that you have a cultural phenomenon on your hands and should plan for your future accordingly. But arguably, Marvel Studios in 2012 wasn’t expecting this kind of massive success and their prominent traces of their cultural footprint on Hollywood and mainstream culture. After the success of The Avengers, Marvel Studios expected to, well, keep making movies. This is partly why Iron Man 3, a poignant and surprisingly moving character study on Tony Stark rather than Iron Man and the Avengers, received a somewhat mixed bag of reactions.
Yet surprisingly, the bigger that Marvel Studios has grown, the more that they have excelled at dealing with their newfound status, success, and surrounding situations. Six years after the release of Iron Man 3, Marvel Studios has learned to plan for their own future and have mastered the balance of expanding upon their own universe while sharing high-quality, moving stories about characters we’ve come to grow and love. And no film shows this balance more than Spider-Man: Far From Home.
Far From Home has its own agency and agenda. The film judges and chooses which relevant information needs to be shared with its audience before launching into the main story, tying up any lingering questions so that the rest of its Spidey-centric narrative can flourish. But along their narrative path, the film is still expanding on the larger universe, further enriching Far From Home with more emotional impact and greater meaning to the universe it inhabits. Even if your knowledge of Marvel movies is purely derived from Infinity War and Endgame memes, I wouldn’t be surprised if you felt some of that emotional impact or greater meaning too.
Marvel’s Spider-Man films are not the palate cleansers that their Ant-Man films are, and it shows. In several aspects, Far From Home can get surprisingly dark. Dipping into his horror background, director Jon Watts plays with a tonal balance similar to Shazam!’s, which tells a goofy story of kids playing around with superpowers while featuring literal demons demolishing corporate executives. Through visuals, performances, and larger commentary, Watts achieves a similar degree of success of tonal balance to tell an engaging Spider-Man story.
Nothing emphasizes this surprising darkness more than Jake Gyllenhaal. Look no further to Gyllenhaal’s background with Donnie Darko and Nightcrawler to show you why he was born to play Mysterio. Mysterio is charming and twisted, and Gyllenhaal’s performance blends seamlessly into the entire core of Mysterio’s character in Far From Home. Gyllenhaal complements Tom Holland’s Spider-Man perfectly and serves as the tool of choice to the commentary that Watts aims to now blast into the stratosphere in Far From Home, helping to elevate Watts’ political messages to the larger audience.
When compared to the meek bush-beating he utilized to discuss socioeconomics and working-class culture in Homecoming, Jon Watts dazzlingly dives headfirst into further exploration in Spider-Man: Far From Home. At the risk of traveling too far down into spoiler territory, all I’ll say is that Watts’ newly ablaze message and social commentary makes Far From Home an almost-necessary film to watch in our current political climate of misinformation, masking a larger educational importance under the guise of a film about our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man; the best way to experience Watts’ messages in Far From Home is to watch for yourself, process, and learn.
However, this beautiful darkness that Watts brings to Far From Home comes at the expense of other aspects of the film. In Far From Home, the high school setting and nature of this incarnation of Spider-Man feel somewhat overused; similar to Peter’s new heroic responsibilities looming over his life, what helped Homecoming to stand out and excel looms so heavy over the film that it can drag the narrative down. The excitement at the prospect of another Marvel movie only carries you up until the first 15 minutes of the film, and for the next 30 minutes, Far From Home feels like it’s obligated to show you snippets of Peter’s high school life.
Performances from Peter’s friends and classmates, such as Jacob Batalon’s always hilarious Ned Leeds and Zendaya’s charmingly sardonic and deeply relatable MJ, help keep you afloat and carry you through the rest of the movie, but early on aren’t enough to hide the perplexing state of Peter’s high school shenanigans. The film is constantly shuffling around highlighting different perspectives and aspects of Peter’s high school life, making Martin Starr’s Mr. Harrington and Remy Hii’s Brad Davis to both feel a bit aggressive in their portrayals in their presence on screen. Instead of taking time to slow down and focus on specific characters at the start, Far From Home feels like you’re seeing Peter’s life from a blender. Far From Home feels like it overemphasizes Peter’s inner turmoil between being Spider-Man and being a high school student in love with a girl to inorganically pull at emotional strings, only really learning to let go and facilitate much more organic emotions and connections halfway into the movie.
There is too much history and love behind the character for Marvel not to build Peter Parker up into a larger character in their universe. As this is the third individual we’ve seen play a live-action Spider-Man in the past two decades, Marvel Studios in Far From Home shows the studio’s commitment to further stretch out Spider-Man’s place in the universe, building upon the character’s importance, significance, and the legacy of both Parker and Stark. Far From Home is an incredibly fitting story and narrative to tell in a post-Endgame world by asking the question that we’ve all been wondering about: “What happens now?” As cliché as the question presents itself in the trailers, “Who’s going to be the next Iron Man?” is a legitimate question that begs answers both within the universe and outside the universe.
In answering this question, Tom Holland once again gives another great performance, on par with his first stint in Homecoming. One of Holland’s greatest talents is to amplify whichever emotion he is conveying onscreen. When you see Peter Parker breaking down, your heart can’t help but break and empathize with the enormous pressures he faces. When you see him happy, you can’t help but break out into a large grin. And when you see him as an awkward teenager, you feel that awkwardness so much in your core that it can sometimes get too cringe-y to watch, which was also an initial problem in Homecoming so you can also get used to it a little more. The further development of MJ as a character also helped to spread this out, and it’s clear that Holland and Zendaya have the strongest chemistry amongst all of the iterations of Spider-Man’s couples. The material added to Peter Parker’s character post-Endgame gives Holland much more emotional background and story to work with, and Holland uses this to his advantage in spades.
In a way, Tom Holland also seems to struggle with this question himself. As a guy who can’t help himself in becoming a meme regarding everything he’s involved in (especially with Spider-Man), Tom Holland remains a consistent entry in the long-running and fickle list of the Internet’s Boyfriends. His fame only grows with every new film and TV appearance, and it’s only going to keep growing: between now and next year, Holland is going to be featured in five upcoming films. It would be a huge waste of time and talent for Marvel Studios not to cash in and develop on Holland’s star power. And throughout Far From Home, you can see how Holland’s performance is enriched by how deeply Parker’s conflict mirror’s Holland’s: there are moments where you can see Holland wondering if he truly wants this responsibility of shepherding the MCU into Phase Four, and if he feels like he’s the right person and is ready for the job.
Because in some sense, Tony Stark — and thus Robert Downey Jr. — is still there. Surprisingly, in a film about Spider-Man — and in a film about Spider-Man further exploring his responsibilities — Tony Stark never fails to loom over Peter Parker’s story like a vain ghost. Maybe Marvel Studios will always aim to include Tony Stark throughout their Spider-Man films in general. And arguably, for this film, it feels especially necessary to discuss him. But it was still surprising to see how much Far From Home still relied on Tony Stark, even after he’s gone, to tell its story in the MCU.
It’s true that Tony Stark will always be an important lingering presence within the MCU. And Far From Home goes above and beyond to show that this universe will survive without its founding father and that it has a plan for what’s to come. It makes me even more excited for the next time Kevin Feige reveals Marvel Studios’ next grand plan. But there are some moments in the film where it can come off as if Marvel Studios is worried what their future looks like without him, raising concerns and even more questions.
