Spider-Man: Far From Home

A quick rundown, spoiler heavy.



The opening segment of saccharin In Memoria for the heroes who died in Endgame was the funniest thing in any MCU movie so far. That was just great.

The "blip" (where half the population died for 5 years then came back) as a metaphor for puberty ("that guy who was a dweeb just overnight became this tall hunk all the girls like and I'm still the same me") and for life passing you by (Nick Fury's pathos) were better metaphorical uses for that whole 5 year snap than the previous films had done.

The painful high school movie awkwardness was not bad... so much as an accurate recreation of a movie genre that died in the 90's. And it was a good reminder of why we don't watch those movies anymore. I can't criticize but I don't want more of it.

Parker's desire to live a life without responsibility was really undersold and tied back. If the filmmakers had wanted to sell this "you don't own me" is a pretty easy and powerful message in this day and age, hell Captain Marvel just did it. Instead they focused on his whininess, which was a concrete decision to make us sympathize with him less.

Mysterio slamming the entire MCU and genre of superhero-CGI movies with his scheme and "who buys this bullshit" schpiel was uh, pretty devastating from within the franchise. The message wasn't literally "people will believe anything" (as they say) but "people will believe this specific cheesy, saccharin set up we hired a screenwriter for" as an indictment of how bad the writing in superhero movies is.

Both of the Spider-Man MCU movies so far have been about "who is the heir of Tony Stark?" and specifically pitted him against employees or workers who rely on Stark. It's easy plot fodder for compelling B-list villains, and "the innocent young chosen heir vs the cynical servants who think they should be ruling" is a tale as old as fairy tales. However monarchism is also as old as fairy tales, and in the modern context, all these schlubs being the punching bag sounds pretty classist and anti-worker.

Now the most important point: the Reality Stone.

A major theme of this movie was special effects, illusion, and the warping of reality. We have Mysterio's shenanigans and holographic projectors. But we just as strongly have EDITH and this AR (Augmented Reality) system with an AI and attack drones and being able to read what is on everyone's smartphone, which itself is a key into what they are thinking. (Tertiarily, we have Nick Fury able to change where this high school trip is going on a whim, controlling the reality of the poor teachers.) This entire movie emphasizes the fluid nature of reality, as a series of illusions and invasions controlled by the whims of capital. Which is fine subject matter for a movie but...

As I wrote before about Ant-Man:

…the Infinity Stones themselves - aka the Captain Planet elemental harmony of this universe - are just criminally under-explored. Like yes we have two good scenes about the Soul Stone, but all six of them should be doing something different and interesting and powerful, that makes their combination more interesting than “you have collected 5 out of 6 Macguffins.” What is wielding the Mind Stone like? How does using the Space Stone change you? What is the Reality Stone even doing? (Granted Doc Strange did discuss the Time Stone some, but let’s just admit that was bad even if explored.) This would be whinily asking for a fictional universe to reveal more of its wikipedia to you except that each stone got at least a whole movie about it. They spent a movie on each stone before uniting them, and we still know barely anything about them other than “with our powers combined.” Criminal. 

So I just watched “Antman & Wasp” and, well, you know the Space Stone? 

AKA the Tesseract? There are at least 3 movies centering on the Tesseract (Captain America 1, Avengers 1, Captain Marvel, am I missing any?) and they do nothing interesting with it qua the “Space” Stone in those. It’s used to open a large portal in Avengers which is space like, but otherwise it’s just this mystical object which grants a lot of power or knowledge in vague and undefined ways. 

Well what better can we expect from Marvel except they actually made the perfect movie for the Space Stone. They could have injected it as the plot element into Antman that gives him his powers, and so all the weird growing smaller and larger pyrotechnic displays would have match up thematically perfect. It would have been a really cool demonstration that this is what existence is like when space bends to your whim, and the different meanings and perception that gives you to distance and comparison. 

Compare that with Captain Marvel, who is supposedly powered by the a byproduct of pollution from experiments with the Tesseract. Are her blasty powers anything space like?

The "Reality Stone" got a whole movie about it, Thor Dark World, where the stone just makes red blob stuff, and one scene in Infinity War where Thanos uses it to create a false reality to fool his daughter.

If they had made *this* movie about the Reality Stone instead, where both Beck's tricks and EDITH relied on its world-altering properties, we would have appreciated the power of it more, and what sort of god acquiring it (and combining it with time and space stones) would make you.

So my BamBamCanon of the MCU movies would be:

Ant-Man and Wasp [Space Stone]
Dr. Strange [Time Stone]
Far From Home [Reality Stone]
Captain Marvel [Power Stone]
Some movie where the hero unlocks the other 90% of his brain [Mind Stone]
Infinity War [Soul Stone]