This is a weird movie to analyze for a number of reasons. For one, Disney has released an unprecedented amount of details from the movie to "build hype", meaning you likely walk in knowing what will happen for the entire first half of the movie.
For another, this movie relies on having seen more movies previously than any film I've heard of before. It assumes familiarity with all the Avengers movies, including the two Spider-Man movies in that universe. But it also pulls in from the previous five Spider-Man movies released by Sony from 2002 to 2014. Maybe catch "Into the Spiderverse" just for thematic parallels. (There's even some references to the Netflix Marvel series, and the Tom Hardy Venom.) You can still understand the plot of what is happening without those, but many of the jokes will fall flat otherwise.
But what makes it harder is... it's really three movies in a row, which are pretty different. If we're doing any analysis deeper than "the jokes sure were funny," we have to admit that Spider-Man 3 goes through three very different stories. We'll go into those.
Lastly, my own personal experience watching this also couldn't help but be shaped by reading Worm. This shouldn't be that surprising: both are stories about a teenage superhero with bug powers and wrestling with the split between their quotidian life and their awesome power. There were just multiple scenes I couldn't help watching without thinking "how did Worm do this exact thing."
Act I: A social media horror story.
The first part of the story is the most affecting and disturbing. And the least subtle. Mysterioso ended Spider-Man 2 by exposing Peter Parker's identity and accusing him of of murder, broadcast live over the web and J. Jonah Jameson's Breitbart/Alex Jones style show. For about 40 minutes we live through a painful immersive piece about the entire world suddenly knowing our deepest secrets and believing absurdly wrong things about us. (As I said at the time, "Far From Home" was really the Marvel movie about the powers of the reality stone.)
Obviously, it's "about" the modern phenomenon of going viral and getting canceled. "Twitter has one main character every day - the goal is to never be it." It's also about our fear at fake news and how reality has polarized into different silos, completely in disagreement, where our enemies take the barest string of facts and come to radically different beliefs based on them.
Much of this act is not shot realistically, but metaphorically. The shot of all the students in Peter's school parting like a wave for him while their flip-phones record him, evokes the famous scene from Tobey's Spider-Man 2 when the subway of New Yorkers crowd surf Spidey on their hands.
The movie even realistically shows that going "viral" like this is not a one-sided affair. Half the world hates you, but half the world (or more) loves you. (The opening radio show calls of Hancock also do this, quickly.) But the earnest love is awkward and certainly not a balance for the pain of all the hate. This is epitomized in the scene in front of the trophy case that Parker's principal has made to celebrate their "hero." (That scene can't help but recall in Worm when Taylor returns to her high school as one of the reigning crimelords of the city, and the principal falls over herself to favor her.)
The whole act is effective, and extremely uncomfortable. It's hard to call something that digs into our modern fears this much "fun." There is no real truth, just whichever fantasies the public and our enemies find the most convincing.
JJJ I think is a problem. Jameson has always been this sort of propagandist preaching hate towards Spiderman, but in the comics and other movies he has a personal connection to Spiderman. He is his employer, and generally an asshole but a human-sized one, and will in the end go out of his way to show humanity to Peter Parker. This both redeems the jerk, and lets us laugh at him for the dramatic irony of hating someone's public identity so much while not seeing them and liking them up close. The latest trilogy completely misses this human connection, and in doing so just makes Jameson an unforgivable monster. Anyway...
Act II: The multiverse
This is what the trailers were all about. Peter performs a magical spell with Dr. Strange that "messes up" and summons antagonists and other Spidermen from the previous two trilogies. We get William Dafoe's Green Goblin and Alfred Molina's Doc Ock and oh yeah Jamie Foxx and... the janitor from Wings as a sand monster.
The entire magic spell plot is senseless, with no logic but what is needed for the appropriate drama, and has both Peter and Dr. Strange being absurdly stupid (which is fine) and immediately kicking themselves for how stupid they were right after (which is not. Either commit to the bit or don't do it.) I am fine with characters being irrational and doing what is needed for the plot, if we believe in them as characters, but not if they go around the rest of the story commenting on how weird it was they did that thing. But fine.
What is more to be regretted is the drawn out tease of the "multiverse" the MCU has been doing. We've had "the multiverse is coming... dun dun dun" now be central to Spider-Man 2, WandaVision, the Loki series, and now this movie. It's still always "coming" and we "know frighteningly little about it." Presumably this will take center stage in the movie teased after these credits, but it has been a damn lot of teasing. Especially since the amount of multiverse crossover in this movie is basically pornographic.
Anyway, this act stretches from the first scene between Peter and Strange in the sanctum to right after their second. The one thing I really want to say for it is... damn William Dafoe is good. When I first saw the Green Goblin appear, I felt bad that MCU had reduced him to a CGI cameo for a paycheck. But his scene in the soup kitchen, and later in Happy's apartment, really let him shine.
The Act ends when Peter manages to defeat Dr. Strange in his own pocket dimension, and is a little bit in awe of himself for having done it. Which slightly touches on but doesn't embrace what could have been the main theme of this movie: awesome power.
In Worm, there is a scene after Taylor has defeated Mannequin, the technologically enhanced member of the Slaughterhouse 9, and one of the most feared villains on the planet. She crawls back into her apartment to find some hoodlums there. And they are terrified at how monstrous she is, having killed a monstrous enemy, and she reflects on what this says about her. Spider-Man realizing he just defeated the world's greatest magic user could cause that same reflection.
Because that is a sub-theme of this entire Act. Oh no, Doctor Octopus is here to threaten our universe's Peter Parker who has never had to deal with those robotic tentacles before. Oh it's no problem, Doc Ock has bluetooth on and Tony Stark gave Parker the best hacking tools money can buy. Mechanical villain is easily disabled. In fact with his magic friend, Spiderman doesn't have to kill any of these enemies, but can trivially lock five of them up in inescapable prisons.
This world (the Avenger's) is the super-science world. This Peter Parker is not just a webslinger, but possibly the most powerful person in this universe. Nothing is... really a threat to him. The awe of being a supreme entity could be a really interesting topic for a teenage superhero to wrestle with. I highly recommend "Strong Female Protagonist" for this very reason. But this movie doesn't engage with this sort of existential crisis.
Act III: Everyone Deserves a Second Chance
That's the title of this act because they repeat this moral like a dozen times. This finishes up the movie, even though it has two distinct parts (Peter trying at first to cure all the villains of their defects, and then the all out brawl after that fails the first time) but they are at least related to each other, and follow a combined arc.
It's certainly interesting as a series of short stories, and allows all the cameo actors to show off briefly, and we get the adorable chatter between the three different Spidermen. But I'm not gonna pretend that was a theme that was in any way supported by the first half of the movie.
The death of a major character here is, as everyone else has said, unearned. I don't really have anything to add to that besides how annoying it is that the new myths of our culture are so dependent on actors' contracts and the need for a main character to have the same sort of tragic backstory as their previous iterations have. It's without doubt the worst part of the movie (especially with the whole "receive a mortal blow, get up and walk around and talk for a while, and then pass out from blood loss, and no hero tries to take them to a hospital at any point.")
***
Update: Second Chances. (Hey, we're thematic here.) Muga brings this up below, but I had wanted to address this regardless once I had a chance to think about it more.
What does "a second chance" mean in this movie? It's the rallying cry of why Peter wants to figure out a way to "fix" the villains (which, to be fair, the movie gives a whole three lines of dialogue to how creepy "fixing" people sounds) so they don't go back just to die.
As Muga says, it's also easy to see this as a theme in how Peter wants to rewind time to fix what went wrong, or at least then rewrite memory.
But these aren't the same thing, nor the other ways "second chances" come up. What does a second chance *mean*?
Does it mean "we think you as a person have a lot of value, that first strike will not put you out, we'll give you another chance to prove yourself." Or does it mean "we will literally let you go back to your mistake, and do it right this time now that you've learned from it?"
Who is getting the second chance? The same person in the same circumstances, just hoping the fate goes another way? A person who has learned from what went wrong the first time? Or a person that has been forcibly changed by external forces?
What does mercy and redemption really mean? Do we value people because "they are not the worse thing they have ever done", or are we saying "if I were god, it would be my responsibility to fix all the bad parts of people?"
These are all good questions to be raised by a movie. But this movie in itself is not interested in their complexity, and just slaps multiple things together that aren't really connected to say "second chances!"
