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Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019; Directed by Jon Watts)

The first post-Endgame film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (ie. That Massive-Budget Superhero TV Show That We All Watch Together In Movie Theatres), Far From Home takes the charming and even clever elements of Homecoming, Sony/Marvel Studios’ first tandem Spider-Man movie rebooted into the MCU, and self-consciously, self-reflexively Avenger-fies them to typically overblown proportions.

Homecoming saw a teenaged Peter Parker (the preternaturally boyish Tom Holland, who is actually 23 years old, of course) struggling in intermittently comedic and action-dramatic ways with the difficulty of balancing the typical and relatable problems of a regular teenaged boy (school, home life, girls; okay, it’s pretty much only girls) with the pressure, expectations, and perpetual life-threatening danger of the life of a superhero. It was more than a winking, intertextual homage to John Hughes movies, it was a John Hughes movie; the key distinction being that the intimidating father of the male lead’s putative girlfriend who might have served as a Hughesian antagonist is also a menacing proletarian arms dealer who is out to kill the protagonist (Michael Keaton is this dad-tagonist, and the scene between him and Holland in the car on the way to the homecoming dance is the best thing about that movie and among the best things in the whole MCU).

Homecoming was also concerned with Peter’s relationship to father-surrogates, namely with his self-appointed mentor, the late Tony Stark/Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.). Orphaned and also without the sage advice of his father figure Uncle Ben (always a first-act casualty whose loss galvanized Peter’s quest in prior Spider-Man franchise streams, Ben was reduced to passing dialogue references in Homecoming and a subtle suitcase monogram in this one), Peter was built up as a surrogate son to Stark (whose own backstory is rife with daddy issues and self-doubt), who mostly chided him for being too young and unprepared for real superhero challenges while withholding and then gifting glittering tech toys as tokens of (and substitutes for) his disavowed and ill-apprehended love. Surrogate Father of the Year! This relationship evolved in the Infinity Gauntlet duology, especially in Endgame, wherein Tony’s loss of Peter Parker in Thanos’s Decimation haunts him and motivates him to risk everything (and ultimately lose his own life) to undo the Dusting and bring back Peter (and the rest of the lost too, why not?).

In addition to dealing parenthetically and often comedically with the weird social and personal consequences of the Decimation and its five-years-hence undoing (it’s called the Blip), Spider-Man: Far From Home ramps up the stakes by quadrupling Peter Parker’s father-surrogate count (his mother-surrogate, Marisa Tomei’s Aunt May, could have made it a quintupling but thematically she never quite counts, because she’s just a woman, one supposes). Tony Stark is gone, but Peter literally sees him everywhere; just as the society and pop culture of Peter’s world in Homecoming was saturated with the famous world-saving Avengers (one of its cannier features), in Far From Home tributes to Iron Man’s world-saving sacrifice are ubiquitous: advertisements, public tributes and memorials, posters, graffiti, biographical movies, even a hilariously low-budget school A/V club newscast tribute set to Whitney Houston’s version of “I Will Always Love You” (this homemade montage at the movie’s beginning also includes other deceased Avengers, although its image of Vision is amusingly pixelated). Peter is also burdened with the weight of Stark’s legacy and the expectations of following in Iron Man’s footsteps, especially after receiving Stark’s posthumous gift of access to E.D.I.T.H., the complete Stark Industries database and weapons arsenal.

Peter Parker is still a teenager, though, and Avengers proximity aside he seeks to keep Your Friendly Neighbourhood Spider-Man humble and limited in scope. In Far From Home, this proscribing of the lofty ambitions and level of duty conceived of for Spider-Man by others plays out in the midst of a school trip to the capitals of Europe during the summer. His other father-surrogates are all connected to Tony Stark, and therefore hold certain expectations for Spider-Man’s role as Iron Man’s unofficial heir: Stark Industries security chief Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau, director of the first two Iron Man movies) remains in Peter’s life as a reminder of his former boss and friend’s annointing of the boy (and also because he’s romantically involved with May), while Avengers strings-puller Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) aggressively pursues Spider-Man’s cooperation in dealing with a new global threat: enormous Elementals, who arise out of earth, air, water, and fire to wreak destructive havok without warning. With the Avengers and their various allies scattered to the winds after Endgame, Peter’s only super-partner against the god-level threat of the Elementals is Quentin Beck/Mysterio, who claims to be a green-fog-wielding warrior from a parallel universe in which the Elementals destroyed Earth.

In contrast to the crushing weight of Stark’s posthumous expectations and Fury’s no-nonsense insistence that Spider-Man is an Avenger and therefore will do what he is asked to do, Beck takes a role less like a stern father and more like a cool, understanding older brother to Peter. He is impressed with what Spider-Man can do, but is also supportive of Peter Parker getting to have a life of his own, especially since he is mostly handling the Elementals fine himself. This supportive backup is music to Peter’s ears, as he tries to ghost on Fury and enjoy his class trip, during which he plans to tell his high-school crush MJ (teen star Zendaya) that he likes her, along with the gift of a Venetian glass pendant.

And so Far From Home is structured as a push-and-pull between Peter’s human wants and his super-duty. He clumsily balances battling the Elementals in large-scale CG action sequences (in the Grand Canal of Venice, during a Carnival of Lights in Prague) and tackling his feelings for MJ and the awkwardness of his failed attempts to spend time alone with her. The school trip scenes take on the likably light profile of comic misadventures: as Peter is a social klutz around MJ, his rival Brad (Remy Hii) moves in on her, while Peter’s friend Ned (Jacob Batalon) strikes up a vacation puppy-love romance with classmate Betty (Angourie Rice) and the hapless teacher chaperones (Martin Starr and J.B. Smoove) clown it up with their ineptitude. Because this is a Marvel Studios movie, the tension is not so much resolved and Peter never precisely has to choose between a normal life and a superhero life; the two poles are softly reconciled, as he succeeds by acting like he always has, only more so.

Far From Home‘s thematic focus on this tension in Peter Parker’s life and his struggles to figure out exactly how he should follow in Tony Stark’s footsteps (if at all) is oddly at cross-purposes with its antagonist twist (read no further if you don’t want to know what it is) and its contemporary political subtext. As should be no surprise to comics readers, Mysterio is not what he claims or appears to be. Behind the fishbowl helmet and the flight-empowered green fog suit, Quentin Beck is just a man. A clever, creative, angry man who is utilizing sophisticated hologram projection technology once rejected by Tony Stark along with swarms of Stark’s attack drones (particularly after Parker, impressed with Beck’s abilities and empathy and eager to shake off the burden of responsibility for E.D.I.T.H., hands over control of the system to his new Super Big Brother) to simulate the Elemental assaults. With the help of a coterie of disgruntled former Stark specialists (this is now the fourth MCU movie, and hopefully the last, to feature scorned Stark colleagues/rivals as antagonists, after all three Iron Man films went to that well), Beck seeks to turn Mysterio into a publically-loved superhero replacement for the Avengers, swindling Fury, his right-hand woman Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders), and Spidey in the process (or eliminating them if that fails).

Peter Parker’s superhero challenge in Far From Home, therefore, pivots with this twist from a more standard strength test of destroying monstrous embodiments of the four elements to penetrating Beck’s layered defences of illusion. These confound and nearly kill Parker in Berlin, in a sequence of rapid-fire mirroring projections that will impress audiences who haven’t seen the similar but far trippier and better sequence in Doctor Strange. Utilizing Gyllenhaal’s favoured approach of wielding his considerable charisma to subvert and darken the margins of initially stock-esque characters (it may be this vector of his performances that has kept him from being a bigger star than he is), Far From Home (the screenplay is by Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers) seeks to make a larger point through Mysterio’s deceptions about the current public discourse of deception infecting global politics and society. This is all well and good, and an interesting new angle for the MCU’s usual careful political critiques of American power (even if Iron Man 3 kind of did a version of it already). But it has absolutely nothing to do with Peter Parker wanting to be a regular kid while everyone seems to want him to be a world-saving hero, and its tangential (and even slightly contradictory) direction compared to its lead character’s emotional arc weakens Far From Home not inconsiderably.

The MCU Spider-Man movies are unique in the multi-film cycle in featuring a superhero protagonist with a secret identity that he seeks to protect. Ever since the Universe kicked off with Tony Stark publically coming out as Iron Man when the expectation (and the creative intention, if the legend of Downey, Jr. ad-libbing the now-iconic “I am Iron Man” line at the end of the eponymous franchise-starter has any truth to it) would have been that he would keep his identity under wraps, the MCU’s depiction of its heroes has not gone in for this obvious and fruitful device of dramatic tension. The application of that device has worked very well in the two Tom Holland-fronted Spider-Man movies thus far, but if the mid-credits sequel-teasing stinger scene is any indication (featuring J.K. Simmons as J. Jonah Jameson as a parodic take on far-right site InfoWars’ splenetic, conspiracy-spewing warthog Alex Jones), its time in this franchise is at an end. However, the biggest movies in Hollywood are preparing themselves for the difficult task of taking on fake news (or at least mildly satirizing it), and that is a fascinating development.

Another fascinating development that Spider-Man: Far From Home represents is the rare superhero genre sight of Marvel Studios playing catch-up after being surpassed by a rival production. This spectacle was visible to some extent in the belated and more than a little forced manner in which Marvel Studios found religion when it came to representations of feminist empowerment, after DC and Warner unexpectedly lapped them in this regard with Wonder Woman (although the objectification and stereotyping of Justice League undid a lot that movie’s fine work, Captain Marvel and the cynically unearned female team-up beat in Endgame‘s final battle had a whiff of desperation when it came to this issue).

But while the Jon Watts/Tom Holland Spider-Man movies have been well-received critically and commercially and can boast the prized imprimatur of the Marvel Cinematic Universe to ensure some reliable baseline level of quality and blockbuster prestige, film and comic book lovers alike cannot pretend that they can stack up in any way to Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, last year’s innovative, incredible, and enervating animated feature take on the character. It seems likely that Sony, aware that they were giving up more than a little control over the character in inviting Marvel Studios to incorporate it into its successful but limiting continuity, decided to establish a radically new and different strand for Spider-Man at the same time. In the process, they strangely handicapped this live-action Spider-Man. When Peter Parker suits up and embraces his full web-swinging glory above and through the streets of Manhattan at the conclusion of Far From Home, he is only chasing the animated Miles Morales of Spider-Verse, whose own journey to that portrait of urban freedom is already (after but a single, wonderful movie) both more visually and emotionally rich than this Peter’s. It’s a curious position for Marvel Studios to find itself in as regards one of its most iconic characters and a vital component of the future of its Avengers brand. Let’s see where they go with it.