James Proclaims!

It’s Christmas Eve once more and so once again the folly of my annual advent calendar of movies that are a bit Christmas(ish) must draw to a close.

And what better way to go out than 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home? That is a clearly a rhetorical question for there is no better way.

As big a fan as I am of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and of superhero films in general, they are now so ubiquitous that it’s not often that they live up to the hype. But I genuinely loved this movie. Spider-Man was always my favourite superhero as a kid, which is a pretty high accolade from a kid who really liked superheroes. As a child I was mainly a fan of Spider-Man cartoons, what with there not actually being a live-action cinematic version of the Web-Slinger until 2002 (I know that may not be factually accurate and but it’s reasonable to state that anything ‘live action’ relating to Spider-Man pre-2002 was not widely known or particularly good). I’ve enjoyed the highs and lows of all the cinematic iterations of Peter Parker and his alter ego since the 2002 movie (some are clearly better than others) but, just when I thought the world didn’t need a new version of Spider-Man, Tom Holland made the part his own in the MCU, first through a cameo in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War and then in subsequent stand-alone Spider-Man movies alongside the brilliant third and fourth installments of the Avengers movies. Sometimes the MCU can be hard to keep up with, but the addition of Spider-Man was genuinely wonderful.

The bar was pretty high for No Way Home, and on paper it seemed like it might be biting off more than it could chew by incorporating several villains from both the Toby Maguire and Andrew Garfield versions of the franchise, as well as uniting Holland with Maguire and Garfield (in one of the worst kept secrets in Hollywood) to have three iterations of Spider-Man in one movie. Incorporating all five non-MCU Spider-Man films into the already fairly bloated MCU might have been disastrous. It was, instead, a triumph.

I have no idea if this film is remotely appealing to anyone that isn’t a well-established Spidey-fan because I am so far down that particular rabbit-hole that I can’t even understand the concept of not being a Spidey fan.

This is definitely a movie that was made for my inner child and my inner child will forever be grateful.

Score for Christmasishness

As if a movie containing three versions of Spider-Man were not reward enough, imagine my delight when I realised that the end of the movie is explicitly set at Christmas time. It isn’t clear exactly when the rest of the movie is set beyond the fact that it is established quite early on that we’re into a period that is post-Halloween. There is one subtle reference that Christmas is coming shortly after that, but as it involves a department store and as department stores are quite heavily invested in promoting Christmas for much of November and December, there is no conclusive proof that we’re into ‘the season’ prior to the final scenes of the movie. But those scenes are very Christmassy and would be enough for me to include a much lesser film in this annual countdown. So for a movie as great as No Way Home those scenes make it a shoe-in for the Christmas Eve slot.