Though it reacts to the death of a single person rather than those of millions, Spider-Man: Far from Home more acutely portrays the lingering aftershocks of grief than Avengers: Endgame. Much of this film finds Peter Parker (Tom Holland) mourning the loss of mentor and surrogate father figure Tony Stark and struggling to live up to his legacy. That Iron Man continues to groom Peter as a protégé from beyond the grave, bequeathing him much of his technology and a general sense of personal trust, only leaves the teenager more distraught. Holland nailed Peter’s awkward, nerdy skittishness from the moment he debuted as the character, but here he laces that anxiety with a striking sense of pathos.
Peter, now back from the dead, is drained and in need of a break, which he hopes to get in the form of a school trip to Europe. Determined to leave hero work behind for a few weeks while seeing sights and working up the nerve to confess his romantic feelings to MJ (Zendaya), he desperately clings to the hope of simply enjoying life. Of course, fate has other plans, and soon Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) arrives to demand Peter’s help in stopping a threat of Elementals, alien forces of fire, water, wind, and earth. Compared to Tony’s sardonic yet avuncular rapport with Peter, Fury is purely authoritarian, forcing Peter to work with Quentin Beck, a.k.a. Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal), a technologically advanced caped crusader who claims to be from a destroyed alternate Earth. Peter, motivated by his youthful self-doubt and his indefatigable earnestness, is so wowed by Mysterio’s displays of bravery and skill in fighting the Elementals that he humbly turns over access to the global drone network that Tony entrusted to the boy in the hopes that Earth has found a new superhero leader.
Of course, anyone with a passing familiarity with Spider-Man and his rogues’ gallery of foes can guess that Mysterio isn’t who he seems, and soon Peter finds himself confronted with the character’s prodigious skills as an illusionist. Like Spider-Man: Homecoming, Far from Home can look tacky at times, with its actors standing out garishly against visibly fake computer-generated backgrounds and effects that verge on the cartoonish. Here, though, that uncanny valley of dissonance is narrativized, a literal projection of the film’s villain.
Mysterio’s mirages also result in some of the strongest action scenes in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, including a spellbinding sequence in which Mysterio plunges Peter into an ever-shifting illusion where Spider-Man is knocked around a space with indefinite parameters while being taunted by the false images of his allies. As Peter punches stone columns he believes to be Mysterio, dropped in and out of abysses, and even dog-piled by duplicates of himself, the scene marks perhaps the first moment in the entire MCU to fully, almost expressionistically, embrace the limitless possibilities of malleable comic-book action.
As overwhelming and frightening as Mysterio’s powers can be, there’s an inherent absurdity to his weaponization of illusions and parlor tricks that adheres to the oddball spirit of Silver and Bronze age comics over the more serious-minded, modern-era material that’s informed most of Marvel’s film output. Likewise, Far from Home intuitively understands Peter’s allure as a character. No other figure so thoroughly epitomizes Marvel’s mission statement of mixing the fantastical with the routine as Peter, who’s dealt with aliens, clones, and alternate universes but was struggling to pay the rent decades before New York was gentrified.
Director Jon Watts deftly weaves the epic and the mundane aspects of Spider-Man’s existence throughout Far from Home. No less impressive than the film’s action scenes are Peter’s endearingly awkward attempts to grow closer to MJ, whose introversion magnifies
the clumsiness of his flirtations. Zendaya may be even stronger than Holland at portraying the intensity of romantic inexperience: If Peter’s face can be read like a book, MJ regularly falls back on macabre humor and blunt distractions to avoid being open about her feelings.
In the end, though, Far from Home’s driving principle is less Peter’s hang-ups or the face-off with Mysterio and more the effort to reposition the MCU around Peter Parker. At times this goal is made too explicit, with the characters’ shared scientific acumen and intelligence used to dubiously suggest that this hormonal teen might be ready to take a leadership role in the Avengers. Yet the film is ultimately on more solid ground when positioning Peter as the new emotional fulcrum on which the MCU can turn, with Tony’s sarcasm and megalomania replaced by Peter’s humility and guilelessness. It all suggests that the next phase of the MCU may be less cynical and more emotionally resonant than the prior one.
Since 2001, we've brought you uncompromising, candid takes on the world of film, music, television, video games, theater, and more. Independently owned and operated publications like Slant have been hit hard in recent years, but we’re committed to keeping our content free and accessible—meaning no paywalls or fees.
If you like what we do, please consider subscribing to our Patreon or making a donation.
