Wednesday 20 May 2020

MAYvel Phase 3: Spiderman Far From Home: "We felt the need to remind you that Iron Man is dead."

And so Marvel's Phase 3, and the Infinity Saga comes to a close. 11 years, 23 movies, and with the next batch of content looking to be even bigger thanks to the Fox acquisition, it seems like the only thing that's going to stop Marvel is a Pandemic. Let's see how well that actually works out, because... actually probably better I don't finish this joke... With this being the last movie of Phase 3, I thought it was fitting to end MAYvel Phase 3 here, the original plans of reviewing the 90's Spiderman and X Men cartoons will happen at another time.




Starting with the plot, after the events of Endgame, Peter Parker and his high school friends go on a European tour, but due to this being Spiderman, it is never that simple. Creatures from a different universe known as the Elementals begin to cause chaos in the aftermath of Endgame, with the only superhero capable of stopping is a new hero by the name of Mysterio. Peter begins to trust this new hero, believing that he should be the one to take the one gift that Tony left Peter after he passed away, a pair of augmented reality glasses that are also connected to an international defence system called E.D.I.T.H (something that may have come in handy during the final battle of Endgame...). Mysterio turns out to be a bad guy, and the head of a group of disgruntled former employees of Stark Industries, and once he takes control of E.D.I.T.H, he and his team use the holographic systems built into the drones to supercharge his illusions to try and make him look superior to the Avengers. Realizing his mistake, Peter goes to stop him, gets the glasses back, stops Mysterio from causing any more destruction, but Mysterio gets the last laugh and reveals Peter's identity as Spiderman to the world via the Daily Bugle, setting up for a Spiderman 3 that, at the time, no one really knew if it would happen due to the game of chicken Sony and Marvel/ Disney were in the process of regarding rights.

I'm mixed about this movie because while there isn't much I can point to as objectively bad, the cast is great, the story is interesting, feeling very much like an MCU Spider-man movie without feeling as repetitive as some other MCU sequel films. The problem I had with the movie though back when it came out, and still to this day, almost emphasised by the fact that I'm watching them back to back, is fatigue. This movie came out two months after Endgame did, which in turn came out a little under two months after Captain Marvel did. Everything in 2019 was focused on Endgame, to the point it overshadowed Captain Marvel, and though Sony tried to keep Far From Home being overshadowed with releasing the trailer early, it didn't help as the lead up to Far From Home was just "How does this affect Endgame, what's going to happen now that Endgame happened?" All of that compressed into a small chunk of the year, it was draining, like it didn't know how to end. I would say Far From Home would have been a better fit if it had released this year alongside Black Widdow, use 2020 as the cooldown from Endgame, but considering everything that has been happening with the Coronavirus, maybe it was better for it to release last year. Still, would an October release not hurt? Give some more time to breath between releases? I don't have a problem with Marvel movies coming out 3 times a year, but this was in a relatively short window that it felt like overkill.

But again, on its own, the movie itself is good, with one of my favourite parts of the movie being when Mysterio uses his hologram illusion tech on Peter. The way the shot was filmed, it makes you question what is real and what is fake. I'm curious to see where this story goes, but above all else, I really hope that they do eventually learn from this release schedule. But regarding that last one, a part of me thinks they aren't going to because as far as I can tell, Thor 4, Doctor Strange 2, Black Panther 2 and Captain Marvel 2 are now all slated to be released between February 2022 and July 2022, and that's not including those Disney+ shows...2022 is going to be the year when they make more MCU content then I can fit into a month isn't it?

No comments:

Post a Comment