DigModiFicaTion said:
Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019)
Not sure how I feel about this one. It wasn't great, but it certainly wasn't bad. They really messed with the traditional Spider-Man in this one. I wish it wouldn't have taken the turn it did so that we could have more clarity on future directions between Sony and Disney Spider-Man. The credits scene cameo was fun, but I ultimately wasn't a fan with where this takes the character. While Tom Holland may slightly edge out Toby Maguire's portrayal of Peter Parker, this new iteration is yet to reach the levels of Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2's story telling and faithfulness. An ultimately lackluster villain with missed opportunities to take this to a new realm that ultimately felt like an extension of Disney Spider-Man's origin story. As a result I give it a conflicted 7/10.
7/10 sounds about right to me. It's funny, I pretty much agree with everything you're saying, but I find myself mentally defending all these decisions. I think this probably has more to do with the generation we're in (I'm "Gen-X") and with expectations.
For instance, when Marvel got Spidey back, everyone my age was like "ugggh,
another Spider-Man reboot?! I'm so over it! Do another hero!" There was a big push to do something different, take one of the new Spidey spin-offs where the character is female or a minority, for example.
So Marvel didn't give us another origin story. They did give us the original Spidey, but possibly the most faithful to the spirit of the original, where he's
really young, and he looks up to the established heroes and wants to impress them but is insecure (the Fantastic Four originally). They also make him more relevant to the comics of the past decade by showing the mentorship with Tony Stark and the influence of that tech on Peter, really playing up that angle. So can we blame them for not repeating themselves and for making this Spider-Man relevant to today's stories?
I also feel like if you showed this to someone who just watched Homecoming and the last 2 Avengers films and didn't see any trailers and hadn't read any comics, then the big reveal works just fine. Of course no comics fans have any doubt about that story element, and a savvy movie-goer would get too much from the trailers not to be suspicious, but I really have to just judge the film on its own merits. I thought it was done quite well, and a nice update on a classic character.
These aren't really the Spider-Man movies I was expecting to see, but they basically gave me what I wanted with Spider-Man 1, at the time. I can accept these new movies for being the "Spidey in the context of the great MCU" films, which is something very cool I never got to see before. So there's that anyway.