Woah,
TM2YC, those are a couple of really interesting finds! Cheers!
Side note, David Harbour is great, but he's a weird guy who made a lot of weird film choices for a long time before Stranger Things. I feel like he needs stronger management because he's being given enough rope to hang his career right now just when he was getting "hot"...
Canon Editor, I think I know what you're saying, and I can sympathize, but I just don't think I share a lot of that point of view. If you look at my website (in my signature) the entire thing is devoted to sort of anti-Oscar sentiment, anti-pretension, anti-critic... honestly, it's probably the polar opposite of what hardcore Scorcese fans like. I appreciate some of his films, but I think directors like him and PTA and Steve McQueen and Damien Chazelle, etc. are really overhyped. These guys are like dark chocolate or ...I don't know... a double IPA. There's a lot of craft in what they do, but it's not really to everyone's tastes. Most people want a bit of milk in their chocolate, or a bit less bitterness in their beer, and
that's fine. It really rankles me when fans imply that, imagine this, "If you're not drinking IPA, you're drinking a lesser beer. What is that, a stout? Psssh. That's hardly even beer." Imagine that tosser in a pub? Everyone would tell him to kiss right off. He'd be called a pretentious knob.
To bring this back to "Reviews" and closer to the thread topic, if you want to compare Spider-Man 2 to SM: Far From Home, then I'm on board with you that SM2 is a much more effective story. I see where you're coming from with all your reasons. But I hardly think you can say the same for MCU films across the board. And there are plenty of Scorcese films that are less effective (Last Temptation of Christ, Kundun, Bringing Out the Dead, etc.).
It's also kind of unfair... if you look at pre-MCU superhero films, Spider-Man 2 is arguably the best of the best. Versus in the MCU, Far From Home is one of the weakest, imho. For example, compare the original Spider-Man to Spider-Man: Homecoming. Raimi's Spider-Man has not aged all that well. I loved that movie, but nowadays it often seems cheesy and stagey. Versus Homecoming, where you're just anchored in Peter's journey and actually get a couple of gut punches.
Plus, you could argue that comparing
anything to the MCU is like apples and oranges, as they've really re-invented the genre. They have finally serialized films to match the comic book experience. It's a shared world, characters enter and exit and everyone brings with them previous history and potential future plot threads... virtually
nothing is standalone, everything is part of a bigger picture. Just by the nature of the thing, it becomes a Producer-driven medium, unless you get one director to director film after film (the closest we've had is the Russos). It's just not really fair to pick out one MCU film and compare it to one film of anything else, since there's nothing else like it. There are benefits and drawbacks to making this kind of universe, and I feel like people have now gotten used to the benefits so they just want to pick out the drawbacks, which is not really fair.
I would agree though that I'd like to see the films show more of the director's personal styles. We've definitely seen this a bit already with Waititi and Coogler and Black and Whedon. But I'd like to see them push it like the comics, into these films being really like a totally different genre. A proper supernatural horror film for Dr. Strange, for example. A real martial arts film for Shang Chi. A true meditative headtrippy sci-fi film for The Eternals. Marvel is definitely in a position to let their properties have more of their own look and feel now. Would that help to close the distance for you and make them feel more like real "art"?