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Forum namePass The Popcorn
Topic subjectI think he meant more that this movie really had no stakes
Topic URLhttp://board.okayplayer.com/okp.php?az=show_topic&forum=6&topic_id=730223&mesg_id=735366
735366, I think he meant more that this movie really had no stakes
Posted by Nodima, Fri Jul-05-19 11:47 AM
Not big or little, but just none at all. This is kind of what I was getting at with my comment too, he just articulated it better. Far From Home is a ton of fun, but it was missing the actual stakes behind Vulture's relationship to Peter and his personal motivations for doing what he was doing. The stakes were low, the lowest of anything outside the Ant-Man films, but it got what made the stakes high *for those characters* and presented them as such. Here, Spidey doesn't really doubt that he can defeat Mysterio, he just gets what the problem is and deals with it. There's no one for him to bounce off of, either, because Mysterio is the only one that gets it and he's not exactly about to give Peter any ideas.

Far From Home does that a lot; it shrugs off the Blip for the most part, it shrugs off the damage to the cities after so much of Phase 3 dealt with the fall out of the critic reactions to Avengers, Ultron and the Superman movie, it honestly shrugs off the people who know Peter is Spider-Man compared to how excited Ned was and conflicted/angered Adrian was in the first film.

I don't think Far From Home needed stakes as high as Endgame - and as it goes, Mysterio and his motivations were *perfect* for a film following up that one - I just think the screenplay was content to let a lot of big moments come and go without a real emotional weight to them, which is something I know people say about a lot of these movies but I really think Phase 3 in particular has been excellent at making the inevitable seem plausibly impossible, and its characters convincingly unsure of their inevitability (other than Thanos, which was what made him a great final boss) as well.

Like, I was speculating above where they could take this story now that the world knows who Spider-Man is but the state of play has also effectively been reset to zero in Spider-Man's world otherwise. What makes the first two Raimi films great is that there's no greater context to the story other than Peter Parker and his struggles with growing up under the pressure of being capable of being Spider-Man, and the stakes really aren't any higher in those movies than never meet your heroes, easy and nimble morality tales with superpowers (hell, the villains don't even really have *powers*).

After Far From Home, there's no worry that Spider-Man movies will be mediocre or bad any time soon, it's more that this super awesome version of the character will be stuck having to deal with whatever's going on in the MCU all the time and never have time for another car ride with the father of his would-be girlfriend who also happens to be his first nemesis, where the stakes are confined to a very specific set of people, but for those people it's all that matters. That's the greatness of Spider-Man as a character, and sometimes Far From Home missed the boat on that.


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