MCU Fans Criticize Spider-Man’s Sequel for Making ‘Absolutely No Sense’
Marvel fans have been so eager to keep the company’s signature hero, Spider-Man, in the Marvel Cinematic Universe that debate still rages on how to handle him. So intense was the debate last year when the Disney/Sony deal lapsed that it still echoes throughout Reddit forums now.
Case in point: the debate over Spider-Man: Far From Home. Fans have talked about everything from the strangest of all end credits scenes to whether the MCU/Spidey movies lean too hard on Iron Man, even after Tony Stark made the ultimate sacrifice. Now some say the movie makes no sense at all.
How have the MCU Spider-Man movies gone over?
On the whole, reception of Tom Holland and his Spider-Man movies has been very positive. Fans cheered his first appearance in Captain America: Civil War so much that they wanted the standalone Spider-Man movie immediately. When they got it the following year, they rewarded Spider-Man Homecoming with an $880 million worldwide gross.
When the sequel, Far From Home, arrived last year, it did even better financially, making more than $1 billion worldwide. That was almost certainly fueled by the stratospheric box office of Avengers: Endgame, the biggest international moneymaker of all time. One could say that Far From Home was the most hotly anticipated cinematic postscript of all time.
On Rotten Tomatoes, Far from Home scored a strong 91 percent with critics, with the consensus saying “A breezily unpredictable blend of teen romance and superhero action, Spider-Man: Far from Home stylishly sets the stage for the next era of the MCU.” The audience score is 95 percent. So what’s the issue?
What are fans’ complaints about ‘Far From Home?’
A fan who must be in that other five percent writes on Reddit that the whole matter regarding EDITH, the Stark AI entrusted to Peter Parker, makes “absolutely no sense.” One of the key complaints is “WHY would Tony leave a super powerful military-grade weapon to a teenager instead of, you know, his best friend who just so happens to be an actual general AND an Avenger?”
The simplest answer to the fan’s question would be that if Stark didn’t do that, there would be no movie, but that would be a cop-out. One fan defended the movie by saying that character growth does not always follow a straight line, and that it would actually be in character for Tony to make reckless, ill-considered (if well-intentioned) decisions. It was his MO in life, and so it goes, even after he’s dead.
This feeds into the overarching complaint that some fans and critics have had that the Spider-Man movies have tried too hard to be Iron Man Jr. Spider-Man, even more so than Iron Man, is the very symbol of Marvel Comics, the same way Mickey Mouse is the symbol of the Walt Disney Company. Why should Spider-Man need Iron Man that badly, the detractors ask?
Is the third movie not the charm?
Fans on the Reddit forum noted that with the third Spider-Man movie coming up next year, there is still a chance for Peter Parker to break free of Tony Stark’s shadow.
Having his secret identity revealed in the last act just might force Peter to do that. At the same time, with his dying breath, Mysterio was still tying Peter to Tony, so some chains are hard to break.
That said, fans hold out hope that the third Spider-Man movie will make the title character stand on his own, just as the third Thor movie, Ragnarok, did for the God of Thunder. Fans thought that Loki had hijacked the first two Thor movies, but Thor stood more on his own in his third movie, even though Loki was still around. Barring any more pandemic-related delays, the third Spider-man movie swings into theaters in November 2021.
