If you haven’t seen Spider-man: Far From Home yet, make sure you get out of here and into a theater now, because you don’t want to miss it, and you definitely don’t want to get spoiled!
I have a feeling that the spoilers are, in large part, what make Far From Home such a fun movie: as I wrote in my nonspoiler review, it’s virtually impossible to talk about the film without giving anything away, because there are dozens of little shocks and surprises, not to mention a couple of huge, mind-blowing plot twists. And we can talk about them all now! We’ll discuss them in order of importance.
Surprisingly, one of the smallest, most insignificant surprises in the movie has to do with the consequences of Avengers: Endgame – or, rather, the lack thereof. The film opens with an emotional tribute to fallen heroes of previous movies, set to Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You”, which then gives way to some exposition about what happened after Endgame: namely, the moment at which half of the human population suddenly reappeared. Unfortunately, this is all covered in a matter of seconds, with just one quick shot of dusted highschool students suddenly reappearing on the basketball court where they had been dusted five years earlier by Thanos’ infamous Snap. Thanos would be outraged to hear that people have begun calling this moment…the Blip. It’s a dumb name, and it does kind of undermine the huge drama of Endgame, but it is exactly what people these days would call such an event – a blip, a minor nuisance for those who were dusted.
But let’s talk about that, actually. In Far From Home, we mostly see things from the perspective of those who were Dusted, and have since Blipped back into existence, five years later, but still the same age. Peter Parker (Tom Holland), and all but one of his classmates were victims of the Snap, as was Peter’s Aunt May (Marisa Tomei). Leaving aside the fact that this is highly implausible considering that the Dusting was random and indiscriminate, these characters all have something in common, something I couldn’t quite place a finger on while watching the film: entitlement. The Dusted make up the vast majority of this film’s cast, and almost all of them have the same attitude of nonchalance and, dare I say, arrogance. They died and came back to life, but for them, the entire span of time between the Snap and the Blip was a matter of minutes: meanwhile, in the world around them, people have gotten married, had kids, died. One Dusted character comments on “how weird” it is that his younger brother is now older than him, but why don’t we stop to think about how it must feel for that younger/older brother, who has probably been dealing with emotional trauma, possibly even living as an only child, but now has to re-adapt to life with a sibling? The film only focuses on one character who survived the Dusting and has grown up in the intervening five years – Brad Davis (Remy Hii), who is treated throughout the film as a threat to Peter’s relationship with MJ (Zendaya), and something of an antagonist. But it’s the Dusted who actually come off as ungrateful and selfish, willfully endangering their lives time and time again. A lot of people wondered why, if Peter had just been Dusted, Aunt May would immediately thereafter let him go on a field-trip to Europe. Well, because Aunt May was just as dismissive of the Snap as any of the Dusted: sure, she had a funny experience where she reappeared in her old apartment only to discover that a new family had moved in – but she still got the apartment back, didn’t she?
Anyway…while we’re on the subject of Aunt May, let me move on from my angry tirade – May is not an important character in the film, but she does have a very adorable flirtatious relationship with Tony Stark’s aide, Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau). And at the end of the movie, when Peter confronts them and asks for the truth, May breaks Happy’s heart by revealing that it wasn’t meant to be a serious relationship – just a fling. Hopefully May rethinks that, because these two made one cute couple (honestly, when you think about it, it’s another example of how ungrateful the Dusted are).
Happy isn’t the only constant reminder of Tony Stark in Far From Home: aside from a brief mention of Tony’s wife Pepper Potts, there’s also some new surprises. We learn early on in the film that, before his death, Tony built a pair of glasses which control the hugely dangerous E.D.I.T.H (Even Dead, I’m The Hero) technology: this includes an almost infinite supply of killer drones and some really scary satellites orbiting the planet. Naturally, he also entrusted these glasses to Peter Parker, a scared and overwhelmed teenage boy. Just like any of Tony’s creations, these E.D.I.T.H glasses can be used for good or bad purposes – Peter makes this clear when he accidentally uses them to call a drone-strike on his rival, Brad Davis: even worse, he then gives the glasses to Quentin Beck (Jake Gyllenhaal), a man he’s known for a couple of days – even though he does eventually get them back, the E.D.I.T.H drones also capture him on camera, killing Beck. We’ll get to that later, though.
First, let’s talk about Beck himself. This one honestly shouldn’t have come as a surprise: we learn about halfway through the movie that Beck, who seems really nice and friendly, is actually a mentally unstable con-man trying to get revenge on his former boss, Tony Stark, who he believes stole his life-work and gave him no credit. With a team of disgruntled former Stark Industries employees, Beck has created an elaborate smoke-and-mirrors ruse – he pretends to be from another world in the Marvel multiverse, a warrior hunting huge creatures called Elementals, which wreak havoc across Europe. In reality, the Elementals are all special effects, and Beck is hunting Peter Parker, trying to win him over with kindness and get the E.D.I.T.H glasses from him. Jake Gyllenhaal brings a lot of charisma to the role – and his abrupt transformation from sweet, gentle Quentin Beck, to the over-the-top theatrical villainy of “Mysterio”, as he calls himself, is handled with ease. Granted, the actual scene in which his evil plans are revealed is…not quite as great. Gyllenhaal has to dump a lot of exposition and backstory while monologuing to his henchmen, and the dialogue itself is a bit wooden – but the delivery is as good as it can be, and Gyllenhaal was clearly having the time of his life while filming. He reminded me a great deal of Count Olaf from A Series of Unfortunate Events in that one scene. And he was detestable: from his snarky smile to his outfit, I wanted to punch him in the face. I didn’t think he could get worse.
He got worse.
I mentioned in my nonspoiler review that fans of Peter Parker will be traumatized by this movie: I stand by that. After getting the E.D.I.T.H glasses, Mysterio learns that Peter and MJ have uncovered his secret identity and are trying to reach Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) at a S.H.I.E.L.D office in Berlin. Mysterio lures Peter into a trap, using special effects and illusions to fool him into an abandoned warehouse where he tries to murder him. What follows is some of the most nightmarish and imaginative stuff I’ve ever seen in a superhero movie: a sequence reminiscent of the “A Friend Like Me” musical number in Aladdin – but with disorienting green fog, spiders, and hundreds of Mysterio clones instead of singing genies and magic carpets. There are moments of dead silence, where we follow Peter as he tries to find a way out of the CGI darkness, only to run into a graveyard where he is confronted by a zombie apparition of Tony Stark. There’s a scene where Peter is surrounded by mirror images of himself, which suddenly come to life and try to strangle him. It goes on for an excruciatingly long time, with no end in sight – there’s one point at which you think the illusion is over, when Nick Fury shoots Mysterio in the back…but that’s a deception too. And then Peter Parker gets hit by a train.
He survives this, of course. How, I don’t know, but at least he manages to finally break free from Mysterio’s illusions – watching Peter be tortured both physically and mentally, not knowing who he could trust or what he could do to escape: it was heartbreaking. I nearly cried when Peter climbed, bloodied and bruised, up onto the side of the speeding bullet-train. I nearly cried again when he was wandering, lost and confused, through a picturesque Dutch village. I did cry when he finally met up with Happy Hogan again: he was crying, I was crying.
Then Led Zeppelin started playing. That dried my tears pretty quickly.
One more thing about Mysterio before we move to the third act surprises: the whole concept of the Multiverse, teased in the first few trailers for the film – it’s all a lie, concocted by Quentin Beck’s professional scriptwriters. There is no rift between dimensions, no Earth 616 – as of right now, there is still only one reality in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which is honestly fine by me. It does mean we can probably dismiss all those rumors about the X-Men or the Fantastic Four coming from an alternate world in the Multiverse.
Now, for the big battle at the end. This happens in London, on the Tower Bridge, where Mysterio uses the E.D.I.T.H drones to create one “Avengers-level threat” for him to single-handedly defeat. Things get a little messy when Peter Parker disables the drones and exposes the illusion, leading to an epic battle where Peter has to go through Mysterio’s nightmare world again in order to get to him. Meanwhile, his friends, such as MJ and Ned (Jacob Batalon) are trapped in a museum, using medieval weapons to take on the killer-bots: this is what I called a Disney-Channel moment in my nonspoiler review – it’s silly, but fun. In the end, though, no amount of plot armor was going to save those kids from being horribly murdered – it’s only when Mysterio shuts down E.D.I.T.H by himself, while trying to fool Peter into thinking that he’s surrendered, that the teens are able to escape. But here’s where things get really cool – and, again, traumatic. Mysterio falls back, seemingly humbled, telling Peter that he regrets everything. For a few moments, the audience is fooled – and then, suddenly, Peter spins around and grabs a gun from the real Mysterio, who has been standing nearby, invisible. There’s a single gunshot in the dead silence, and Mysterio slumps to the ground, dead – all thanks to Peter’s “spidey-sense” (though, it’s worth mentioning that there’s a running joke in the movie where everybody refers to “spidey-sense” as the “Peter-tingle”, something that Peter loudly objects to on multiple occasions).
But Mysterio’s legacy lives on, just as he wanted it to: turns out, he was filming the whole battle, and his henchmen edited the preserved footage to make it look like Mysterio was murdered. This is revealed in a shocking mid-credits scene, in which the footage is broadcast on national television by conspiracy network, The Daily Bugle, along with Peter Parker’s name and image: in a horrifying parallel to Tony Stark’s own declaration “I am Iron Man” at the end of the first Iron Man movie, Peter’s own identity has now been unintentionally revealed to the world. It’s likely that the third Spider-man movie will see the young web-slinger, armed with E.D.I.T.H, on the run from a host of villains who will be coming after him, not to mention his family and friends.
And, finally, one more surprise is revealed at the very end of the movie, but it’s so big that I think it warrants its own post, so I’ll only cover it a little here: basically, in the post-credits scene, Nick Fury and his partner Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders) are revealed to have been Skrulls – specifically, Talos and Soren, who we already know from the Captain Marvel solo movie. We overhear their conversation with the real Nick Fury, as they inform him that they’ve successfully delivered Tony’s glasses to Peter. Nick Fury himself is shown to be lounging on a tropical beach, which itself is merely a hologram: turns out, Fury is in space, on a vast starship manned by Skrulls, commanding what looks to be an army of soldiers or workers in a sort of cosmic version of S.H.I.E.L.D., again paralleling the end of the first Iron Man, in which Nick Fury first appeared onscreen and recruited Tony Stark into the Avengers Initiative. Eleven years later, Fury is assembling some sort of new team for Phase 4. I have a few guesses as to what might be going on there, but we’ll discuss that another time.
With the end of that post-credits scene, the Infinity Saga is officially over. The story of Tony Stark has been concluded, but there are dozens of new stories we can’t wait to see unfold on the big screen. We even have a bunch of new questions: is Spider-man going to be the next face of the MCU? Will he be forced to hide, or will he confront his enemies head-on? Is Mysterio really dead? What is Nick Fury doing up in space? Can all the Skrulls be trusted? How long have Skrulls been impersonating people on earth? Will the E.D.I.T.H tech play a large part going forward?
Will Aunt May and Happy end up together?