Amazing that even subsisting on the nostalgic fumes of better movies and performances they somehow still struggled to justify the existence of this version of Spider-Man outside of the overall Marvel project of never-ending corporate table-setting (even in the supposedly emotionally climactic ones that have already had the tables set for them by 6 years of movies!) and call-and-response meme generation.

Going into this I had already come to with the fact that they chose to strip my favorite comic character of his unique features (namely the specific, small-scale drama and detail of his class status) so that he could be dropped into plug-and-play universe-saving plotting of any other Marvel superhero but I was still surprised by how lazy and empty the scenario conceived here was. It doesn't hold up to even the thinnest scrutiny and is mostly unrelated (or at the very least incidental) to what the big, dramatic gestures are supposed to be. Which they also whiff on anyway because they're so painfully obviously calibrated not for character or emotional clarity but for the moment you point and go "he did the thing!" followed by an insanely contrived course correction to get to the place these movies should've just started at in the first place.

Wild that these things are costing and making more money than ever and despite that (as well as constant leaps in technology) they continue to get more hideously plastic as they go on. there are very few shots here even in simple scenes like characters talking in a room or standing on a sidewalk that looks like a real space is occupied by people (I had to double check IMDb to even be sure they filmed any of this in New York) and if you told me the action in this was 100% animated with the generic lighting set-ups, camera moves and lens choices generated by software I would believe you.

Incredible that Marvel has seemingly found the one director with less visual personality and ambition than the Russo's (who have post-Endgame at least pretended that they're supposed to be interested in making other kinds of movies), and have already given him the keys to another franchise. I like to imagine this guy sorta like the dude from the Hurt Locker g up for another tour but his addiction is being the most anonymous, nothing filmmaker to ever live. I don't know. I can't even be mad about these movies anymore. They won, we lost. This is what a vast majority of people want movies to be. Go with God, etc.