The newest Spider-Man adventure is spectacularly ambitious, marvelously nostalgic and quite entertaining.  It is easily the most popular film of the pandemic era and its IMDb rating is currently 30th all time.  Everybody loves it.  I enjoyed it — more than I thought I would — yet I fear what it is creating for the future, which I will try to explain as we go.

Jon Watts’ adventure finds Peter Parker’s secret identity as Spider-Man no longer secret, so Peter (Tom Holland) approaches Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) to find a way to make people forget who Spider-Man really is.  Doctor Strange stupidly agrees and casts a magic spell that goes awry, thanks to Peter’s interference, and which creates a rift in the universe which leads to several characters from other, parallel, universes coming to ours.  Peter finds himself fighting characters he has already defeated in other places, unaware of their pasts, and they do not recognize Peter.  And it only gets more complicated from there.

My fear involves this multi-verse narrative, which everybody except me seems to adore because it leads to unexpected encounters and allows old, familiar characters to reappear and interact with the current crop.  I hate the multiverse.  It is a realm without rules, like magic, where literally anything can happen.  People seem to love that, too, but I need fiction to follow realistic guidelines, natural laws, common sense.  When you can have anybody appear at an instant to do anything without consequence, then it loses all meaning.  Everything is chaos.  I don’t like it, and I will never support it.  It turns otherwise finely-tuned literature into a crap shoot.  I hate the multiverse.

That said, I have to admit that I enjoyed the film.  It didn’t overdo its weirdness.  It kept the crossovers to a minimum, and then kept those characters in character.  When it brought back the other two superhero figures from the past, even I thought it was pretty cool.  There is still an overproduction of the action stuff, most of which flies past so fast that it is difficult to follow.  Tom Holland’s Peter Parker is an annoying young squirt, though his heart is certainly in the right place.  It was actually fun to see Peter drive Doctor Strange into kiniption fits.  If all the multiverse movies that will certainly follow this one are as sharply drawn as this one and don’t delve into chaos, maybe they won’t be so bad. But don’t say I didn’t warn you about them now.  Our own universe ought to be enough.  ☆ ☆ ☆.  21 February 2022.