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Personally, my gripe is that it feels like a lot of this movie and previous stuff so far are there for the big picture of the MCU. I hated how Infinity War and Endgame insisted that everybody died and they didn't undo anything, just brought people back (which is literally the same thing but worse), but I understand that they're just living up to the name "Avengers" ; here, I hate that they reset everything with May and MJ, even though I know that it's because they're setting up future stuff (by making it a way to get out of the MCU or stay there if Sony wants to). It's just the very end, they could have not wiped the slate and the rest of the movie would have been fine, but this final decision at the end was obviously made for Marvel's real-world planning.
The stories are much less self-contained, I normally like that each movie knows that they're part of a whole world where other people and heroes exist, but they're making less movies with their own story. It's a bit weird that there's no choice between "another origin story" and "can't have a story that starts and finishes on its own".
That's my major problem too. Too many of the decisions characters made in NWH feel like they're made solely to get a particular plot point moving (and are not being made based on the character's personality or flowing naturally from their pre-established beliefs and motivations); moreover, there's a bunch of these huge, major plot developments that all seem incredibly poorly thought out (much in the same way that the big twist ending of Far From Home was just tossed out carelessly and then immediately undone). I really felt reminded of all the shit I hated in Endgame during NWH, sadly.
I feel like this... narrative sloppiness, for lack of a better term, has been really noticeable in a lot of the past MCU projects. One that's really been bugging me in particular has been the recent trend introducing big, cosmic high concepts (time travel, alternate timelines, and multiversal teamups, e.g.) but totally whiffing the exposition and explanations of how it all works while also simultaneously over-complicating the actual plot beats required to pull of said high concept. NWH felt particularly torturous in all the twists and turns it took to
get to the fireworks factory: the big Spider-Man teamup against the Sinister
Six Five.
Maybe if I revisited some of the older movies I'd find some of the same issues, but I'm not that sure: for one, the older movies weren't doing quite so many high concepts and were a bit more down-to-earth, which is inherently easier to pull off. But even beyond that, I don't ever remember sitting in a movie theater watching an older MCU production and legitimately wondering if they just filmed the first draft and did no revisions to tighten the script... which I have been doing quite often recently. Or wait, actually, I do think I had that issue with a lot of the Netflix shows. Which is not great!
Ultimately, I think the MCU's conception of both Spider-Man and Peter Parker has been pretty fundamentally flawed, probably from day 1. I did think Homecoming was really good, but now I kinda think it was a weird fluke, because all the stuff I thought they were putting a pin in and explicitly moving away from in that movie (Spidey as Iron Man's apprentice, Spidey being given all this crazy advanced Stark tech, etc.) was in fact only doubled down on by the subsequent Avengers and Spider-Man sequels. And all the stuff I was hoping to see more of (a more active role for Aunt May to suit the much younger and more active actor they cast as her, a continued focus on high school life and specifically a bigger focus on supporting characters who hadn't really been given a major role in previous Spidey movies like Flash and Betty) was basically immediately dropped.
I dunno. The ending feels like it's pointing at a way more promising direction than Far From Home did. I just hope this new direction feels more like Spider-Man than the weird Iron Boy Jr. shit they've been doing for 5 goddamn movies. And I really don't think they needed 5 whole movies to get to this point either.