Spider-Man: Far From Home is the first post-Endgame jaunt in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. For that reason alone, it occupies a singular place in the Marvel Cinematic Universe—but how is said universe getting along after The Snap That Wasn’t? Where does it go from here? What will we see going forward?
This contains ALL THE SPOILERS, so don’t read until you’ve seen Spider-Man: Far From Home.
What We Loved
The Blip
Though we don’t get nearly enough explanation on this front, we do find out that when the universe “un-snapped,” there was a great deal of general confusion as people suddenly appeared in their former homes, places of business, and so on, all over the world. The event was dubbed “the Blip,” and the world had to figure out how to accommodate its “blipped” members, leading to Peter and friends having to redo a school year. It also seems as though May and Peter might have been displaced from their home due to the Blip. So again, lots of questions from this one, but at least we have some idea of how society reacted to the Snap Undo.
Also: The moment the kids weaponize “The Blip” to narc on Flash when he tries to drink an alcoholic beverage is just gorgeous.
“in memoriam”
Far From Home had a lot to live up to with Homecoming’s tone-setting home video, but the moment we heard Whitney Houston sing “I Will Always Love You,” we knew we were in good hands. It’s the perfect earnest but also half-assed tribute, with some ironic Comic Sans thrown in (or maybe we’ve gone so far around that Comic Sans is not ironic anymore??) and exactly how we would see Gen Z reacting to the death of three Avengers on top of the Blip and unBlippening.
Pepper Potts is Keeping Tabs On Tony’s Loved Ones
In addition to the fact that Pepper Potts is clearly still the (reinstated?) CEO of Stark Industries, doing all the philanthropic work that she amped up during her time in charge, she’s also still keeping an eye on the people that Tony loved most, sending big relief checks and keeping Happy on Peter duty. Even when we can’t see her face, she’s still out, making the world better.
Peter Takes Uncle Ben’s Suitcase Abroad
It’s like he’s protecting Peter from beyond, it’s fine, we’ll just cry through our holiday weekend.
We Wanted to Watch That Wakanda Documentary
On the plane, Peter is stuck sitting next to his teacher and finds a documentary on Tony Stark that makes him go all wibbly. But right beside it is a documentary on Wakanda, which was clearly made to help introduce the world to the country. We wanted to watch that documentary.
Far From Home Recommitted to Showing How Diverse Peter’s Community Is
While these characters are still lacking lines or much to do, Peter’s school trip crew is pointedly even more diverse than the previous film, including a student wearing a hijab, and a trans student (we know because Marvel sent out a casting call for a trans or non-binary actor to play a part in the film, and trans actor Zach Barack is playing a character also named Zach in the student group). A small step toward better representation in the MCU, but still an important one.
The Relationships Are Some of the Realest the MCU Has Ever Crafted
From Aunt May and Happy Hogan’s we-don’t-agree-on-how-we’re-labeling-this hang-outs, to Ned and Betty’s we’re-that-annoying-couple-who-is-super-cute-but-it-cannot-last, to Peter and MJ’s admitting-that-you-like-someone-is-awkward-and-hard, all of the relationships of this film have a sheen of reality to them that you don’t often find in these films. Peter and MJ’s first kiss(es) were the cutest damn thing we’ve ever seen, and the exact opposite of the Raimi-era’s upside-down kiss in the rain because first kisses are not sexy, especially when you’re teenagers. That initial peck on the lips should be just as legendary, if only for the fact that we’re rarely shown this very real scenario of two teenagers who have no clue what they’re doing.
Buy the Book
Null Set
Reverence for Captain Marvel
It’s already hilarious when Nick Fury tells Peter, “Do not invoke her name” when the younger hero dares to mention Carol Danvers. But it’s even funnier—and super touching—when you learn that “Nick Fury” is Talos.
Flash Thompson: Sympathetic Character?
After being the snotty rich kid in Homecoming, Flash Thompson is now posting videos that no one seems to care about, he loves Spider-Man, and we learn at the end that even though he almost died multiple times in Europe, his mom sends the butler to pick him up. Now I’m actually invested in the kid.
Ned + Betty 4-EVA
Everything involving Ned and Betty.
(A brief note from Leah: Personally I ship Ned + Shuri, mostly because I want a standalone movie of Ned marrying into Wakandan royalty and having to learn how to be a prince—a genderswapped Wakandan The Princess Diaries, if you will.)
Having allowed for that, Ned and Betty are a delight.
The Continued Refraction of the MCU
Yet again the villain is a monster of Tony’s own creation! And because this movie is largely about disgruntled former Stark employees, we get to see scenes from the first Iron Man and Captain America: Civil War from very different perspectives.
MJ is Perfect
Zendaya won our hearts the first time around as MJ, but this film finally gives her more than five quips, rounding out her character into a teenage girl who plenty of us know (or have been at some point). She tells the truth because it keeps people at arm’s length. She’s obsessed with death and murderers. She always has an unsettling piece of history to throw out on scenic walks. Forgoing the mythic “girl next door” trope gives us a version of MJ that teen girls can actually relate to, and the film is 500% better for it.
The Plot Twist Around Mysterio is Pretty Great
Rather than a failed actor with some handy special effects skills, this version of Mysterio hits much closer to home; with the help of his fellow former disgruntled Stark Industries employees, Quentin Beck works to create disasters that he can “fight” in order to make himself into the next superhero. After convincing Peter that he’s an okay guy, the kid gives him access to EDITH, Tony’s satellite defense platform, because he feels unready to assume any of Tony’s responsibilities. But the best part of this is not Jake Gyllenhaal’s performance (which is excellent, being equal parts charming and sinister), but the meta sight of watching him direct his own Mysterio “battles” while wearing the dreaded mo-cap suit that comes with the territory of being a modern-day actor. Perfection.
FASHION
Jake Gyllenhaal’s Steve Jobs turtleneck.
Villain as Mentor
At one point, Beck tells Peter: “Never apologize for being the smartest person in the room.” Aside from the addendum that if you’re the smartest one in a room you should find a smarter room, this is a wonderful underlining of Peter’s non-Spidey personality. He’s a science nerd, just like Tony Stark, but unlike Tony he’s always felt poor, out-of-his-depth, and dorky. Beck reminds him that as amazing as Fury and Hill are, he actually is the smartest person in that room (in addition to being, y’know, a superhero) and they should value his insights and creativity rather than scoffing at him. When we learn Beck’s true identity, this line twists into a new form: Beck is a thwarted supergenius, yet another person who has spent years nursing hatred for Tony Stark after being humiliated. Beck thought he was the smartest person in the room, and after Tony’s treatment of him he probably spent years giving himself pep talks and reminding himself of his worth and intelligence. Given a potential mentee, Beck passes advice on to Peter in good faith—one gift he’s trying to give him during a long, evil con.
The Voice of EDITH
Peter’s first helpful AI in Homecoming was KAREN, voiced by Jennifer Connelly—a cute little Easter egg, as she’s married to voice-of-JARVIS Paul Bettany. Interestingly, they didn’t go for a recognizable name for EDITH: Dawn Michelle King, who has been first assistant editor on about a quarter of the MCU since Iron Man. Maybe they just needed a voice, but that’s a sizable role, so we’d like to think it was a cute thank-you for a decade of hard work. (That, or Marvel Entertainment wants to make sure they keep their employees from going full Mysterio…)
The Movie Isn’t Actually About Peter Taking On Iron Man’s Legacy
The trailers made it seems like the entire plot would center on Peter needing to step up and take on the mantle of Iron Man. Which was weird because… Peter and the Spider-Man persona have basically nothing in common with Iron Man, and that’s without counting the fact that Peter is a kid. But by the end, Happy admits to Peter that even Tony didn’t know how to be Tony—it’s not the kind of legacy a person can live up to. Instead, Peter gets the chance to design his own suit using Tony’s toys, proving the things that he and Iron Man actually do have in common: They’re kitbashing nerds who love to build stuff.
Skrulls??!?
Rather than going the Secret Invasion route with everyone’s favorite shapeshifters, the Skrulls are here doing something far more important: giving Nick Fury a vacation? After spending an entire movie with Fury and Maria Hill seeming just a fraction “off,” we find out that it’s because they’re not Fury and Hill—they’re Talos and Soren, sitting in while Nick Fury hangs out with the Skrull fleet in space, gazing out on a holographic beach with a space colada. They truly have earned the downtime, and this gives us a better idea of how Captain Marvel’s side of things will be integrated into the MCU going forward.
Nobody Knows What They’re Doing
Typically, big comics events like Avengers: Endgame wrap up neatly, with the surviving characters kinda shrugging their shoulders and saying, “welp anyway… life goes on.” Far From Home makes it clear that, despite all appearances to the contrary, nobody has a clue what the next step is—not Peter, not Mysterio, not Talos and Soren as Nick and Maria. But by the end of the movie, they’ve got plenty to react to in Phase 4.
J. JONAH JAMESON IS BACK AND HE DID WHAT NOW???
The post-credits sequences in Far From Home are actually super relevant to the MCU going forward, none so much as the triumphant return of J.K. Simmons as J. Jonah Jameson. While the idea of recasting the part might have led to all sorts of fun possibilities, this new version of Jameson—a talking head for TheDailyBugle.Net—is so very apropos for this era of fear-mongering. Which brings us to said post-credits kaboom that changes everything for Peter Parker going forward:
He’s been unmasked by a crappy video tabloid?? WHAT. WHAT??
What We Really Didn’t Love
The MCU’s Continued Waffling On Iron Man’s Legacy
We get it. Tony Stark is complicated. The character is frequently delightful and anchored by a career-defining performance from Robert Downey Jr. But Tony Stark is also an asshole who has done some incredibly reprehensible things. If you like that kind of ambiguity, a character can become more appealing—but you can’t continually have it both ways, which is what Marvel has been doing for the past decade where Stark’s character is concerned. Everyone who challenges the concept of Tony Stark’s privilege, of his power, of his right to do exactly as he pleases, is ultimately such a horrible villain that we get to shrug off Iron Man’s misdeeds because the people criticizing him are committing their own atrocities. It was true of Aldrich Killian, true of Ivan Vanko, true of Adrian Toomes, true of Justine Hammer, and now true of Quentin Beck and former SI employees. It would have been nice, for once, to see someone criticize Iron Man’s legacy without being an actual supervillain. But Marvel simply can’t muster the brass to suggest that Tony Stark wasn’t always super.
“in memoriam”
The use of “I Will Always Love You” for the memorial video, when it CLEARLY should have been set to Sarah McLachlan’s “Angel.”
One of the More Interesting Classmates is Wasted
We find out that Brad Davis—one of the kids on the Europe trip—was not a victim of the blip, but the film spends all its time using him as a potential wedge between Peter and MJ. Which, fine, it’s a common romantic trope, but it prevents us from finding out what the world is like from Brad’s perspective. Having your elder classmates become your peers must be incredibly disorienting, and it would be interesting to see how he feels about that.
SKRULLS??!?
Do the Skrulls really work? They sort of put us in the position of yelling “no take backs!” at a movie. On the one hand, it is a way to give us a gullible Nick Fury, which is funny. But on the other hand, this also meant a grieving teenager had to save the world from his dead mentor’s latest nemesis, without any real air support from Actual Fury (or whatever’s left of S.H.I.E.L.D.) which, if you think about it for five minutes, turns Far From Home into a horror movie.
This is a Spider-Man Movie… That Doesn’t Really Feel Like It’s About Spider-Man
This movie is packed with important information and action and twists and turns and a lot of characters. As a result, aside from the love story plot, this movie doesn’t feel like it’s actually about Peter Parker. Removed from the friendly neighborhood and tossed back and forth between authority figures who can’t stop asking him how he plans to defend the world from all evil, there’s very little to say about the mythos of Spider-Man in this Spider-Man movie. It just sort of gets glossed over while the action takes precedent. And that’s a shame, because that was part of what made Homecoming so great.
EDITH’s Fate is Never Addressed in a Meaningful Way
While there’s a lot in the film about legacy and about Peter feeling the need to uphold… everything on Tony’s behalf, the most important aspect of this is filed away for another day. Tony essentially gives Peter Parker the keys to his last defense system, stored in a satellite, and that system almost allows Mysterio to kill a lot of people. Knowing that, wouldn’t it make sense for Peter to deactivate the whole thing? Or at least have more of an opinion on how it’s used? Instead, he just leaves it up there. It comes back to bite him in the butt later with the Jameson reveal, but it still reads more like a hole in Peter’s character arc.
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THIS. I loved that they were allowed to be awkward teenagers. Because being a teenager in love IS super awkward and yeah, a first kiss when you have no idea what you’re doing is generally not great.
Overall I thought the movie was fun and many of the actors charming, but I’m ready to be done with the-villain-was-someone-connected-to-Tony-Stark thing. It kind of makes sense for how they’ve set up Peter to be close to Tony, but I’d love the next phase of the MCU to move on to other villains.
Loved Mysterio’s calling out the 616 though!
I’m a Spider-Man fan, but I’m not a fan of Marvel Studio’s Iron Spider Boy. In their zeal to re-brand Spider-Man as MCU property, they turned Peter Parker from a hard-luck hero who has to fight every step of the way to get anywhere to a kid who can only accomplish anything because he has Tony Stark’s hand-me-downs.
At least we have Spider-Verse.
I agree/understand most of the points here – especially agreeing, like @2, that the teenage relationships were great, the way they handled that Peter needs to find his own way to be a hero, and the suitcase and documentary points. I’m surprised the authors didn’t call what happened to Peter at the end by its name – he got doxed!
The question I have related to the Skrulls is who are they working for? Fury, or Captain Marvel? Basically, I’m wondering where their pressure on Peter to step up and lead came from. Is that what Fury wants? Or is it CM wanting to know someone is watching the Earth for her? Or, was Talos feeling out of his league and wanted someone to put more responsibility on? Who do I blame for the unfair pressure, haha?
I don’t think I’ve missed any MCU movies except perhaps an early Hulk movie. This was a cut above average–I really loved Peter’s classmates, especially MJ– but I definitely had some other “really didn’t love” moments than those mentioned above:
1. First, the tone: the Avengers movies are action movies with a touch of humor on the side–and by and large that recipe worked really well. This movie, by contrast, couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be a teenage rom-com, a straight up comedy, or an action movie. The two science teachers were pretty much on a par with the thieves in the Home Alone movies.
2. The plot felt really thin. The whole “student field trip to a science museum in Europe” story was laughably implausible, and made more so by the complete incompetence of the chaperones–they didn’t bother to check the web site to see if the museum was open? Really? A science teacher obsessed with witches?? WTF? Oh, and faux Fury believes the world will end if the Fire Elemental is not defeated, but he can’t find a single other hero besides Spidey to come save it?
3. The scenes where Peter tries to fight Mysterio through various illusions–especially the first sequence–were overly long and made my head spin. This is often true of battle sequences in MCU movies, but these were particularly headache inducing.
4. I found the two post-credits scenes to be pretty jarring. The scene with the Skrulls turned an important plot element on its head, and after all the other illusions in the movie it made you wonder if we’ll find out later that other characters or events weren’t real. And the JJJ scene seemed like a pretty cheap way to create a cliffhanger out of a movie that otherwise had a satisfying ending.
I know it probably means nothing, but that holographic beach Fury was on looked to be the same backdrop Agents of SHIELD uses for Tahiti.
@5 Good points. I also was consistently bothered by the science teachers, especially (perhaps because I was a high school science teacher). While I thought the illusion fights were cool, my wife agreed that they were hard to watch. Also, on a related note to #4, did anyone else catch that at one point Fury and Hill were talking about a Kree sleeper-cell? With the second post-credit, that makes me really wonder what they were talking about.
@6 My wife and I were saying the same thing! Before the pan out, and we could just see the screen, we both said to each other, “Tahiti?!”
@6 & @7
It is a magical place.
I knew getting bitten by a radioactive spider in a fluke event made Peter into the superhero Spider-Man but I didn’t realise that also has him the ‘smartest person in the room’? Tony was a real genius who made himself into a superhero. Like Superman and Batman – alien from another planet vs rich human with a giant light bulb and a secret lair. Makes no sense to compare them.
Yep, I knew everyone would beat me to “Tahiti.”
I saw King’s double credit, and wondered whether it was one of those “she did the scratch track, and it was so good / we couldn’t find anyone better, so we left it in” things. Then I read:
Love it. Meta comment of the year.
“Everyone who challenges the concept of Tony Stark’s privilege, of his power, of his right to do exactly as he pleases, is ultimately such a horrible villain that we get to shrug off Iron Man’s misdeeds because the people criticizing him are committing their own atrocities. “
Have you forgotten Civil War?
Captain America?
I really liked the film, but I have mixed feelings about the Mysterio video during the credits. (Apart from J. Jonah Jameson, of course. I thought he was the one thing sadly missing from the first film.) But Mysterio’s video is a great twist, and is the kind of thing that always worked well in the comics — where we had to wait a month to see what happens next. Now we have to wait perhaps two years to discover the aftermath of this.
@3. Almuric: ” I’m not a fan of Marvel Studio’s Iron Spider Boy”
This happened in the comics version of Civil War, where Tony re-branded Spider-man to a red-and-yellow armor (with extra arms) to reflect Peter’s allegiance to Iron Man.
But Marvel simply can’t muster the brass to suggest that Tony Stark wasn’t always super.
Uh, weren’t non-villainous people critical of Stark from the very first Iron Man movie? You know, all that stuff about selling weapons and his being an overgrown child? And I seem to recall him being quite drunk and stupid in the second movie.
If I had to guess, they’re being rosy about his legacy because he just bought the farm not long ago.
I’m guessing its a typo, but since I think there Iis a Marvel character named JustinE Hammer, did I miss a character in one of these movies?
Also, while Peter Parker is outed as Spider-Man, the identity of the heroic Night Monkey is still unknown.
@9 Parker was a genius before he was bitten.
@13. But he wasn’t a protégé of Stark from the start, either. It’s strange how dependent they’ve made him on Iron Man. I’m surprised they haven’t revealed that Tony Stark impregnated Aunt May and personally irradiated the spider that bit him.
Prof Geek on YouTube said it best. These movies aren’t about the mythos of the source material anymore. Writers constructed decades of stories solely based off repeating principles that in live action no longer matter.
Some agrue this is okay because the new versions are different interruptations.
kgreirson@5
Not trying to change your mind, you’re certainly entitled to your own opinons, but I’d like to address a few of your points:
1. The tone is following the same tone as the earlier Spiderman movie. This is not an Avengers movie. The first spiderman was played as a teen coming of age film, and this one was played as a teen rom-com with action elements. The Spiderman movies are part of the MCU, but also their own thing. Even more so, since they are technically Sony movies produced by Marvel, not Marvel movies.
2. All the adults in the film are incompetent. This comes from the teen coming of age genre they are playing in. Think back to Ferris Bueller for an example. This movie is a mash-up of 80s movies like Ferris Bueller and the MCU action adventure flicks of this past decade. Just like the Homecoming was. The adults being incompetent is a feature of teen movies, not a bug. Also, the science teach is obsessed with witches because he lives in a world with Thor and Scarlett Witch. As they said earlier int he movie, Thor used to be someone they studied in Lit classes, and now they are studying him in Science classes. The world has flipped, and this teacher is researching these things because now he thinks anything is possible. And because we’re in a teen movie, and he’s an adult, he’s a bumbling idiot authority figure that is required in those movies, he does it in a way that emphasizes his ineptness. As far as your last point in No. 2, I’ll have to watch it again, but the impression I got from the post-credits scene was that the Avengers were unavailable because they were out in space with Fury. Talos asked how long he needs to keep telling people the Avengers are unavailable. In other words, he doesn’t know where they are, Fury does, and they are missing somehow. They are setting up something in that scene that we don’t understand at this point.
I do agree with most of this but 2 things, one small and one big. 1st Brad Davis was blipped that was what the whole its not fair after the blip was. He came back and then hit puberty, otherwise he is a 21 year old who failed high school how many times and makes him hitting on MJ all wrong. and 2 there were 4 avengers in the I will always love you segment, Tony, Capt, Black Widow, and Vision
@19 Anthony Pero good points. I’ll just reiterate that I did enjoy the movie, but parts of it didn’t work for me. I really enjoyed MJ and Peter, and I liked Peter’s relationship with Mysterio as well—Gyllenhaal was a bit over the top as a villain but I really liked that he wasn’t just a caricature (like the science teachers) —he honestly liked Peter and tried to help him (and get him out of the way so he wouldn’t “have to” kill him). All in all, not as good as the first Avengers movie or the first couple of Iron Mans, but definitely better than the Ant-Man movies or the (truly awful) last Fantastic Four movie
I only hope the next movie(s? Please Sony, don’t screw the deal over…) show Jonah, for all his bluster and propension to massive errors of judgement, is supposed to be a decent-ish human being who genuinely thinks he’s doing what is best. The Raimi trilogy gets it, when Jonah refuses to sell Peter out to the Green Goblin even when a super strong maniac on a flying platform is strangling him to death. Here, we’re seeing him ruining a kid’s life, and while that still can be ‘justified’ from his perspective, I’m worried they’ll just make him into a pure and simple jerk.
Spiderman was my favorite superhero of all time growing up and, though Tom Holland does a superb job playing him, to the point where I think his is the most recognizable as actual classic Spiderman in all the movie versions (Tobey Maguire’s didn’t much banter with enemies or had the classic corny humor, and Andrew Garfield’s wasn’t much of a nerd, plus both were too old by far), I REALLY hate the Iron Man dad/mentor thing.
I get that we already had two origin stories about how Ben Paker died and “with great power bla bla bla” but it’s always rubbed me the wrong way how the MCU’s Spiderman seems to need a surrogate father in Tony Stark, and depends so much on Stark tech, when Peter actually had a father who shaped who he would become and drive him into being Spiderman, except in the MCU except for a throwaway line in Civil War about how Aunt May became a widow, it’s almost as if Uncle Ben didn’t exist at all for several movies until his suitcase comes up on this one.
What they did on the MCU with Ben Parker’s character in order to give RDJ’s Iron Man more screen time felt to me like having Batman’s parents survive the mugging and have Bruce become a superhero for different reasons, plus have him be dumb as a brick and depend on lasers or something. It seems a weird choice and strays too much from the essence of the character for my taste. I still like the movies and the kid is great as Spiderman, but yeah, the best Spiderman movie so far is Spiderverse, no question. All of those Spiderpeople, different as they were, kept the essence of the character more intact than the MCU version.
I mean, he’s still Spiderman, but he’s a very weird version of Spiderman that doesn’t feel very much like him at times.
Actually, as someone who watched the old cartoons growing up, this recurring theme resonated. How many of the villains in that series (with often cheesy, repetitive animation, yet so very awesome) intoned at some point something on the order of, “they laughed at me at the academy… now they will pay!”
@20: Brad Davis wasn’t blipped, though – that’s what Ned was talking about on the plane. From Ned’s perspective, having missed five years, it was weird that Brad suddenly went from being a little kid to being the same age as Ned.
@25: I mentioned it to my wife and she said same thing I so missed what happened in that scene. That what I get for watching a movie late at night after work. So sorry I messed up on that one.
I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that that is as close as AoS will get to being acknowledged in the MCU.
My head canon is that after their jumping around through time in the last season, our Agents of SHIELD have now ended up in a different timeline(/dimension/whatever) to the rest of the MCU.
It was interesting to see a bit of the “Blip” footage in FFH, but it just serves to highlight what I’ve been thinking since Endgame (and what no one seems to be talking about, but maybe I’ve just not come across it) – when the Avengers undid Thanos’ Snap, they probably caused massively more deaths than almost any other villain the MCU has yet featured.
Think about it: anyone who was in a moving car, train, boat, plane or spaceship when the Snap occurred will “Blip” back 5 years later and be subjected to a horrible death either by scraping along the ground at 60+ MPH until all the skin is flayed from their body, downing in the middle of an ocean, falling to their deaths from 10,000+ feet in the air or asphyxiating in the depths of space. And that’s not to mention infants who were Snapped out of existence and would undoubtedly starve to death or die of exposure post-Blip, people who were in the upper levels of buildings that have been demolished, people who were merely crossing the street and will be mowed down in traffic, and so on and so forth.
At least by the time Thanos fatefully snapped his fingers, he’d spent years (possibly centuries or even millennia judging by the state of Titan) thinking about how, exactly, he would enact his plan. But the Avengers spent all of 15 seconds deciding how to go about bringing everybody back and as a result would be directly responsible for the actual, irreversible deaths of trillions.
Let’s face it, almost regardless how you choose to view it, Endgame turned the Avengers into the probably the most heinous mass-murders of all time.
@28 I agree with the complications of bringing half the population back that the writers seem to have glossed over, but I don’t agree that bringing bringing them back makes the Avengers mass murderers. The fact is that they had *already* been murdered by Thanos—if they don’t survive an attempt to bring them back that doesn’t make the Avengers murderers, just unsuccessful rescuers. And given the trillions of people killed by the snap, there wasn’t really much anybody could plan to do beforehand even if they knew the blip was coming. If anyone is to “blame” I’d guess it would be Stark—because instead of blipping everyone back to the present he could have returned everyone to the moment of the snap, minus Thanos. The one possible explanation why he didn’t—assuming it was a deliberate choice and not an oversight by the writers—is that he didn’t want to lose the years he had spent with his daughter. If that was indeed his choice, then yeah, I’d go with mass murderer
@29 — Yeah, Tony did explicitly say in Endgame that anything they did to undo the Snap would have to do so WITHOUT erasing the five years that had elapsed, specifically because he didn’t want to lose his daughter.
I’m prepared to assume that the Unsnap was at least smart enough to bring people back safely and not start raining the bodies of air passengers out of the sky — if it was completely literal, then everybody who returned would’ve come back to some random point in space (based on the movement of the Earth around the Sun, the Sun around the galactic core, etc., etc.), and that obviously didn’t happen.
@30:
I’m not. As shown in Far From Home, people came back in the exact spot they were snapped away from, relative to their position on the Earth. So. May came back to her exact same apartment, which was now leased by someone else, and the Mascot for some basketball team came back on the court… and got hit in the head by a basketball.
Which means all the people who were snapped when that plane crashed in New York during Fury’s post-credits scene in Infinity War came back in mid air at the exact location they were at when their pilot was Snapped… but without the plane around them. They are jam somewhere on the streets of New York now. plenty of people would have gotten run over on the Expressway, too. It could be the up to half of all the people who were Snapped died shortly after being unSnapped.
@31. Anthony: Unless we’re shown such carnage, I’d highly doubt it happened. If people can be placed back to a spot on the Earth relative to its orbit five years later, it’s a trivial matter to displace them a few feet or yards in order to make sure they are safe when they land.
The rules of the stones aren’t spelled out enough for this level of literalness to be applied. (We take the word of an outright villain that the soul stone requires a sacrifice, for instance, which should’ve been contested.) But we can assume the intent of the user matters. Thanos didn’t give a crap about collateral damage. Both Bruce and Tony do. They are both brilliant and ethically concerned. There is thought behind their Snaps.
@32:
We are told about three or four people (and shown one) who returned exactly where they left from. One of those people was returned to a spot of danger that could have (and might have) caused bodily injury. There is zero reason (other than wishful thinking) to assume that anyone else returned differently at this time. Perhaps as we get more information (obviously four people is too small a sample size to draw anything resembling a conclusion), it will provide some evidence to the contrary. But as of right now, the only evidence we have regarding the results of the Blip (sparse as it is) points to the conclusion that people were returned to their exact position on the earth.
@33. Anthony: There is zero reason (other than literalist) to assume that everyone returned exactly at the relative spot they left from. You’re still skipping past the point that they are not returned to the exact position they left from. They just aren’t. They are at different points in time and space.
Two Avengers who are the most brilliant minds on earth would have accounted for it. They are heroes. It seems more than trivial to simply add a clause to your wish for the stones: “Make sure everyone lands safely.”
Lack of evidence isn’t proof of your assumption.
@34:
We obviously disagree, which is fine. But just for clarification:
No, I’m not, that was addressed in my very first comment on the topic, @31:
That’s what “relative to their position on the earth” means. I didn’t say they were returned to their exact location in space time. I said they were returned relative to the earth. To be even more clear, relative to the earth’s movement through the cosmos. The only examples we have so far are people who returned to the place they were snapped from, relative to the Earth. This statement accounts for celestial motion, obviously.
Only one Avenger was involved with bringing people back. Tony’s snap had nothing to do with the Blip, only with dusting Thanos’ forces. But even so, both Banner and Stark are also the people who thought creating a MurderBot was a good idea, and neither have shown the best judgement throughout their careers. That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement for “No way they would have screwed up like that!” They have. And often. Both on screen and in the comics. And we have no idea if such broad clauses are even possible. We don’t know how any of this works, other than what we can observe. What Thanos did was random, it didn’t require any particular will to guide each individual’s destruction. Putting people back? Doesn’t that seem like it would require a Will to actually place everyone back? Especially if it was in a different spot than where they were when the Snap happened? It does to me, not that that’s proof, or even evidence. The only hard evidence we have on any of this are the examples of people returning that we know about.
So far, we have no examples of anyone being returned in any other manner than the one I’m suggesting. 100% of examples we have been given support the interpretation that the people on the plane in Fury’s post credits scene will be returned mid-air. I’ll be more than happy to revise my opinion once we are given examples that conflicts with that statement. And you can keep believing that those examples will come. I’m not saying you shouldn’t, or that you are wrong to do so. I’m saying I’m not going to think that way, for the reasons I’ve listed, until the evidence suggests something else.
@35. Anthony: “100% of examples we have been given support the interpretation that the people on the plane in Fury’s post credits scene will be returned mid-air.”
I agree that you’re free to assume that, since the movies don’t bother to give us more information. But extrapolating from less than a handful of incidental, anecdotal examples to cover an entire universe of possibilities is far-fetched. Thanos snapped the universe, right? Not just our galaxy or our Earth?
Sure, Tony’s screwed up before and Banner performs the actual snap-back, but there must have been discussions about how to wield the stones’ power. There’s much we don’t see, much we’re not shown.
But as I said, it’s not a huge stretch to think some simple rules would govern the return of all those people and aliens. Maybe they don’t work, like Bruce’s attempt to bring Natasha back, but we don’t get the horrific sense of massive cascading loss of life in the new Spider-man movie. The few incidents mentioned are played for laughs. Insisting on collateral carnage seems a bit perverse compared to that.
The video showed some people bumping into each other, not a life threatening situation. We know the unsnapped have returned around where they were when the snap happened. Peter, Quill, etc were in Titan and the wakandans and the other avengers were in Wakanda. But we didn’t know if being sent back to where they were means keeping the inertia of the last movement (like falling) or the altitude. What if a building the person was standing on was destroyed and a new building was in it’s place and now the place where the person was is pure concrete? What if it’s a vat of acid in an industrial facility?
Since the 6 stones in the comics can grant any wish (destroying half the life of the universe was only one of the many things Thanos did to court Death) and they don’t have many limitations, and even some form of conscience (especially the soul stone), then I guess that if someone snapped their fingers wishing that the snapped came back safely it’d do exactly as told and not put the returned in immediate danger.
@ferg Sorry, but you’re wrong. If everyone had been returned to the exact same position they were in when they disappeared, they’d be floating in space and dead. They were returned to relatively similar spots on their planets, provided they wouldn’t be in harm’s way.
The Infinite Gauntlet is basically God mode. It literally allows the user to hand-wave logistics so that everyone who returned would do so safely, universe-wide.
@5 – kgrierson: I’ve checked a museum’s website in another country only to arrive and find out that it was closed, despite the site saying it should have been open. I immediately thought of that when I saw this film.
@39, MaGnUs: Absolutely! Been there and done that more than once, and not just with museums either. There’s just no planning for some circumstances and poor information updates. Hell, my local Co-Operative grocery store (a fairly big company in the UK) had a refit last month and were closed for three days, but their website and Google and even the sign on their front told me consistently that they were open as usual after the first day… seeing as that’s my local Post Office, and that’s what I was after…
Also, If the Stones can keep track of where people were dusted from and un-blippify them relative to their original locations (millions of miles different in all directions for each case) then I think putting people on the ground instead of a few thousand feet in the air, is probably the least of our worries. If it was as bad as the ‘Literal’ suggestion, then there would probably have been at least some comment about the thousands of dead, somewhere. As there wasn’t even a throw-away line about people materialising in the air or middle of the ocean, I’m going to presume they were put somewhere safe-ish. like an island or nearby parkland. Roads are a different matter and It’s possible that many people were in accidents as a result, but even that would have generated some comment.
As for the lack of Avengers. Can you really blame any of them for going off the radar after what happened. I suspect that Talos was just trying to do his best and calling on anyone he could. PP was the only person he could get at the time for whatever reason and I’m sure we’ll get more info on that as movies hit the cinema’s.
Yes, I saw that was the Tahiti (or very similar) backdrop and it wouldn’t surprise me if that was both a deliberate easter egg, as well as a hint of possible future plans, and the Secret Invasion definitely seems to be going on, just backwards, with the Skrulls as the Good Guys now. Fury was definitely just on a quick break though, not vacation, hence his authoritative ‘Back to Work!’ exclamation after.
I’m more interested to see how long Talos and his wife have been on Earth, posing as Fury and Maria… Maybe that’s why everybody’s been getting away with calling him Nick for a few years?
The Getty Images was one of the best touches of the video.
“…this also meant a grieving teenager had to save the world from his dead mentor’s latest nemesis, without any real air support from Actual Fury (or whatever’s left of S.H.I.E.L.D.) which, if you think about it for five minutes, turns Far From Home into a horror movie,”
or a Harry Potter movie.
I was talking to my husband about the Tony Stark villain connection – it just seemed a little stale to have yet ANOTHER guy with a grudge against Tony (plus the whole ‘I worked at a research/weapons firm and was kicked out’ schtick is just kind of tropey anyway). Plus, his spiel was kind of Syndrome-y, heh. The other thing that kind of was hard to believe – in a movie set in the MCU, at any rate – was that his big secret plan involved about a dozen OTHER people who also had a big enough grudge against Tony Stark that they were totally willing to let civilians die. Yeah, one guy brings up the casualties, but nobody really seems to care.
I was not a fan of the mid-credits thing (aside from Jameson, ha) but that’s in part because I do have a real sense of uneasiness about how easy it is to doctor/manipulate media these days, so it just kind of bugs me that the truth is so easily obscured.
Speaking of Brad Davis, who did have some unmined potential, the whole minor plot with the bathroom-pic was kind of dropped. I doubt Brad really cared about MJ’s well being, although it could have been some interesting drama if he really was coming at it from a place of concern (or if perhaps, it was a friend who caught him instead of a romantic rival). That said, I’m kind of over the trope of ‘teen boy is caught in an uncomfortable situation with mature woman and it’s funny’ thing. So that whole scene was just massively uncomfortable to me.
Also, glad somebody else noticed the Kree comment, because my husband didn’t catch it :)
I also felt bad for Flash – in addition to the butler picking him up, while Peter was scanning all the text messages (God, that is such a Tony Stark capability to have…) Flash’s were to his parents wondering why neither of them were contacting him/responding. :(
I loved MJ and her mace, and then Happy trying to throw the shield and commenting that it looks so easy when Cap does it, lol.
One thing I did think was a missed opportunity during Mysterio’s mind battle was when Peter was in the graveyard and Mysterio was taunting him about how if he was good enough he wouldn’t have died and it was Tony Stark’s gravestone would be to also have Uncle Ben’s gravestone. I know that we’re over needing to totally rehash the origin story, but it would be nice to at least acknowledge him (aside from the suitcase, which got blown up, apparently…).