SpiderMan - Far From Home (2019)

Note: minor spoilers for “Avengers: End Game.” If you haven’t seen that already, shame on you. Go watch it now.

In the decade of superhero movies we’ve watched, I think the most unrealistic thing we’ve seen so far are the flawless, ubiquitous network connections.
As far back as “Iron Man” (2008), Tony Stark was able to make lag-free, HD video calls from a random patch of desert in the Middle East; it’s 2019 and I can’t get proper cell reception in my parents’ neighborhood in Suburbia, USA. Tony Stark could summon his Iron Man suits to his exact location anywhere on the globe; my Roomba gives up under the bed because it’s too dark.

This was, in many ways, the fourth Iron Man movie: Tony’s start as Iron Man in 2008 launched the MCU as we know it, and brought Marvel movies into the cinematic limelight. But the genre is grown and healthy and Tony is dead and people are wondering if Spider-Man can take up Iron Man’s mantle as the de-facto leader of The Avengers.
In “SpiderMan: HomeComing” (2017), Tony Stark took Peter Parker (Tom Holland) under his wing, giving him an AI-infused spidey suit and some morality lessons on being a superhero. Now with Tony dead, all that’s left is his vast array of military-grade weaponry and yet another murder-capable AI that he’d just handed over to Peter.

Without spoiling the twist of the villain: I thought they were fantastic. I loved the development for their motive, I loved the way they were portrayed. It very much felt like the director was on the same wavelength as the folks who made “The Boys” series on Amazon Prime, asking the question: What happens when being famous is more important than actually being a hero.
The villain even had an outstanding monologue where they flashed back to two of the previous Iron Man movies, calling out specific scenes and the characters who got shafted in them, as part of their own evil origin story.
Downside: the villain’s plan was one of those “I’ve choreographed everything perfectly, but it all relies on someone else doing this one exact thing” deals. It’s okay for a movie, but the plan starts to fall apart when you realize that, had that other character done literally anything else, the villain would have been up the creek without a paddle.

Tom Holland was, and continues to be, my favorite iteration of Peter Parker.
Samuel L. Jackson’s Agent Nick Fury has been getting progressively more paranoid, which makes sense, especially after “Captain Marvel” (2019) and the advent of the shapeshifting alien race, the Kree.
The other supporting characters continued to be fine.
Jon Favreau’s character Happy Hale stands out as kinda weird to me - he cast himself as a relatively small role back in the first Iron Man (of which he also directed), and apparently Kevin Feige (the president of Marvel Studios) decided that he needed to be a long-term recurring character, and thus he’s in this too.

Believe it or not, there was actually a soundtrack! It seemed to be a whole new creation by Michael Giacchino, which is fine by me, and he played it throughout the movie in all the right ways. Now I just hope he carries it forward into whatever the next SpiderMan movie comes out.

The special effects were, as expected from Marvel, outstanding. There were two split-second scenes that didn’t look great, but I was also aggressively looking for them.
You, dear readers, probably won’t notice them at all.

This flick has a mid-credits scene, which makes for an outstanding segue into future SpiderMan movies. The end-credits scene was... not as good. It answered a plot point from the movie, but you could just YouTube it when you get back from the theater.

One of the nicest things about the MCU is that we don’t have to keep watching superheroes learn how to use their powers. Even better: because these movies make so much money, studios aren’t trying to reboot their characters and retell their origin stories over and over again. 
Now that we’re 20+ movies into the MCU, Marvel has stopped all pretenses of trying to catch you up at any point. If you’re not already familiar with the compendium as a whole, or at least the character whose series you’re watching, you’re out of luck. Granted, Spider-Man has one of the best-known origin stories, next to Supes and Batman, but they still didn’t hold our hand through any part of this movie: if you haven’t seen “Homecoming” or “Infinity War” or “End Game,” you’ll probably have a lot of questions, but that’s on you to figure out.

And speaking of “End Game” - the 5-year disappearance caused by Thanos in “Infinity War” was dubbed “The Blip” here, and given an acceptable glossing-over as a minor plotpoint for the first post-End Game movie, vaguely explaining how people are now dealing with the other 50% of life spontaneously reappearing.

Feige said that April’s “Avengers: End Game” (2019) was not the end of Phase 3, but that this movie was. While “End Game” finished the final chapter, “Spider-Man: Far From Home” (2019) actually closed the book.
It was a spectacular transition, ending Phase 3 and opening the door to the huge potential for Phase 4.

This was definitely worth seeing in theaters.
Also, when you get the chance, go watch “The Boys” on Amazon. It takes the entire superhero genre and flips it on its head.