With great storytelling comes a great film

• Heavy spoilers*

At last, a Spider-Man film that leaves an imprint long in the memory. We’ve not had that since Spider-Man 2, which is fitting because a lot of what makes No Way Home work is how it draws from the deep mines of stories gathered in previous stories, told in different films, different universes.

The multiverse is a fabled concept in Marvel Comics. We understand the world we read about as Earth-616. For a long time, that was Toby Maguire’s Spider-Man, and then Andrew Garfield. Now we understand it to be Tom Hollands yet though they share different worlds at least we know they do occupy in the same multiverse, at last.

This is what we were waiting for right? Nostalgia done correctly? Everyone tries it nowadays, and fail terribly at it to the point where the original feels tarnished by association. Sometimes it’s better to leave things in the past, to not tread back in fear of desecrating something preserved in beauty because it was left alone. And when the memories are as deeply fond as they are with some of the older Spidey films, the risk of failure runs higher.

But so does the reward, and the pay-off worked. This was a film told very carefully by focusing on messages shown in glimpses across the previous films. In Homecoming, Peter wanted the responsibility but didn’t have the…