Spider-Man: No Way Home, The Multiverse and Getting out of Your Own Way

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON Christmas Eve, 2021

 "You're flying out to darkness to fight a ghost."

 - Otto Octavious 

The level of wokeness – identity politics – and SJW shit that wasn’t present in this movie is its own post-logic miracle. This movie was about people – all people – whomever you may be – to come and enjoy an action-adventure film without being torpedoed with – confabulating ideologies forced into a mosaic of fabricated far-leftist multiculturalism.

Spider-Man: No Way Home was about growing up and leaving yourself out of the outcome if that outcome for the group is better off without you in it. The truth is we don’t always get our way – we don’t always get what we want – we are often left out – we are often left alone. The flipside is – we – grow. We learn to navigate, we learn to assign meaning, within ourselves, to what is meaningful about the relationships and the world that is all around us.

The Spider-Boy becomes a Spider-Man.

Spoilers ahead……..

To proceed forward assume your spider senses are tingling.

Matt Murdock – Daredevil.  This was exciting to see that Charlie Cox’s Netflix Daredevil character was loved enough by fans that Marvel saw fit to put him into the MCU movies.  He will add a great deal of, and much needed, maturity to upcoming MCU movies.

No Way Home juggled all the previous Spider-verse villains seamlessly and then comes Andrew’s Amazing Spider-Man and then Tobey’s Spider-Man to add icing on the cake that I haven’t seen at the movies in a long time, nostalgically speaking.  There are still a lot of questions, but this was a calculated but convoluted movie with many moving parts, even for complex subject matter that surrounds the Multiverse and String-Theory. 

Speaking of - Question: Does the other Peter’s, Tobey and Andrew, in their respective universes have all their loved ones who know they are Spider-man, forget them as well?

Electro – Jamie Foxx got to not be so blue.  His Electro thankfully stayed true to the comic book character and was electricity yellow whenever he blasted lightning from his hands.

Green Goblin – William Defoe killed it in every scene.  Spoiler friendly spoiler hahahahaha.  He didn’t skip a beat from 2002’s Spider-Man and still looks great.

Dr. Ock - Alfred Molina was great once again as the multi-tentacled villain.  He's always been the voice of reason as long as he is in control of his cybernetic technology and not the other way around. 

So much spectacle, so much fan service, so much awesomeness.  Spider-Man: No Way Home was a fun movie to watch from start to finish – and that’s it, that’s all I have to say, but…. It turns out it isn’t – there’s a little more.  The movie is so much more than its moving mechanical tentacles… I mean parts.   

Post-Logic Miracle: A Marvel movie inspiring not only its main character but its audience to grow up and assume responsibility is – for a lack of a better word – inspiring.  We learn to step aside and get out of our own way if necessary for the greater good.  This film turns out to be philosophically utilitarian in the end with no wokeness insight.

"The problem is you trying to live two different lives.  The longer you do it the more dangerous it becomes."

 - Dr. Strange

Dr. Strange performed a spell, by Peter’s request, to magically disappear anyone’s memory of Peter Parker being Spider-Man through a sort of magical Mandela Effect – which at this point the whole world knows who Spider-Man’s identity is.

I do think that Strange’s eagerness to help Peter with this spell despite its dire consequences may have less to do with this movie and more to do with the Dr. Strange upcoming sequel.  Some questions – I guess we wait and see.

Spider-Man: No Way Home was the best Marvel movie I’ve seen in years.  It was respectful of what came before it.  It didn’t come off selfish or even jealous of the earlier Spider-Man movies.  Instead, it chose to celebrate them with actual class.  The film had real stakes where Peter had to make choices with consequences, some with unfortunate outcomes.  The No Way Home in the title could certainly be toward the villains and Andrew and Toby's Spider-Men, but No Way Home is really about how the MCU's Spider-Man was never going backward where he could seek comfort at his home.

This movie showed that Tom Holland's Peter Parker wasn't actually Spider-Man until the end of this film.  By the end, when he puts on the new suit that he made, and after taking full responsibility for his previous actions, only then do we truly see our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.

With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

  

 

The Matrix: Resurrections and Caught Up in a Meta-Loop of Destruction

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON Christmas Eve, 2021

---If we don’t know what is real we are often unable to resist what isn’t.---

Tabula Rosa – is the theory that individuals are born without built-in mental content, and therefore all knowledge comes from experience or perception.  The mind isn’t born with a hardwired possession of certain knowledge.

Some spoilers ahead……………

Like a mosquito at a nudist colony, I’m trying to figure out where to begin with this fourth installment of The Matrix franchise.  Which by the way, this movie cynically criticizes throughout the first half of its long-running time.

The Matrix: Resurrections is about choice, destiny, identity, and trans-formation.  The movie explores qualifying memory recall and whether free will is an illusion and destiny always being part of our programming.  Then - we are able to escape that programming through, I guess through some form of free will, hence these strange repeating loops and inconsistencies this movie softly investigates.  I would argue – not well.

Is reality-based in memory nothing but fiction?

Thomas Anderson (AKA Neo) in this version of the Matrix is a video game creator and designer of The Matrix game for a company called Deus Machina.  Which is a game that mirrors the content, characters, and plot of The Matrix 1999 film, which of course is unknown to the millions of gamers that reside in this seventh version of the Matrix from which they perceive reality.  I know what you’re thinking – a loop within a loop within a loop within a loop then a meta-loop, and so on.

Thomas goes to therapy to try and resolve the psychotic and suicidal issues he has been experiencing for some time now.  He believes he doesn’t belong in his current reality; he believes somethings wrong or off with this place, “like a splinter in his mind” that he just can’t put his finger on.  So, he keeps taking his blue pills to help from going ‘crazy’.  A word, it turns out, he isn’t permissible to say in his therapy session.

Thomas meets up with Tiffany (AKA Trinity) in a café called Simulatte.  They start to get the feels and begin to remember moments of their ‘true’ past.  Thomas through therapy and Tiffany through dreams.  Thomas is then brought over to the real world, which has survived 60 years since the last time he was there, by red pilling it and then planning to get Trinity out of the Matrix.  That’s pretty well it, no saving the world, bin there dun dat, just get Trinity out.

Big shocker, in the end, Trinity becomes the One and saves Neo and then takes down the patriarchy afterward.  This hasn’t been a common theme permeating cinema and culture in the last five years, has it?

---If we are unable to distinguish the difference between what is real and what isn’t we are doomed to be trapped in fantasy.---

Reason it appears, is unable to break out from its own loop.  No matter what these characters do, they seem to remain caught in this Matrix loop, indefinitely.  In our, outside of this movie, world we are not able to change on the level that our imaginary and emotional perceptions tend to believe.  We have thoughtful stories and internal narratives that persuade our minds into going along with this line of thinking, often in a quite convincing way, but to quote the actual Morpheus, “There’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.”

The truth is most of our lives are lived internally within the neuro-synaptic confines of our minds.  We perceive the world outside our braincase, we feel it affect our nerves and gather sensory data through our many available inputs, we then form a narrative and live that story as if it were as real as apple pie.

Echoes of the past ripple up to this point in time only to help us forget.

The fight scenes were sloppy, unlike the choreographed artistry of the original.  The action scenes for the most part was generic and in some cases crappy for what you’d expect from a Matrix film.  The Merovingian from Reloaded makes an appearance in one such crappy action scene yelling out barely coherent indictments against Neo.  I won’t go into detail, but it was just a sad sight to behold.  How did that make it into final picture I will never know?

All the far……….far left, neon hair dye and non-binary, diversity couldn’t swoop in and virtue-signal this movie from being a cardboard simulacra shadow of its former self.  The wokeness in this movie is plastered throughout, unfortunately, which ultimately bogs down the story and drenches it in identity politics.  To be fair, the reason it is bad isn’t hinged on its wokeness – it’s just bad filmmaking from screenplay to picture lock to final test screening.

There were a few moments that were -actually- okay.  The movie dived a little into Predictive programming and the meta-message about exploiting nostalgic IPs for the sole purpose of a money grab but Neo and Trinity are the real focus here.  Everyone and I mean every other character in this movie are forgettable, ‘Who was forgettable?’ ‘Exactly.’

Other than that, there was no real innovation and only rudimentary cookie cut-out philosophy that was even beneath entry-level Philosophy 101.  The Matrix: Resurrections did make a profound statement despite itself; the audiences of today can’t handle the discourse and depth of The Matrix 1999.

Resurrections is more on par with Revolutions, the third Matrix movie.  It’s lighter and more dumbed-down to suit how the studio likely thinks what contemporary audiences, with many bubble-wrapped and willing participants in victimhood culture, would be prepared to sit through.  Are we the problem here?  This current system?  Social media?  Why do we resist the Red Pill?  Is the choice an illusion or was the red pill always decided?  Sadly, these days I don’t see much of that going around.

Why are we all so easily offended in our first-world technocracy?  We have become hyper-sensitive to any comment, opinion, or view that conflicts with our own perspective.  We often become agitated at the slightest bend in our narrative, that story that we believe defines us.

We are alone in the fastest and most expansive time that human beings on this planet have experienced.  We have technological advances and scientific discoveries developing at a rapid pace.  We have endless conflicts with governments and their often-absurd policies, and the daily threat of impending doom by some unknown, faceless enemy.

We have difference in every direction, constantly reminding us of how small we are, among all this chaos.  We have health warnings, passive-aggressive violence, and system failure seemingly lurking around every corner of our lives.  We have numerous multi-cultures of people, that believe in other gods and live by dissimilar traditions than the ones we are accustomed to. 

We do have control but the problem with it is it isn’t real, it’s manufactured.  Our control mainly comes in the form of some technology or what we choose to buy.  The problem with this control we all share is, our control isn’t really ours, it belongs to the corporations that deceived us into thinking it’s ours.   

 

---If reality alludes us, we will inevitably fall prey to illusions presented to us.---

 

GODZILLA vs. KONG and Suspending your Disbelief

Some spoilers ahead.

Godzilla Vs. Kong was a monstrous movie extravaganza with two mighty Titans destroying cities while trying to destroy each other.  Despite its convoluted narrative, GVK was a fun movie to behold.  It had all the explosions, carnage, and silly one-liners we have all come to expect from American blockbuster movies in the 21st century.  It also had an incredibly twisted, and ridiculously hard-to-believe plot.  Not that we should expect great story writing and well-thought-out plot points but here, you are required to suspend your disbelief a lot further than usual.

 GVK starts off with King Kong on Skull Island in some sort of outlandish dome to hide him from Godzilla, who basically swims around a lot, but would kill Kong if he should sense him or something like that.  Anyway, turns out they (the one-dimensional humans) need Kong to go to the Hollow Earth to find an energy source to help power a massive Godzilla-sized robot to kill any monsters that attack people.  I’m not making this up.

The Hollow Earth is a massive cavity in the center of our Earth where Kong, Godzilla, and several other gigantic creatures originate.  The inner core, the outer core, that we all learned in science class is thrown out with all the other logic this movie wanted nothing to do with.  But that's.... okay.

On the way to the Hollow Earth, lol, Kong and Godzilla battle it out on a U.S. military Aircraft carriers at sea, this is why we are watching this movie in the first place.  We want to see these two mammoth creatures go toe-to-toe in the ring, and I got to say, they delivered.  The fight was quite a match to behold in all its competent CGI deliciousness.

Godzilla eventually makes his way to Hong Kong wreaking havoc while Kong makes his way to the Hollow Earth to acquire the energy source.  Sorry, I’m laughing as I write this. Lol.  Kong and Godzilla eventually have it out in Hong Kong, knocking skyscrapers over like they were in a pinball machine.  Then, big shocker, like no one saw this coming, after they damn near kill each other, they join forces to destroy the evil human-made Godzilla robot and save humanity, not from Kong or Godzilla but by humanity????????  What the fuck!  The moral here is nature wins and humans lose – I guess.  I’m not really sure.  But that's...... okay.

Now don’t get me wrong, I might be a little over critical....... 

Good suspension of disbelief is Marty going back in time or John Wick shooting up a bar and killing a hundred trained killers.  Bad suspension of disbelief is Vin Diesel driving a sports car off the hundredth floor of a skyscraper and smashing through another skyscraper and surviving.

..........With that aside, this movie was silly but more importantly, this movie was fun.  Despite all the curve-ball mental-gymnastics, you might be required to perform, at the end of the day, this movie is a good time.