The Spider-Man: Far From Home Trailer Raises Some Questions
Early this morning, Tom Holland, aka Peter Parker aka Spider-Man in Marvel's movies, took to Instagram to reveal the first trailer for Spider-Man: Far From Home. (He tried to, at least. There were a few technical difficulties before he finally got it uploaded.) The broad strokes of the clip match up with what we already knew: Parker goes on a European vacation with his friends and decides to leave the Spidey suit behind—until Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) shows up and tells him he "has a job to do." That job, as it turns out, is taking on the super-baddie Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal), who seems set on wrecking half of Europe, because reasons.
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Pretty cool, huh? It is until you start to remember, wait … isn't Spider-Man … *snaps fingers* … what's the word? Oh, right—dead? Yes, at the end of Avengers: Infinity War, when Thanos finally iced out his Infinity Gauntlet and fulfilled his dream of wiping out half of the living creatures in the universe, Spidey said, "Mr. Stark, I don't feel so good" before turning to dust. So, uh, what gives with him now gallivanting around Europe and flirting poorly with Michelle Jones (Zendaya)? That, dear reader, is hard to parse.
But it's not hard to account for. Far From Home and Infinity War are comic-book movies, and given the nature of their source material, chances are no one who floated away in Infinity War is perma-dead. The mechanics of how they'll be revived is anyone's guess—my theory is that Wong (Benedict Wong), whose fate wasn't revealed in the last Avengers movie, will finish executing whatever plan Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) was talking about when he gave the Time Stone to Thanos and later told Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) "it was the only way"—but chances are some kind of capus ex machina will come along to save at least some of the fallen Avengers. What's interesting, though, is that this new trailer seems to confirm it.
No, the plot revealed in the Far From Home trailer doesn't necessarily mean that Peter Parker will be revived after Thanos' dastardly deed. The movie could, for example, take place before the events in Infinity War or happen on some alternate timeline (somewhere off in the Spider-Verse, perhaps?). Yet, that doesn't really seem to be the Marvel Cinematic Universe's way. Far From Home hits theaters July 5. Captain Marvel arrives March 8. Avengers: Endgame—the movie where all the questions about who stays dead and who doesn't will presumably be answered—comes out April 26. And, aside from the fact that origin stories like Captain Marvel go back in time to establish storylines, these films typically happen in order so they can build to their big finishes. Oh, also, Amy Pascal, the head of the studio (Sony) that produces the Spider-Man movies, has said this movie will pick up "minutes" after Endgame. So there's that.
If all is to be believed, this trailer proves that Spider-Man will come back—a rare reveal in a genre of films that lives and dies by keeping things secret until people see them in theaters. That said, what can we learn from this trailer? Well, for one, places like New York, London, and Venice seem to be intact. And their populations don't look like they've been halved. At the end of Infinity War audiences got to see how many heroes were affected, but the impacts on major urban areas weren't really shown (minus, of course, the post-credits scene that showed Agent Hill and Nick Fury driving through a city). It's possible that these cities didn't suffer huge catastrophes, but it seems unlikely they'd go back to business as usual. As Alexis Nedd noted on Mashable,"ordinary people don't seem to be laboring under the trauma that the Snapture would cause." There is also the fact that Peter Parker himself isn't acting like someone who just came back from the dead. Sure, someone who just faced Thanos might want a vacation, but a class trip to Europe? That seems less likely. Either Spider-Man is playing it very cool, or he and everyone around him have at least some form of collective amnesia.
All of which brings us back to the one big question that remains after watching the Far From Home trailer: If Spider-Man is alive, how? And who else will be returned? I'm sticking with my Doctor Strange/Wong time-reversal story, but other than that, I've got nothin'. Answers, presumably, will come in April, with everything else being laid out in July. Only then will we know just how far from home Peter Parker really is.