The ways in which Spider-Man: No Way Home and Resurrections engage with their own cinematic legacies might seem as far away from each other as they could possibly be. The idea that it is a fourth Matrix movie coming so long after the original three is something that Resurrections is fascinated with. The meta-text alt reality of the film is that of a game developer looking to make a new Matrix game in the franchise, while his colleagues all bandy about what. The Spider-Man films that came before it were given a chance to tie disparate sagas into a whole, a celebration that the thing you currently like, Tom Holland's Spider-Man, can literally co-exist alongside. No Way Home might be considered to be largely spectacle if the approach to what came before is intellectual.
Both No Way Home and Resurrections are in conversation with their past selves in surprisingly similar ways. Both stories are about how the past is not sequestered off from the present to be recreated and retold, but how the lessons learned from it can inform their futures. This is easier to understand than it would be if it were not for the fact that this is a continuation of a story director Lana Wachowski and her sister, Lilly, told at the turn of the century. Spider-Man's cinema history is one of multiple remakes and retellings already, but No Way Home has to do this in spite of being sequestered from that past.
The realization of what they went through in the past is confronted by Neo and Trinity in Wachowski's blunt-force dialogue about what it means to be in a new Matrix movie in 2021. They can either acknowledge the existence of reality or deny it, but they can also have a loving relationship with each other. They are not the only characters that have to think about accepting the past as they move forward, there is also Jessica Henwick's Bugs who is at odds with her commanders because of her deification of Neo's history as the One. General Niobe, the head of a new city state in Io, has to let go of the past because he is afraid that Neo will attempt to liberate Trinity from the Matrix, which would put the peace she has safeguarded for humans and rebel synthetics alike.
In No Way Home, Tom Holland's PeterParker has to deal with the fact that it is not his own past that is being confronted, unlike Neo and Trinity. As he grieves for the death of his Aunt May, Peter was visited by his alternate selves and asked to consider the other Peters' own growth beyond the traumas of their pasts as Spider-Man. The catalyst for Peter to lay down the path for his own future was given to him by the pain that defined those pasts. Even if we don't know what shape that will take, the knowledge that Holland's Peter Parker is our third cinematic interpretation of him becomes baked into the text as a leaping point for wherever his next adventure takes him.
We feel like we are ever continuously barreling toward a mainstream cinematic future of studio franchises, as we feel like we have a chance to have an interesting endpoint with both Resurrections and No Way Home. While being a part of that machine, their mirrored, yet differing approaches to engaging with that idea on an artistic level, and offering up the thought that something new and exciting can come from our current drive to constantly live in our cultural past, in turn give hope that maybe there is space for
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