I really enjoyed this film – and unlike the third film in the previous two Spiderman franchises, it worked as it built on and developed interestingly what had happened in the past – and with some welcome darker aspects. I think we forget that of all the superhero sagas, Spiderman has some of the most consistently dark thread running through it with Peter Parker’s losses. For me the first Spiderman films in a sequence are the best as there is the constant tension between the young human Peter Parker (we often forget, or are made to forget, that he is just a HS student when he is first bitten) and the supernatural figure he is in the process of becoming. It is him dealing with this conflict that is the most dramatically engaging part of the story. Other superhero figures are at ease with themselves; Peter Parker is not and often in latter films where he has come to terms with who and what he is, that aspect is gone and we are only left with the spectacle and the grotesque villains.
Here however, the human/super-human conflict is still there as his identity has been revealed and that means that, necessarily, the human side of the story is still crucial.
The other excellent aspect of this film was how the often baffling/unnecessary/profitable-franchise-driving concept of the multiverse was really powerfully and smartly used by having the two previous Spiderman manifestations come into this world. The scenes with all three of them together were marvelous. Funny, sometimes touching, quite smart and ones where there all communicated as humans and shared their human experiences and problems. But Tom Holland remains my favorite!
It will be interesting to see where the franchise goes from here.