Spider-Man: No Way Home is the third movie in the sort of "Home Trilogy" of the MCU Spider-Man movies. If you have not seen the movie, I will not spoil almost any major detail about it (it's one of the kind of movies that's best to see without having been spoiled about its contents), except for the one described in this post (and even that I will try to keep at a minimum).
From all the movies in this sort-of "trilogy", this is generally regarded as the best one. And, in fact, in the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe it is considered one of the top movies (definitely on the top half, way above the average).
I liked the movie, and it had very interesting ideas (which I won't spoil here), but it also left me with a slight bad taste in my mouth. A taste of disappointment. A taste of wasted potential.
You see (spoilers spoilers), one of the villains appearing in the movie is the Green Goblin.
Now, the Green Goblin is legendary in the comics, all the way since the 1960's, where he was first introduced. He is one of the biggest long-running arch-villains of the Spider-Man comics, and one of his most dangerous foes. In a way, the Green Goblin is to Spider-Man what the Joker is to Batman.
It's no wonder that he was the main villain in the first "modern" Spider-Man movie, ie. the 2002 film Spider-Man, directed by Sam Raimi.
In that film, however, he was a bit of a disappointment. His costume didn't really match that of the comics, and overall the movie was a bit meh, most likely because in 2002 special effects were still extremely expensive and thus they were not top-notch in that movie.
The 2021 film, Spider-Man: No Way Home succeeds in making the Green Goblin extraordinarily cooler and more menacing, both because of higher production values and more modern film-making technology, as well as because of better writing. In fact (and still without spoiling too much), the design of the Green Goblin in the movie pays perhaps a bit of homage to the various Hobgoblins in the comics (another related arch-enemy of Spider-Man), which actually works extraordinarily well. (This design isn't actually arbitrary in the movie, but I won't go into more detail about it.)
In my opinion this is, by far, the coolest and most menacing depiction of the villain ever put on film.
So, what's the disappointment?
The fact that his screen time in the film is criminally small.
In the comics a main fight between the superhero and the supervillain lasts for a really, really long time, often spanning several issues. These fights are often extremely elaborate, have a lot of storytelling in them, change locales frequently, and are outright spectacles in comic book form. If depicted on film in the same way as depicted in a comic, such a fight could well take half an hour, if not even longer.
This film could have been a golden opportunity to make the Green Goblin an absolutely awesome villain, with absolutely spectacular prolonged fights with Spider-Man. The snippets that we get were extremely well made: The costuming, the choreography, the special effects, the ambience, the scriptwriting. Absolutely superb.
All pretty much flushed down the drain by giving the Green Goblin a criminally small amount of overall screen time.
Not only should the Green Goblin, as depicted in the movie, have been the main villain, he should have been given enormously more screen time, and his fights should have been enormously longer and more elaborate.
The film, as it was actually made, was a complete waste of this potential, and thus a huge, huge disappointment in this regard. So much so that it actually made me kind of hate the film.
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