Canadian Lad's Spider-Man: No Way Home Breakdown Wins Us Over With the Smallest Details

We came away from Canadian Lad's scene by scene breakdown of the first half of Spider-Man: No Way Home impressed. "Wow um that was thorough i really enjoyed that," was the first reaction, and we applaud him for going out of his way to see the movie eight times in theatres and take notes while doing it. He admits it is not a true slowed down breakdown, since he was waiting for the Blu-ray to do that properly.

The obscure details are what set this breakdown apart

We have seen a lot of breakdowns of the trailer and the movie by now, so plenty of this was familiar. What stood out were the things we had not heard anyone else mention. The quirky timing detail was one: Aunt May calls Peter at 7:27 and he arrives at the F.E.A.S.T. facility at 8:10, which Canadian Lad works out as about 40 minutes of swinging. That struck us as pretty random, in a good way.

The Stan Lee taxi number, 1228 for his December 28, 1922 birthday, was also interesting, because Canadian Lad noticed behind the scenes footage where the taxi did not carry that number, meaning it was added in later. And the shadow detail was really cool: Peter's shadow matches the round head of his nanosuit, then changes when the armor comes off. "He notices a lot of arbitrary things it's very fascinating." As we put it, "it takes a special kind of person to pick up on details like that," though anyone might after eight viewings, and the shadow is the kind of thing that is meant to go unnoticed because it is natural.

Where we had our own takes

We did not always land where Canadian Lad did. On the window Peter webs shut and then opens easily, we raised the idea that this was supposedly a mistake that was improvised on set, though the lore answer is that he is just that strong. On EDITH's glasses lying around his bedroom, we suggested it might be an oversight the filmmakers swept under the rug, comparing the glasses to the God's Eye from the Fast and Furious franchise. Canadian Lad thinks the newspapers in the windows might cover broken glass; we thought that maybe they were just covered to give more privacy.

We also floated reasons for the Sanctum's snow, perhaps tying in thematically with the Christmas release, and for the blue screen set, either control of the environment, secrecy, or both.

The manhole cover reading

Canadian Lad sees Tom Holland closing a manhole cover, after Andrew Garfield's Spider-Man picked one up in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, as a sign the movie would redeem that film. That struck us as an interesting interpretation. One view was that it works well enough simply as a reference to Andrew Garfield turning up in the film, or as "a cool little indicator of what's to come," though the redemption idea was liked too.

Do you see that manhole cover as a symbol of correction, or just a nod to the Spider-Men who were about to appear?