By Dimithri Wijesinghe
Photos Krishan Kariyawasam
Spider-Man: Far From Home premiered in Sri Lanka on 2 July 2019 at Colombo City Centre Scope Cinemas and Liberty Cinema for a select few audience members, with successive screenings on the 3rd and 4th for larger groups of cinemagoers.
The sequel to “Spider-Man: Homecoming”, this film directly follows the highly successful, record-breaking box office success Avengers: Endgame which was released just only a few months ago. It also happens to follow the Oscar-winning, visually and stunningly narrated Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, so it’s fair to say there is a lot riding on this film and the studio definitely felt the heat.
Considering all the aforementioned expectations, Marvel truly stepped up with this sequel. We declare, right of off the bat, that this movie is its own and should be viewed as such and not as a successor to either of those earlier projects.
Confirmed by Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige as the final film of MCU Phase Three, the story continues on from the events that took place in Endgame, with Tony Stark’s death being felt worldwide, and Peter Parker being left to fill in shoes that are possibly too big for him.
The movie really gets going towards the second half, while the first half is basically a quirky teen romance cum high school comedy, which we’ve somewhat come to expect from this version of Spiderman, which was entertaining in its own right.
The screening at Scope was once again a brilliant experience; the cinema is truly something we can’t imagine doing without at this point. At the screening on the 3rd, they asked us to bag our cell phones, which got everyone really excited; it made us wonder whether, maybe, it wasn’t very obvious who the villain was.
Marvel has tried to remain pretty hush-hush about that aspect of this movie but really, those cell phones were temporarily confiscated so we would not ruin one of the best end-credit scenes Marvel managed to squeeze out in its two decades in the making.
Overall, we are truly grateful to Scope Cinemas for allowing Lankans a fantastic cinematic experience. If you’re a fan of the franchise, we urge you to make haste and catch this in cinemas. And for those of you living under a rock, as there are two post credit scenes in this movie, take care not to run off at the end of it like a plebe.
