The MCU Finally Offered Justice For SpiderMans Uncle Ben

The MCU Finally Offered Justice For Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben

Marvel’s What If…? episode 5 finally does justice to Uncle Ben in the MCU – but will Spider-Man: No Way Home follow the Disney+ TV show’s lead?

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The MCU Finally Offered Justice For SpiderMans Uncle Ben

Warning: Contains SPOILERS for Marvel’s What If…? episode 5.

Marvel’s What If…? episode 5 finally does justice to Spider-Man’s beloved Uncle Ben in the MCU. When Marvel Studios brought Spider-Man into the MCU, they decided to skip Spider-Man’s origin story. It was a smart call on Marvel’s part, because they knew viewers were already familiar with it, having seen it brought to life on the big screen twice before. What’s more, as Marvel’s president Kevin Feige explained in an interview with Cinema Blend, there was another advantage to this approach; it gave the studio a lot of creative freedom, because they could add any details in at a later point if they ever wished to do so.

In general, Marvel’s approach has worked. It has had one unfortunate consequence, though; the MCU has failed Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben. In the comics, it wasn’t the spider-bite that turned Peter Parker into a superhero, it was his failure to save Uncle Ben from a mugging – a heartbreaking mistake that taught Peter the crucial lesson “with great power must come great responsibility.” But Marvel has avoided even referencing Uncle Ben, with Peter summing up the broad strokes of the ‘power and responsibility’ speech without using the exact words. “When you can do the things that I can, but you don’t,” he told Tony Stark in Captain America: Civil War, “and then the bad things happen… they happen because of you.” Incredibly, Spider-Man: Far From Home went one step further, because it finally featured a nod to Uncle Ben – a suitcase with his initials – but it was treated in a contemptuous manner, destroyed during Mysterio’s attacks, with absolutely no emotional impact. The film was much more concerned with the emotional consequences of Tony Stark’s death, treating him as the Uncle Ben figure instead.

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Marvel’s What If…? episode 5 has finally given the MCU an explicit Uncle Ben reference. The Disney+ TV show episode is set in a timeline where Hank Pym’s exploration of the Quantum Realm went badly wrong, unleashing a zombie apocalypse upon the world. The media-savvy Peter Parker had grown up watching zombie movies, meaning he was perfectly equipped to survive, and in one scene he reflected on all those he had lost over the years. An orphan, Peter remembered his parents – and then immediately named Uncle Ben. The pain of that particular wound clearly ran deep into his heart.

Although episodes of Marvel’s What If…? aren’t part of the main MCU timeline, they branch off from it, meaning they have many points of contact. In this case, the branch appears to take place two weeks before the events of Avengers: Infinity War, during Ant-Man & the Wasp, when Hank Pym entered the Quantum Realm to rescue Janet Van Dyne. That means everything that happened before those events is the same – meaning viewers finally have their first explicit confirmation that the MCU’s Peter Parker was profoundly affected by the death of Uncle Ben. What’s more, the emotional scars caused by his death ran so deep they remained even in a zombie apocalypse.

It’s good to see the MCU finally doing justice to Uncle Ben, acknowledging the impact he had on his nephew’s life. Hopefully this will only be the first step, though, and Spider-Man: No Way Home will mention him in the main timeline as well; after all, Peter Parker is being taken to court after his secret identity has been revealed to the world, so it would be the perfect opportunity for Marvel to spell out Spider-Man’s MCU origin story. For now, though, Marvel’s What If…? is definitely better than nothing.

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Link Source : https://screenrant.com/what-if-zombies-uncle-ben-justice-spiderman/

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