Plot hole: The whole premise of the movie is that due to a botched spell, people who happen to know that "Peter Parker is Spider-Man" are pulled inside this universe. It's a bit of a stretch already that amongst those people is...Peter Parker himself, twice over, but let's say it makes sense. The problem is that Jamie Foxx's Electro does not meet this condition; he never found out. You could say it's a retcon or it's a different universe from the original movie's, but even this cop-out explanation is negated by the movie itself when Max Dillon makes a joke that shows that he didn't know Spidey's identity or even race.
Suggested correction: Although Max didn't discover Peter's identity on film, an explanation of why Max knows his name IS offered. When the villains are talking about what happened before they found themselves in the MCU, Max indicated that once he tapped fully into the power grid and information systems, there was nothing he didn't know at that point. Since we know there is a clandestine organization tracking Peter from the end of ASM1, it's possible Max gained the info from their database.
In the interest of clarity, you refer to the one line that goes "I was stuck in the grid, absorbing data."? Nothing about tapping fully, and becoming omniscient as the correction presents. So we have to give it that specific meaning and make a connection to the obscure postcredit scene by Fiers in the unfinished trilogy that asks Connors if he said anything to the boy imagining that it produced data that was 'on the grid' somehow, and Electro never processed this information in the movie. Not sure if it's quite an"explanation offered", since the movie offers none. It's a 'possible' explanation like the other one people use, about hearing Gwen say Peter's name (I like this one better because at least it would give a special meaning to a throwaway line and I do I love attention to details).
Suggested correction: I don't find it such a stretch that he knew Peter's name but didn't know what he looked like.
When Spider-Man is explaining his plan to defeat Electro to Gwen, Gwen addresses him as "Peter." Electro was laying on the ground nearby and likely would have heard this. Presumably, knowing that Spidey's real name was Peter was enough to pull him in.
There are almost 10,000 "Peter" in New York alone in our world. Knowing just the super-common first name wouldn't cut it and the movie does nothing to support this theory, in fact does everything to undermine it (Strange's explanation, Electro's joke, complete lack of addressing it, etc). Also if he overheard that bit in the original movie, he would have also learned their plans to defeat him.
Suggested correction: I guess we're all going to ignore the fact that this Electro has a completely different look than the Max we saw previously. It's quite possible he's from a different universe.
He's not from a different universe than the Electro from The Amazing Spider-Man 2. The Lizard and the Andrew Garfield version of Spider-Man both know who he is, and he talks about events from the aforementioned film. His different appearance is also explained in the film.
All that means is he went through similar experiences and has a similar appearance as the Max they knew. Ala J. Jonah Jameson.
Suggested correction: It's not people who know who is Spider-Man that are spilling in, it's people who are connected to him in any way.
No, no. Strange says it explicitly "That little spell you botched, when you wanted everyone to forget that Peter Parker is Spider-man? It started pulling in everyone who knows that Peter Parker is Spider-man" and so on. That's why in the end they fix it by making everyone forget who Peter Parker is, not who Spider-man is.
Plot hole: Otto Octavius in this movie instantly recognizes the Green Goblin as Norman Osborn, a fact that was never public at least as long as Ock lived. On the other hand, he does not react to Lizard being revealed as Curt Connors, who was a colleague of his in 'his' universe but never a freaky mutated dinosaur like in the 'other' universe.
Suggested correction: Green goblin died and his identity would've been public after his death.
Wrong. Peter placed Norman's corpse on his bed and was discovered by Harry. It's not like he left Norman's body in the building ruins to be discovered by the authorities. Harry himself didn't even know his father was the Green Goblin until the very end of Spider-Man 2. Even Norman's dying wish to Peter was to not tell Harry the truth about him.
Plot hole: Sandman's only wish is, as he repeats, to go back and see his daughter again. He helps Spider-man a few times, but at the same time he does not trust him entirely, so he does not act as full time ally. In the final battle though, at one point he explicitly sides with the Sinister Five, making for cool visuals in the battle but no sense; Electro and the others want to destroy the device that will send him home. He has no reasons to support them and every reason to prevent this from happening.
Suggested correction: He doesn't side with the Sinister Five. He demands for Spider-Man to hand him the box during the final battle. It's clear that his intention is to hit the button and be taken back to his universe. He is fighting for himself in the final battle.
As I said, cool visuals in the battle at the price of not making sense. At one point he's doing coordinate attacks on them with Electro and Lizard, he fights without chasing the box, and again, he's visually and in actions on the side of those whose victory will spell the end of his only wish, just because he wants those who wanna help him to do it faster? At no point in the battle it would make sense to do what he does.
You are incorrect.
Plot hole: Strange says he can't turn back time any more since he does not have the Time stone, so he'll resort to "a standard spell of forgetting." The statement is already quite odd since even with the stone he never showed anything close to the ability to revert time on a global scale for the WEEKS it would take to get back to that moment. But no worries; the "standard spell" is in fact more powerful than the Time stone; for it to work, it can't just make the people forget, or else people would learn back about Peter from the gigabytes of pictures and stories published, the Daily Bugle's archives, Flash's published book, T-shirts etc.
Suggested correction: He didn't understand the workings of the time stone as well as he did other spells. The time stone is definitely more powerful, able to trap an omnipotent cosmic being in a time loop. The spell focusses on 1 person's secret identity being forgotten from memory, hardly more powerful than what the time stone can do. In any case, the difference in power is not important to the plot.
The Time Stone in movies always focuses around limited areas, including Dormammu, with Strange concentrating during the activation. It's also a unique artifact and the most powerful in the universe. This is a "forgetfulness spell", but it needs to alter reality (physical evidence) to work, or it's useless, and it's a "standard spell" according to Strange. Was he downplaying it? Let's say he was; it's still a 'fire and forget' sort of deal that alters reality years back.
Suggested correction: I wouldn't say that a spell making everyone in the world forget about Peter is more powerful than the time stone. Memory loss is something that happens regularly (and pretty easily, T.B.H.) to people as a result of anything from illness to a bad bonk on the head. Therefore, it doesn't seem like it'd be something that'd be hard for a wizard to do. He's just applying that to a global scale, which doesn't seem like it'd be impossible if it is indeed a basic spell. As for evidence of Peter, it's really not hard to use conjecture to assume he also made evidence of Peter vanish from existence as part of the spell... making things disappear is a very basic wizardry/magician trick. Heck, it's basically a cliche.
I don't get the logic, sorry. It is easy to do it with a person, therefore it's also doable on a global scale? It's easy for a wizard to move a rock, then by that logic it'd be not that hard to move every rock? Instantly? And since it does that but also makes every physical evidence of it vanish, it is not a spell of forgetting. It has to restructure time and space on a massive scale in a very precise way, and here it is trivalized because the movie does not address the consequences (you will see proposed corrections of this entry that assume it changed nothing physical and it's just no biggie). For instance in the latest Strange movie, there's a magic item that is more powerful than any Infinity stone, but it's not something any wizard can access. The fact that a clichè exists (it's not like I haven't read One More Day, for instance) doesn't mean it fits every context (it's not quite the same doing it in the Tooth Fairy movie and here).
I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that making people forget about something and making some stuff disappear restructures time and space. The film explicitly states that it doesn't - Strange says the spell "won't turn back time." It just makes people forget. (And presumably makes evidence disappear.) There's even a joke in the movie where Strange implies he uses the spell regularly, including an instance where he used it to make Wong forget about a party. Doesn't mean the party didn't happen. Just means Wong doesn't remember it. It seems like you're really over-reading and over-complicating the spell in your head. Forgetting about something (or making some books and computer files vanish) does not necessitate the rewriting of space and time... it just means people forgot and things disappeared. If I forgot about something, and the only piece of evidence vanished, to me, it basically never happened. Doesn't mean history was necessarily re-written.
The boundaries of what constitutes "over-reading" and "over-complicating" are subjective; to me saying "it's a basic spell of forgetting", castable on a whim, for something that necessarily has also to act globally if not universally (Nick Fury is not on this planet and he would forget, most likely) and does not 'merely' affect minds but a plurality of records and physical items dating back over a decade (remember we talk about the whole life of Peter Parker here, not just his association with Spider-man), is over-simplifying on top of misrepresenting. One of the writers answered on the subject by saying they have an answer to that they are not at liberty to reveal currently. We'll see if that is true, (or will just be ignored and dumped on the Sony writers who already spectacularly got it wrong in Morbius); the MCU is not just one movie, and Strange in the previous movies never showed the ability to change the universe deleting selectively parts of it with a 'standard spell'.
I think I can get where you're coming from with this. I just personally didn't see it as that big an issue. I think it's probably just an agree to disagree situation. Sorry if I came across as rude.
Suggested correction: Even if we assume the video footage of people saying that Peter is Spidey still exist, this wouldn't matter much. If anybody saw a video of themselves recorded a week ago saying something that they never remembered saying, they would laugh it off and assume it was some "Deepfake" or something.
Besides the fact that I would sue whatever media outlet published my deepfake and most certainly not laugh it off, if there's no magical alteration of reality/space/time to make that spell work, it would be entirely useless. Anyone could just type "Who is Spider-Man" on google and find out from a million sources.
Plot hole: The original "Make everyone forget that Spider-man is Peter Parker except..." spell went horribly wrong and Strange at the end of the movie is struggling to prevent a complete collapse of reality because people from the whole multiverse who fit the exception shoehorned by Peter have been drawn to this reality. Strange then does a new spell that supersedes the other by making everyone forget Peter Parker, period. The problem is, by that logic everyone would forget who Peter is also in all those universes involved and so Maguire and Garfield's life are likewise ruined and one wonders if they are even allowed to remember their own name (after all, the initial spell did affect them, so the radical undoing of it should too).
Suggested correction: There is no indication that Strange's spell works on the multiverse. I'd say that is a bit of a stretch. The spell was focussed on MCU's spiderman, and him being forgotten fixed the multiverse (temporarily probably). The initial spell was flawed and broke down the multiverse barriers, causing other universes to spill in. The new spell fixed that, not change those universes.
I came here because I had realised the exact same thing Sammo had. The villains are not there because they know who MCU-Peter is, they are there because they know that Peter is Spider-Man in their universe. The first spell is still active, the second spell adjusts the consequences of it, because why else would the second spell send them back? The only way the villains can vanish is if they forget who Peter is in their universe as well, which means the other two Spideys are in the same situation.
The spilled over Spider-Men and villains can vanish because the second spell restores the flaws of the first spell, which caused the barriers of reality to come down. With the flaw restored, everything that spilled over is returned automatically. Not because they too don't know who Spider-Man is now, but because reality is restored.
That's not really the way they presented it in the movie. The second spell is "Make everyone forget who Peter Parker is." If it works the way you say, wouldn't they have been able to accomplish the same with a spell with less severe consequences, like "make everyone forget my middle name"?
MCU's Peter Parker, because MCU's Spider-Man is not forgotten. My point was that since the spell failure DID affect people from the whole multiverse, "everyone who know that Peter Parker is Spider-man" even when it's not THEIR Peter Parker, why would the fix (which happens when the beings have already broken in) be a selective one on a specific Peter? Happy if they address it in one of the next movies.
The first spell was also focussed on the MCU's Peter Parker but the failure caused tears in the multiverse and caused people to spill in, the spell didn't directly affect them. The fix was again specifically aimed at the MCU's Peter Parker, to supersede the failed spell and cause the tears to heal and the spilled over people to return. This one did work and thus only the MCU was affected whilst the others were returned (still with memories from changes by MCU's Peter).
As I said, hard to say it "didn't directly affect" those people when they were sucked into a different universe against their will, and they were because they had one peculiar trait the movie keeps hammering in; knowing that Peter Parker, any Peter, is Spider-man. It's the characters that use it in the exposition and then in the resolution, with two different meanings that don't match.
It was stated near the beginning that the spell went out of hand because it was changed six times mid-spell. Changing a spell while it's in the middle of being cast causes the spell to go berserk. The spell cast at the end is not changed mid-cast, so it was more controlled than the old spell.
If he just needed to cast properly, he could have casted it again in a more controlled way, but he cannot since "they're here." So it is a different spell, but if the condition "being Peter Parker" was not sufficiently clear the first time around (and Peter even interrupted the spell saying "everyone who knew that *I* was Spider-man before", not "everyone who knows Peter Parker is Spider-man"), there's no reason why it should be now.As I said, I'm pointing out that the meaning keeps shifting.
Suggested correction: That this was only limited to the MCU universe is a given because extending it to every possible universe is an impossible plot element to put into the story, for one simple reason: Our universe is officially part of the Marvel multiverse, and if the memory alteration extended to every universe, then we (the audience) would no longer remember Peter either.
