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.
TedStixon
23rd Dec 2021
Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021)
Upvote valid corrections to help move entries into the corrections section.
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.
Join the mailing list
Separate from membership, this is to get updates about mistakes in recent releases. Addresses are not passed on to any third party, and are used solely for direct communication from this site. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Check out the mistake & trivia books, on Kindle and in paperback.