Movie Review: Spider-Man - Far From Home

Spider-Man: Far From Home [2019]

After the super-long review series I did for Avengers: Endgame, as well as the sheer general hype of the overarching cosmic plot of both Infinity War and Endgame, it's actually pretty refreshing to sit down and just watch a relatively standalone superhero movie, y'know? I mean, sure, the backbone of Far From Home still hinges hugely on the rich backstory of the MCU as a whole. Between dealing with the ramifications of the end of Endgame, particularly the death of Spider-Man's close friend and mentor, as well as the void of a prominent superhero figure with multiple huge names either going off-world or just plain offed, Far From Home still manages to be a very, very solid Spider-Man outing due to the amazing performances done by the main characters of the show. 

And... and this movie is one that hinges a lot on a certain twist that might be a wee bit obvious to fans that are at least a little bit familiar with the comic book inspiration that these movies borrow from, but man does the acting and the general storytelling really end up make the twist work out very, very well. I'm saving all my opinions on the two huge twists this movie makes until after a spoiler alert section, but other than that, let's just say that the movie holds up very, very well to a second time viewing. 

The cast was balanced out pretty well this time around, too, which is something I liked. It's not that I disliked Ned or anything, but the role of the supporting characters -- Nick Fury, Happy Hogan, Ned, MJ -- end up really being a bit reined in so that it's more about Spider-Man himself and his personal struggles with dealing with being thrust into the center of a lost legacy. In other words, "great power, great responsibility", except once more, the movie doesn't say that iconic line. Still, the themes of legacy, responsibility and generally just a plucky young boy from New York trying his best even though the world seems to have it out against him is done exceptionally well. 

The visual effects of the movie is also exceptional, and it's not just the pretty cool smashy-smash CGI monsters we saw in the trailers with Hydro-man and Molten Man either. You kind of expect some degree of visual spectacle from every Marvel movie at this point, but man the visuals and general sound editing for this movie is nothing short of spectacular. The action scenes of this movie are... they get slightly repetitive towards the end, and some of the giant-CGI-monster bits alternate between being very breathtaking to just regularly cool, but I'm not going to complain. Everything looks pretty damn great, and there are just so many moments with Spider-Man and his webs and him swinging around giant rocks and cars and shit that just look great. I could sit here and geek out about the action scenes, but that'd take all day. 

So... with that out of the way...

=SPOILER ALERT WOOP WOOP WOOP=

So a good chunk of this movie is all about Peter Parker, which is a huge, huge improvement, I think, from Homecoming which essentially plays it a bit too safe by focusing things more on Peter and Tony's relationship, banking on the star power of Robert Downey Jr and Michael Keaton to carry the movie. And, of course, Tom Holland is a perfectly great Spider-Man, but throughout Homecoming I really get the feeling that they wanted to keep things as grounded and as close to the MCU comedy-action formula as possible. It's understandable, considering just how much is riding on the MCU integration of Spider-Man and after the pretty disappointing results of the Amazing series. But with both Holland and the studios really showing off just how much they have a handle on Spider-Man, I really do get the feeling that they are far, far more willing to hit the gas and just go all out on this movie, really trying to dissect who Peter Parker -- or, specifically, the MCU's version of Peter Parker -- is as a character.

Throughout his brief appearance in Civil War and the entire Homecoming movie, Peter Parker's whole character arc has been trying to live up and prove himself. Not just to his mentor Tony Stark or the superhero community as a whole, but also to himself that, yes, he is a superhero. He's not just some kid that Tony has to babysit, he's the god-damned Spider-Man and he is his own hero. He's proving that he is Avengers material. And it pays off when he beat Vulture in Homecoming mostly on his own, and participating in huge cosmic events throughout Infinity War and Endgame. 

But one thing that is hammered home in this movie is that... this version of Peter Parker is still a young lad. He can't even drink! He's like, 16, I believe, at the time of the movie, and all of this is overwhelming him, particularly after the death of Tony Stark and after his freaking death during the Snap (or 'the Blip', as the movie calls it). Sure, he's not sitting around in a corner moping or anything, but the fact that everyone is throwing questions his way about "how it feels to be the new Iron Man" when the thought of succeeding Iron Man hasn't even crossed his mind... it's an almost meta subplot of how the MCU will survive after these legendary actors that had carried the MCU on their shoulders have bowed out. 

This is a beautiful shot.

And can you blame Peter Parker for just wanting to take a god-damned break? He just wants to enjoy his week of vacation in Europe, hang out with his friends and do his stupid plan of impressing MJ with a black dahlia necklace. But, of course, the superhero life finds him and Spider-Man gets thrown straight into what seems to be yet another world-ending catastrophe scenario when, allegedly, a quartet of Elemental beasts are arriving from a parallel Earth, and Spider-Man has to work with Nick Fury (who straight up sabotages his vacation and redirects the tour group to where they need to go) and the enigmatic but charismatic Mysterio to fight giant monsters made up of water and flame and all that jazz. Throw in the fact that Tony Stark has bequeathed EDITH, a super-powerful set of glasses that gives Peter access to Stark Industries's most powerful satellite/drone system, and the burden of legacy weighs more and more on Peter. 

And I do love that while it's never really pointed out, there were some points when Peter was fighting "Hydro Man" and "Molten Man" that he seemed pretty... ineffectual. His web shooters do nothing, and he certainly ends up spending a good chunk of both the Venice and Prague fights just webbing up buildings and stopping clocktowers from falling over. Throw in some additional failures -- like accidentally almost causing EDITH to send a drone strike on poor Brad (easily the comedic highlight of the movie), and the fact that Mysterio's charm is clearly made to mimic Tony Stark... and it's pretty easy to see why Peter was so willing to abandon this superhero life. Not do something as drastic as hang up the costume, perhaps, but he clearly doesn't want anything to do with EDITH or to be Nick Fury's number one superhero. 

But, of course, Peter Parker is a responsible, good boy, and even after his fuck-up of handing EDITH over to Mysterio, he ends up discovering the deception, and ends up basically going on to try and defeat Mysterio on his own, eventually really growing as a character. And I do really like that it's Happy Hogan that ends up giving him a pep talk, with Happy having grown to respect Peter more as an actual superhero after the events of Homecoming, and the pep talk of Happy telling Peter that, no, he's not Iron Man, and he'll never be Iron Man -- because Tony was a far, far bigger paranoid mess than Peter Parker is. The interaction between Happy and Peter on the plane was pretty damn great and well-done, and as Peter is reinvigorated and takes the fight against Mysterio's largest scheme, it's just a huge moment of "fuck yes!"

After the requisite bit of elaborate stunt-fighting and CGI fighting with webs and thrown cars and the like, I really do like that the actual fight against Mysterio once they stand face-to-face ends up being so, so short. The reason why Mysterio was so easily able to get into Peter's head is because of his own personal demons, and once Peter has essentially gotten a handle on it, everything becomes scarily trivial as Peter Parker, Spider-Man, takes control of his destiny. Or something cheesy along those lines. 

And I do think that it is pretty damn important that, once more, Peter basically ends the threat of Mysterio relatively single-handedly. Sure, MJ and Happy helped out a little, but it's very much important to Peter's solo movie that he really ends up fighting every inch of the way to finally get close enough to smash Mysterio in his glass bowl helmet. Hell, he even gets a 'power up' in this movie with him finally getting a handle on his Spider-Sense (or "Peter-Tingles", which is a horrid name and I love it) and weaponizing it in the final corridor fight against Mysterio. It's so goddamn badass. Character-wise, I think this movie really ends up nailing Peter Parker down, building on his history in the MCU and crafting a pretty badass story out of it. 

Mysterio!

Hoo, boy, Jake Gyllenhaal really knocked it out of the park, huh? I know I praise Peter Parker a lot, but Mysterio carries this movie pretty damn well, too. Initially introduced as a mysterious newcomer superhero (and, let's be honest, in these MCU movies new superheroes are a dime a dozen), Mysterio's intricate sci-fi comic book superhero origin story ends up being quickly believed by the established heroes, and he seems to take over Tony Stark as the cool, understanding mentor character to Peter Parker. And turns out he's evil all the while, and he's just using the Elementals to make this crafted identity of "Mysterio" into Tony Stark's replacement, attempting to wrest power all for himself, while getting close to Peter Parker and getting him to hand over EDITH. There are some... flaws in his plans, but the revelation that he quite literally doesn't give a shit about casualties and the movie later showcasing just how the hologram/explosion generation drones work really end up making Mysterio and the twist around his character pretty well done. 

Honestly, I don't think I've ever expected a twist and 'called' it from day one but still am thoroughly enthralled and entertained by it. Gyllenhaal's performance of trying to be the cool big brother to Peter is amazingly done, and the sheer charisma he exudes really ends up making you question if this is an alternate take on Mysterio. After all, it's not the first time the MCU has redesigned or reinvented a character, right? Honestly, it's a pretty great take on the actual misdirection that Mysterio himself employs!

And hoo boy, that reveal in the bar as the fancy trappings of the bar starts to dissolve and Mysterio just goes into a loony dance is just perfect, and his increasing ego and his insistence that "they will see what I want them to see" ends up being a particularly great highlight of the movie. The fact that Quentin was probably watching Peter for a while before this movie to try and get into his head ends up making that utterly splendid confrontation in the warehouse really amazing, and oh boy can we just talk about just how great the visuals in the warehouse confrontation was? From the constantly changing backgrounds from a warehouse to the Eiffel tower to a fake SHIELD base to just an ominous video game corridor, all the while fake Mysterios and fake Spider-Men attack, all the while Peter himself ends up going through different iterations of his costume, while some of his fears like Zombie Iron Man or MJ being thrown off a tower are shown... there's a lot of great visuals in this movie, but the SFX team didn't forget that Peter is technically still just fighting in a warehouse, and I do really love the brief scenes when he punches through what he thinks is Mysterio but instead hits a pillar, and we briefly see said pillar... or when he accidentally brings a crane down... Honestly, these MCU movies have always been visually awesome, but I don't think I've ever had special effects actually WOW me the way the mid-movie Mysterio fight did. 

Anyway, back to Quentin Beck's character. The man is a charlatan, someone who makes use of smoke, mirrors and lies to build up this fake persona around himself while using stolen resources to eliminate the people that gets in his way. And obviously trying to kill schoolchildren is pretty damn evil, but I really do like how the movie ends up emphasizing (but not to our faces) that Beck is essentially the reverse version of Tony Stark. Both Beck and Tony suffered a setback in their lives, but where Tony tries to better himself and fix the sins of his past, all Beck really wants is to grab the power and wealth and influence for himself. Tony is no angel, but at the core of things, even the power plays he makes as Iron Man (during Age of Ultron or Civil War in particular) is driven by a desire to do the good thing and to either preemptively protect the Earth or to prevent another Sokovia. Beck, meanwhile, stages huge catastrophes with high body counts just to make himself look good and put himself on a pedestal. And where Tony is a superhero who reveals his secret identity to the public to operate in transparency, Mysterio ends up making up a fake identity with fake powers to fool everyone else. Hell, even compare Mysterio ranting about how he's so "sorry" that he has to murder-kill Peter Parker, and compare it to the times where Tony Stark was genuinely remorseful and breaks down over his mistakes. Mysterio is so caught up in his own delusions of grandeur that, well, as he states so many times later on in the finale, to him, his version of truth is the truth, and he will twist events to suit his needs, which, well, ends up working very well with both his illusion powers and the final "fuck you" to Spider-Man in the mid-credits scene when he edits out a sequence of events that makes it look like Spider-Man is a terrorist. 

Honestly, even the fact that Mysterio, like Vulture, is another man disgruntled at Tony Stark (and it's pretty unfortunate that the two solo Spider-Man movie villains are connected to Stark in some way), I really do like how they seamlessly integrate this to Spider-Man's own character arc of rising up and proving himself to be his own man, to be a worthy successor to Tony Stark. And I'm not sure if Mysterio is my favourite MCU villain (between Thanos, Vulture and Loki he certainly has a lot of competition), I really do feel like they ended up doing Mysterio justice as both a fake hero and as a flat-out villain. 

Secondary characters!

Not going too much in-depth here, but as I mentioned above, the movie does a far, far better job at managing its large cast compared to Homecoming. Spider-Man and Mysterio get the bulk of the screentime; while Happy, MJ and Nick Fury get a bit less, while everyone else show up enough to be memorable but doesn't take up too much screentime. Nick Fury and his super-spy cell essentially acts as mission control, and Nick (or, well, Talos) is the harsh but well-meaning mentor compared to Mysterio's more... coddling act. Nick does end up feeling slightly incompetent because the plot needs him to be fooled by Mysterio, but I do think that the Mysterio twist itself is handled pretty well, and the post-credits revelation that this isn't exactly the real Nick Fury ends up really fixing that problem for me. Poor Maria Hill gets shafted again, though. Really kinda wish they let her do anything at all.

MJ is... well, she has chemistry with Peter, at least, so at least she's not just a pretty girl that Peter's pining for. The whole Peter-and-MJ storyline is honestly one that we've seen many times in the Raimi movies, but I do like that it doesn't take up that much screentime and it's interlaced pretty well with other comedic beats with the school support cast like Ned and Brad. I'm still not the biggest fan of the MCU's take on MJ herself, but she's just such a sarcastic, sassy girl that at least she's likable on her own. Her figuring out Spider-Man's secret identity is a neat little touch, as is her more hilariously morbid lines. 

Ned is not a character I dislike, or a character that I found annoying. Hell, he's pretty damn hilarious and it's honestly always great to see a prominent supporting Asian character because god damn it we don't have enough of those in the MCU. But this movie pretty neatly just has him be lovesick throughout the entirety of the European trip with his new girlfriend Betty Brandt, and the two of them end up engaging in some of the most hilarious cringe comedy that... well, I could personally do without some of them, but by and by the actors are charming enough and the jokes fly past fast enough that they ended up working. 

Happy Hogan ends up taking up the role of a the supportive parental figure, someone who supports Peter in his superhero career while not actually being in a position to basically fix everything the way Iron Man or Nick Fury could've. Again, that conversation on the airplane was amazingly done, and the fact that Happy was essentially an antagonist in Homecoming is pretty great character development for him. Not much to say here that I haven't said before earlier in the review. Aunt May... she's there. She's supportive. She's likable. I don't think she really does much other than deliver some hilarious one-liners. 

Flash Thompson finally gets rerailed back into an actual bully who idolizes Spider-Man but also calls Peter Parker a "dickwad" literally in the same sentence. Which is great. I was utterly baffled at Homecoming's decision to make him just a science club rival, and while this isn't exactly what I want Flash Thompson to be, he actually feels like an asshole bully here and I appreciate that. There's this interesting subplot both during the scenes when Peter looks at the messages in his friends' phones, as well as the final scene at the airport, that poor poor Flash is just very neglected by his parents and ouch my heart. 

Newcomer Brad Davis (another Asian character, yay!) gets significant screentime as a love rival for Peter, but he doesn't take up that much screentime, and the movie straddles the line on making him just a dude-bro and an actual douche pretty well. The teachers in Peter's class, Mr. Harrington and Mr. Dell, deliver some fun comedic lines, enough to be memorable, but certainly aren't overused.

One final mention is I actually do like that Suit-Lady KAREN was nowhere to be found in this movie. KAREN's whole point in Homecoming was to give Spider-Man another gimmick and to allow himself to sort of... have someone to talk to, which is honestly pretty redundant with the amount of characters around. EDITH, meanwhile, is basically a machine and a plot device that doesn't distract as much as KAREN does. I like that. 

Oh hey, that twist was sure something huh?

Yeah, while Mysetrio being a baddy might be slightly obvious to anyone who knows all about these comic book superheroes, once you look at Mysterio's behaviour and his backstory, the holes really start to pile up. Obviously, there's the whole ridiculous sci-fi story about how the lone survivor of a doomed alternate Earth fighting against extra-terrestrial elementals and avenging his family being a bit too cheesy and ridiculous, but Mysterio is also right that it's the sort of thing that people would accept in the MCU world. 

But the fact that some of the other characters describe him as being a "combination of Iron Man and Thor", how the whole "the elements resemble our myths" "Thor was a myth" thing works in favour of his backstory, and how he initially seems to be using Dr. Strange-esque magic (albeit with green smoke tendrils instead of orange runes) actually is a sly hint that Mysterio is actually modelling himself after the other heroes that people would know about. Hell, even that fishbowl helmet now serves a purpose, because it actually means that Mysterio's SFX crew wouldn't have to convincingly animate Mysterio's facial expressions, and they can just insert in random superhero-y lines. 

Even during some of the fights, some of Mysterio's lines do feel pretty off and stereotypical. Like the "you go left, I go right" or "for my family!" (which the movie itself lampoons to hell and back after the reveal). 

But perhaps the biggest clues to the fact that Mysterio isn't what he claims to be is the lack of.... well, lack of any other heroes that show up. The movie references Doctor Strange a lot, but you would think that even if Strange himself is busy fighting magical monsters or some shit, Wong or some of the magicians would actually notice if elemental monsters start entering Earth. The fact that no other Avengers showed up actually is a neat little tip-off that the Elementals were pretty bogus and are actually just holograms and explosions as opposed to being actual, well, elementals.

Oh hey, those OTHER twists were sure something huh?

Basically, the post-credits scenes this time around are pretty great! The mid-credits scene is basically the extended finale of the movie, setting up Mysterio revealing Spider-Man's secret identity to the world and framing him as a murderer, with the glorious return of J. Jonah Jameson. That's pretty awesome, and it's definitely going to be interesting to see the third MCU Spider-Man movie presumably dealing with the world against Spider-Man, that damn public menace. 

But the actual post-credits scene, with the Nick Fury and Maria Hill we've been following throughout the movie turning out to be Talos and Soren from Captain Marvel... yeah, that has a whole ton of implications, but it's also clears up so much of the questionable things that Nick (or, well "Nick") does in the movie. Sure, it's sort of a cop-out that a movie that so prominently features Samuel L. Jackson ends up not really featuring the real Nick Fury, but I did think that in a movie that's all about a villain that misdirects people and whatnot, the audience ends up being hit with one of the biggest misdirections of all. It's a pretty awesome move, too, and that post-credits scene with a sheepish Talos just trying to deny any faults that he has is hilarious. 

And, oh yeah, real!Nick is in space with a bunch of aliens on a spaceship, presumably founding S.W.O.R.D. from the comics. Pretty cool!

But honestly, there has been a fair amount of hints, once you know what you're looking for, that the "Nick" we follow through Far From Home isn't quite the real Nick Fury. In addition to being a very, very smart move from the writers to not have the cop-out of Nick Fury looking like an easily-fooled sap just to make Spider-Man look good (because I don't buy that the real Nick Fury would be fooled by Quentin's act), through my second viewing I did see a fair amount of neat hints that the writers dropped about the true nature of "Nick":

• He did feel a bit too... try-hard at times to be badass. And during my first viewing, I attributed it to the general comedic tone of the movie, but while the knocking-on-the-door scene was pretty hilarious and makes sense, his final wacky stare-down contest with Happy felt a bit off.
• Comparing Talos-Nick's more harsh reprimand of Peter with Nick Fury's far more patient stance with Tony Stark in Iron Man 2, or the Avengers in The Avengers, the difference between their handling of emotionally vulnerable superheroes can be seen to be pretty different -- the real Nick Fury can and will manipulate the superheroes to get them off their asses, but he's never quite as harsh to their faces as Talos-Nick was here. 
• Both the Captain Marvel and the Kree Easter Eggs are things that either Talos or the real Nick Fury would've said since both characters are involved in the events of Captain Marvel, but considering Talos's history, makes much, much more sense that it'd be more of a Skrull in-joke.
• When Talos-Nick tells Peter about Beck, he says "he's from Earth. Just not yours." Note that he says "yours", not "ours". 
• It also makes Talos-Nick's apparently quick acceptance of Mysterio's "elementals born in the heart of a black hole" and dimension-hopping origin story a lot more plausible, considering Talos, being a space warrior, is far more accustomed to these sort of insanity if the other cosmic MCU movies are anything to go by. 

So, yeah, before we go straight into listing Easter Eggs... Far From Home might honestly be one of my all-time favourite MCU movies. I don't really do like doing actual ordered lists, but my favourite MCU movies easily has Winter Soldier, Civil War, Ragnarok, Avengers and the two Thanos saga movies on it... and now Far From Home has very, very easily snuck onto their ranks. I like it that much. 

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• Mysterio's whole claim about there being a multiverse and that the MCU universe is Earth-616, is, of course, a huge reference to the multiverse in the actual Marvel comics. 616 is actually the prime Marvel comics Earth, while the MCU is actually Earth-19999. While it all ends up being actually part of Mysterio's cover story, the multiverse clearly exists in the MCU, briefly glimpsed (if not mentioned) in Doctor Strange and Ant-Man, implied in Avengers: Endgame via alternate timelines, and outright explored in the Agents of SHIELD TV shows. 
• Mysterio in the comics is actually a dimension hopper at one point, moving from Earth-616 ('prime' Marvel universe) to Earth-1610 (the Ultimate comics). 
• In the very first appearance of Mysterio in the comics, he did briefly set himself up as a hero after framing Spider-Man for a robbery. 
• After the water elemental's attack on Venice, Flash reads a Buzzfeed story about how the water elemental was a crewman named Morris Bench who obtained "hydro powers" from a science experiment, which describes the comic-book origin story of Spider-Man's villain Hydro-Man. The elementals were actually marketed in secondary material as classic Spider-Man enemies Sandman, Hydro-Man and the much more obscure Molten Man. 
• Intentionally a nod to this misdirection is the prominent showcase of certain cars with certain plates that are prominently featured in the trailers as well:
• A boat in Venice during the water elemental's initial attack has the registration number ASM-212, which is a reference to Amazing Spider-Man #212, Hydro-Man's debut issue.
• A car in the background of the earth elemental's attack has a license plate with 463 on it, a reference to Amazing Spider-Man #463, Sandman's debut issue. 
• A car during the fire elemental's attack has the plate number 2865-SEP, a combined reference of the issue that Molten Man debuts in (Amazing Spider-Man #28) and the publication date of that issue (September '65). 
• In the background of Peter and Happy's arguments about ghosting Nick Fury, a poster in the background for a wrestler called "Crusher Hogan" could be glimpsed, a reference to the wrestler that Spider-Man battles in his origin story in the comics. 
• A hotel in Venice has "Hotel DeMatteis" after longtime Spider-Man writer J.M. DeMatteis.
• The brief bait-and-switch bit of Spider-Man seemingly giving a huge talk about his secret identity before it ending up just being a conversation between him, May and Happy is a likely homage to both the cinematic identity reveal that Tony did in Iron Man, as well as Peter Parker's own identity reveal in the comic-book version of Civil War. 
• Speaking of Agents of SHIELD, Nick Fury is relaxing in a "Tahiti" simulation in the stinger, which, of course, Agents of SHIELD watchers will know is a very, very important part of Phil Coulson's backstory. 
• Dimitri Smerdyakov is actually the secret identity of one of Spider-Man's enemies, the Chameleon!
• J.K. Simmons famously played J. Jonah Jameson in the original Sam Raimi Spider-Man trilogy, and is the first time in any superhero live-action material that an actor has reprised his role post-reboot.
• Peter Parker's birthday on his passport (in a trailer-exclusive scene) is August 10, which is the publication date of Spider-Man's first appearance in Amazing Fantasy #15. 
• The idea of Skrulls shape-shifting and infiltrating human culture is, of course, a reference to Secret Invasion, although Talos and Soren, in a twist, are actually friendly Skrulls that are working alongside the people they impersonate. 
• Nick Fury does canonically own a surfboard and can surf:
• 

Specific MCU continuity nods:

• Iron Man, Captain America, Black Widow and the Vision's deaths throughout the Thanos movies are memorialized and are apparently common knowledge. The Snap and the events surrounding it are also common knowledge. 
• Peter briefly brings up Captain Marvel, Doctor Strange and Thor as other heroes that Fury could've called. Aunt May also briefly confuses Mysterio for Doctor Strange (with Peter going through a brief Mister/Doctor mix-up that poor Strange keeps getting into), while Brad notes that Mysterio looks like a mash-up between Thor and Iron Man. Happy tries and fails to ape Captain America's throwing a shield. 
• The BARF therapy machine is seen briefly in Captain America: Civil War, and a brief scene from that movie is showcased briefly with Jake Gyllenhaal edited into the background. Hell, even the effects of Mysterio's illusions are taken straight from those holograms!
• Peter Billingsley's character William is the man who was shouted at by Obadiah Stane in the famous, memetic "Tony Stark built this in a cave with a box of scraps" scene from the original Iron Man, and, again, archival footage of that scene is shown. 
• Peter making his new suit is a direct reference to Tony making the red-and-gold Mark III armor in the original Iron Man, with Happy even setting up AC/DC's Back in Black, a song featured prominently in both Iron Man and Iron Man 2 -- Tony himself seems to be a huge, huge fan of AC/DC in general in these movies.
• Erik Selvig, Thor's scientist friend who has been MIA since Avengers: Age of Ultron, is apparently the author of one of the documentaries among the movies that Peter flips through on the plane. Other documentaries reference Wakanda and Hydra. 
• Happy recalls a prior trip to a hotel in Germany, which seems to be when he ferried Peter to participate during the events of Captain America: Civil War.
• MJ and Peter briefly recalls the events of Spider-Man: Homecoming, where Peter did disappear with the excuse of stomach pain. 
• Kree sleeper cells are briefly mentioned by "Nick" to "Maria" during a scene. Both Nick Fury and Talos have had prior encounters with the Kree.
• The ending of the movie is sort of a homage to the ending of Homecoming, with a truncated "what the f-" when Peter's identity is uncovered by someone else. Obviously, Far From Home's ending is a lot, lot more disastrous for our friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man.