A short while into my screening of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, I was struck by a realization: These are, by far, the best web-slinging sequences I’ve ever seen. Even looking past the montage of Easter Eggs (like a cheer-worthy Amazing Fantasy #15 cover homage), we’re feeling the sensation of soaring with Spidey, cutting thickly through the atmosphere as the wind whips by – and suddenly, every other version of this feels kind of slick and weightless in comparison.
We’ve been watching Spider-Man dramatically swinging through New York City on the big screen since 2002, and yet – and yet – with his latest outing, somehow they’ve managed to raise the bar in a way I couldn’t have anticipated.
And that sense of reinvention extends to this film as a whole.
If the first thee MCU Spider-Man movies directed by John Watts represent a trilogy, then the appropriately titled Brand New Day, directed by Destin Daniel Cretton (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings), represents the first chapter of what comes next.
Spidey’s last outing, No Way Home, is a difficult one to top – with a multiverse story tapping Spider-Men past and present, it was a major fan favorite and representative of the Marvel machine at its biggest and most bombastic. Rather than try to match that energy and go bigger, Brand New Day opts instead to dig deeper.
One of the major criticisms of Spidey’s MCU story so far – especially by comics fans – is that things have been uncharacteristically serendipitous for a young Peter Parker (Tom Holland). We meet him as a protege to billionaire Tony Stark, and soon he’s fighting alongside the Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy, and getting sucked into a multiversal misadventure. We missed the hardscrabble “friendly neighborhood” version of this Spider-Man.
Brand New Day manages to scale back the world-saving stakes with a back to basics approach, with an unbalanced Peter facing a mysterious new threat while trying to reconcile with the devastating loss of being forgotten by his friends Ned (Jacob Batalon) and MJ (Zandaya) – the result of the events of No Way Home, in which Doctor Strange cast a spell to fix a rift in the multiverse, at the cost of erasing all knowledge of Peter Parker from the world.
It’s even an origin story of sorts, not in a narrative sense, but in its approach. Still evolving, Peter finds his body is mutating, aggressively driving him deeper into the “Spider” part of Spider-Man. Learning to adapt to his biological changes and increasingly dominant arachnid DNA is reminiscent to watching Peter discovering his powers in 2002’s original Spider-Man.
Add to this a terrific antagonist – one of the most compelling villain arcs of the MCU so far – and supporting turns from fun characters like Punisher and Hulk, and this is is a wonderfully entertaining and refreshingly different kind of Spider-Man movie that feels less like a CGI spectacle and more like an issue of Marvel Team-Up.
At the end of the day, Brand New Day is an invigorating experience and one of the better films in Spidey’s mostly-excellent film canon, realigning this version of the character to a more apt representation of his core comic book values.
A/V Out
