[84/100] The stock line among showrunners on television these days is that they conceived of a given season of television as “a ten-hour movie.” Spider-Man: Brand New Day feels like the reverse: an entire season of television squished into a two-and-a-half hour frame.
That's another way of saying it’s ambitious. Director Destin Daniel Cretton (who also helmed Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings tries to cover a lot of ground here. There is the fallout from the events of No Way Home and its Peter-erasing spell. There are stutter-stepped attempts for Peter to reconnect with Ned and MJ. There is Peter grappling with both his crime-fighting isolation and an evolution in his spider-DNA manifesting itself. There is a fake out villain waging a war on Damage Control and taunting Peter with her possessed puppet. There is the real villain putting on a genteel smile but turning anything different into a weapon. There is bouncing Spidey off of Punisher, Hulk, Scorpion, and any number of other foes and allies along the way. And that's just the big stuff.
Most of it’s good! Or at least interesting! But little of it has time to really breathe and have the full impact and much of it doesn’t quite fit together. You can almost see the episodic format that Cretton and his collaborators deployed brilliantly in Wonder Man. Plenty of these ideas and scenes work on their own terms, and share a decent enough connection to a central theme to serve a grander vision. But narratively, many of the moments feel spackled together, and on the whole, the film suffers from a sense of being overly busy and packed in, in a way that leaves the movie feeling like a little less than the sum of its parts. No Way Home arguably bit off a lot as well, and yet came out with a better sense of balance than its sequel.
The result is that Brand New Day is a film with a strong foundation and some great concepts that also feels like too much and not enough at the same time. Its most admirable qualities are that it takes the events of the last movie seriously and that it uses the larger-than-life conceit to explore the struggles of difference and young adulthood in an earnest way, and however off-balance the execution, the effort is a noble one.
For the former, it would be easy to brush off Dr. Strange’s spell that erased Peter from the world’s memory at the end of No Way Home as something more symbolic than logical (or which cleared the decks in case Disney and Sony couldn't come to terms again). Instead, Brand New Day admirably leans into the hardship of what it would be like to be forgotten by those you care about most, to have your connections with anyone and everyone you know and love erased.
To that end, the fourth entry in Tom Holland’s series of spider flicks is easily the darkest of the lot. While Spidey takes his licks in all the prior films, here he is constantly struggling both physically and mentally. The changes his body goes through from the arachnid parts of his genome are not quite to Cronenberg levels of body horror, but lean into a sense of palpable physical disruption that serves the film’s ends.
More significant than that are the psychological difficulties Peter grapples with in the throes of his deliberate isolation, giving him no outlets and no help in either his crime-fighting, his personal woes, or his downtime. Holland sells those moments well, with a script that sacrifices some of Peter’s happy-go-lucky teenage sprightliness for a more haunted twenty-something who is Going Through Some Shit Right Now™. It would be easy for these moments to come off cheesy or over-the-top, but Holland and the film sell them well.
Along the way, there's some interesting thematic material. Beyond exploring the transition into adulthood and entry into the real world, a challenge that's conveyed well through the heightened metaphor of Spider-Man’s crusade, the wrinkle of his physical transition and its attendant adjustments and challenge speaks to a broader sense of difference.
You can read Peter’s overstimulated senses and overloaded emotions as a metaphor for neurodivergence or, as the presence of an X-Man suggests, the differences of any stripe that can leave people feeling overwhelmed and isolated. The film plays with those ideas well, particularly in how it contrasts him with his allies and enemies. To be frank, I wish we had more of it.
Peter worrying about “the monster in him” and seeking guidance from none other than Bruce Banner is a good beat, one that feels glancing given given the film’s time constraints. We get plenty more of Punisher, and he and Frank Castle have a surprisingly great dynamic given the difference in tones of their characters. Jon Bernthal moderates his signature character expertly, and no one is a better spokesperson for the idea of holding onto those close to you and his own isolation not being something to emulate, even if I wish we got more than one conversation that touched on that point.
Most of all, the film compares and contrasts Peter and Jean, and there's a lot there. The film has to build a lot of scaffolding to accommodate Jean’s backstory and its third act villain switch, and much of it feels a bit tedious. If there were more time to dig into her character than just a few speeches and one brief but heartbreaking vignette, it seems like there's depth to accommodate it. But there's unexpected common ground between the two iconic characters: in loss, in difference, and in the need for support.
The most powerful choice in the film sees Peter lending Jean the kind of wisdom and love he still holds onto from his Aunt May, and showing the conviction behind the sentiment by taking a bullet for her. It’s a powerful, emotional conclusion to the story (with shades of the extraordinary ending to Thunderbolts), and one I wish we had more time and space to build too so that it would have more meaning.
As a pure superhero flick, Brand New Day is fine. We’ve seen Spidey swing around New York City through countless live action films at this point, so there's not much new in the toolbox. But Cretton and company do find a few novel approaches to depicting the flips and thwips, with a handful of particularly good POV shots from Peter’s perspective that help put you in the web-slinger’s shoes as he’s going through all this. Plus, with his adjustment to organic web-shooters, Peter’s powers have never seemed more gross (complementary).
In terms of action, the visuals are the standard cape flick block and tackle, bolstered by character, but not otherwise terribly gripping on their own terms. The mid-movie fight at Damage Control has some highlights, with a three-way dance between Spidey, Hulk, and Punisher that could be a comic book splash page. And the finest feature of the film’s action scenes is Jean’s ability to have her possession leap from person to person, creating some unique chase concepts, a troubling mechanism that sells her as a threat, and a neat visual shorthand that's distinct from anything we’ve seen before.
Yet, what really stands out in Brand New Day, and the element I wish we got more time to explore, even in a movie clearly concerned with it, is Peter’s hesitant attempts to keep up with MJ and Ned. The film plays in the same spaces as no less a film than Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and while not as good, is similarly willing to explore the existential awkwardness and hurt of the high concept memory loss. The rueful confrontation with MJ, the warm reunion of the original group, the way that Peter’s wants for his old connections are used against him, are the most compelling elements of this film, and the most significant hangover from the last one. When the film goes there, it finds a gear and level of emotional maturity about such a strange, sci-fi concept that's stunning.
It just has to balance that against the blockbuster fights du jour, and introducing an X-Men, and smashing Peter against several more MCU allies, and dealing with his physical transformation, and dropping in hilarious cameos from Yelena (who could relate to Spidey’s crisis here!), and a quasi mentor on the force who he learns to open up to, and twists about who’s a friend and who’s a foe, and random wire fu ninja fights, and so much other narrative heavy machinery that gets jury-rigged together for a film that feels more overstuffed than streamlined.
The film is already making too much at the box office for Disney and Sony to dare subject Tom Holland to the indignities of a humble streaming show. And there are plenty of longform Spider-Man stories on television in animated form. But watching Brand New Day, I was struck by how many worthy ideas and interesting character moments and compelling concepts there were, and also by how much I wished we didn’t have to cram them altogether into a single-sitting frame, where unlike Spider-Man himself here, none of them quite have enough room to grow.
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