‘SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY’ Lets the Spider Eat the Man

With new powers come new responsibilities in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, the first installment in Tom Holland’s web-slinging series not directed by Jon Watts or saddled with the word “Home” in its title. Picking up after Peter Parker willingly sacrificed his identity and everyone’s memory of him to save the world, this fourth Spidey-centered MCU outing is most interested in what happens after the heroic gesture, when Peter no longer has anyone to come home to. The widening divide between Peter Parker and Spider-Man becomes the movie’s real battlefield, with one identity slowly devouring the other. Although the bar has been impractically low since Avengers: Endgame, the Spider-Man brand remains the MCU’s sturdiest tentpole, and this is the best thing the studio has delivered since, well, the last Spider-Man sequel.

Filling in the gaps since we last saw him, the film opens with a montage of Spider-Man putting Scorpion (Michael Mando) behind bars, fending off the red-clad ninjas of the Hand, and generally stuffing the jail cells of the Department of Damage Control. Years pass, but Peter’s solitude only deepens. Ned and MJ have forgotten him entirely, Aunt May is dead, and whatever personal life he once had has entirely disappeared. When Peter isn’t Spider-Man, he isn’t much of anything really. He patrols, fights crime, and watches Ned and MJ live through their college years at MIT via Instagram Stories, a particularly modern form of emotional sadomachism. In making the world forget Peter Parker, he has started to forget Peter Parker too.

Spider-Man is no longer the other half of Peter’s life. He is Peter’s life. That becomes increasingly literal as his arachnid DNA begins to mutate, heightening his senses, producing organic webbing, and pushing him toward something more spider than man. Despite his growing abilities, he doesn’t like that sense of letting go. Every heightened sense and fresh strand of stringy webbing feels like further evidence that he is moving away from the kid MJ loved and Aunt May raised. The added strength also comes with diminishing control, leaving the “friendly neighborhood” hero capable of hurting people even when he is trying to protect them. The spider, it seems, is consuming the man.

That internal crisis finds an effective external mirror in a new enemy capable of taking control of others. The villain can seize control of almost anyone except Peter. Peter, increasingly, cannot say the same. Brand New Day is about the tectonic devastation of change and the hard truth that some transformations cannot be reversed. That some scars entirely reframe who you are. Peter cannot turn back time, reconstruct the life he sacrificed, or indefinitely suppress the more powerful version of himself forcing its way to the surface. What began as a heroic act of erasing himself from everyone else’s life has gradually become a form of self-erasure.

Bruce Banner and Frank Castle offer Peter two very different warnings about what happens when trauma overwhelms the person carrying it. Keeping track of Banner and the Hulk’s “relationship” over the course of the series is like keeping up with your most dramatic on-again-off-again friend couple, but the important thing here is that Bruce still does not have full control. His latest attempt to contain the Hulk only creates a more volatile eruption, his first in years. Banner represses his monster until his form is bigger, nastier, and angrier than he’s been in years. Castle meanwhile has made being a monster his full-time job. Peter remains caught somewhere between them, afraid that either path could become his own.

Director Destin Daniel Cretton, who previously helmed Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, gives the action welcome specificity. Cretton understands that Spider-Man fighting the Hulk should be fun as hell, and it is, fully embracing the differences in their statures and abilities rather than reducing them to two rubbery super-people trading identical punches. A confrontation with the Hand has a welcome wuxia snap, while several first-person web-slinging passages feel genuinely windy and exhilarating. Just as importantly, you always know where Spider-Man is, where he is going, and which ordinary New Yorkers remain in danger. Brand New Day remembers that he is supposed to save actual people, not just punch another supersomething in an empty digital environment.

The visual effects do not always keep pace with Cretton’s choreography though. I saw the film on a massive Dolby screen, where some weaker compositing and less convincing digital doubles looked bizarrely unfinished, though many of the larger sequences look pretty dang good. The shabby moments are not constant, but they are glaring enough to stick out against action otherwise designed with real thought and clarity. Michael Giacchino’s score fares better throughout, lending the quieter scenes of loneliness and internal transformation genuine emotional weight without drowning Peter’s grief in obligatory superhero bombast. Though few will be humming this theme the way they likely can instantly conjure up Danny Elfman’s, at least you’ll remember that there was actual music playing (a rarity for the MCU.)

If it seems like I’m being overtly coy about certain details from the film, that’s because if I even suggest getting into any details that might be remotely considered spoilery, Sony and Disney will send actual Jon Bernthal to put an actual bullet between my actual eyes. That means I can’t say much about Sadie Sink’s mysterious character, despite the entire internet being ablaze with rumors about who she plays. What I can say is that Sink brings an unnerving force to the movie and makes a lasting impression without feeling like another piece of disposable franchise setup. For his part, Holland remains quite well suited to the role. He slips easily back into Peter’s familiar wisecracking, shrug-it-off New York kid attitude while carrying the greater loneliness of someone who barely exists outside the suit. Holland handles that shift well, delivering some of his strongest work in the role.

One final bit of housekeeping: there is technically an end-credit scene, but it may be the smallest tease the MCU has ever produced and is not worth the wait. It is not even live action. Happily head for the exit without worrying that you have missed the next Infinity Stone, secret Avenger, multiversal incursion, or whatever other piece of homework Marvel might ordinarily assign.

That being said, this is still a largely effective piece of superhero filmmaking. Finally. Brand New Day stops short of greatness, but it clears the more important bar of reminding audiences why Spider-Man movies and supes in general can still work in the first place. Peter’s sacrifice at the end of No Way Home was not a clean reset. It was an amputation. This movie examines what grows back, what mutates in the absence, and whether Peter Parker can survive if Spider-Man becomes the only part of him the world still recognizes. Much of Marvel’s larger flagship may still be sinking like a stone, but this corner of the MCU remains worthwhile. Bring on Doomsday, I guess.

CONCLUSION: ‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’ toys with the weight of self-erasure as Peter Parker disappears wholly into Spider-Man in this third sequel that still manages to remind audiences why (occasionally) superhero movies can still work. It’s the best Marvel entry in some time.