What Spider-Man: Brand New Day Is Really About

5 min readWho are we without the people who love us? The cheers of an adoring public ring hollow without the ones we’ve allowed to see us without our masks. At the end of 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home, Marvel’s most prized superhero wiped all traces of Peter Parker to prevent reality’s collapse. His beloved Aunt May is dead, and his closest friends—including his girlfriend—no longer recognize him. He moves into a dingy apartment, sews a new costume by hand, and swings the New York City skyline amid a cold, lonesome, but picturesque winter. The sun doesn’t have to shine for a brand new day to begin.Nearly five years later, that new start is here in the four-quel, Spider-Man: Brand New Day from Destin Daniel Cretton and in theaters July 31. At last, Tom Holland’s ultimate protagonist grows beyond his YA trappings for a mature, measured, but quintessential genre outing about a hero who gave up everything and now hopes to salvage whatever might remain. It is, no hyperbole, one of the best live-action Spider-Man films since the heyday of Sam Raimi and Tobey Maguire. No, it isn’t better than Spider-Man 2. But it comes close.Kinetic and more weighted than the genial but plastic Jon Watts trilogy, Spider-Man: Brand New Day swings to new heights with a cinematic avenger who’s gone to the multiverse and back, while keeping its protagonist’s sticky feet relatively down to Earth. Relative, because the movie still sports an ensemble made up of the Hulk (played again by Mark Ruffalo, lashing out because Universal will never let him have his own movie), the Punisher (Jon Bernthal, whose throat-slitting mean streak from his Netflix show is neutered for PG-13), Severance’s Tramell Tillman as yet another amoral mid-level manger, and Stranger Things’s Sadie Sink as a villain whose identity is the worst-kept secret since the last time a Spider-Man sequel hid surprises. There are also ninjas from Daredevil, likely because they make for good toys on Target shelves.“Back to basics” is the promise of Brand New Day, but in the grand tradition of MCU sequels, there are caveats. As penned by Marvel Studios vets Erik Sommers and Chris McKenna, Brand New Day comes loaded and feels burdened by an assumption you’ve been keeping up with Marvel still, that you’ve not only seen all the Spider-Mans but also, like, Thunderbolts. It’s a contradictory ask for audiences to see Spider-Man with fresh eyes but to keenly remember the trivial weaving of an overwritten saga. It’s darkly poetic that Spider-Man himself spends much of the movie plagued by an internal civil war waged in his bloodstream, with one side of himself—his mutating “arachnid” side—threatening to drown out the part that’s still human.Jay MaidmentTom Holland, who also stars in this year’s big summer hit The Odyssey, returns as Spider-Man in his fourth solo outing in the Marvel Cinematic Universe with Spider-Man: Brand New Day.At the top of Brand New Day, we catch up with Holland’s Peter, now on his own in an asbestos-smogged apartment. As beloved as Spider-Man is to New Yorkers—we’re talking Mamdani levels of enthusiasm—Peter Parker is a social hermit who is totally married to his great responsibilities as a friendly neighborhood superhero. (What does he do to pay rent, anyway?) He’s so obsessed with his superhero duties that even the cops he works with, like The Bear’s Liza Colón-Zayas as Spidey’s analogue to Batman’s Jim Gordon, insist he go out and live a little.After years of Insta-stalking his friends, Ned (Jacob Batalon) and past flame MJ (Zendaya) graduate and return to NYC. Unfortunately, Peter’s newest nemesis is an invisible menace (for most of the first act, anyway) who can hijack people’s bodies. That’s how they learn Peter’s secret identity—and whom, exactly, he wants to keep safe. Behold, the main conflict: How much can Spider-Man protect the last living people he cares about without letting them know his true identity?There aren’t headache-inducing multiverse plots here, thank God, just the basic concern for other people’s well-being at the sacrifice of one’s own.That’s a boilerplate plot you can find in just about any long box of back issues. (It was also the first season of The Flash, now that I recall.) But under Cretton’s direction, Brand New Day really strips Spider-Man to the bare essentials to find what new avenues might open. Nowhere is that more felt than in the aforementioned body-hopping villain, a simple special effect achieved with attentive camera movement and a parade of on-camera extras snapping their bodies. There aren’t headache-inducing multiverse plots here, thank God, just the basic concern for other people’s well-being at the expense of one’s own.But a restart for Spider-Man doesn’t prevent an old spider from knowing new tricks. Cretton, who came up through understated pictures like Short Term 12 and Just Mercy, seems comfortable in his role as a blockbuster steward as much as Tom Holland seems at ease in spandex. It was never a question of whether Cretton could make a bunch of action figures feel like people; his oeuvre of humane dramas speaks to that specific strength. (It may also explain why Marvel originally tapped him for The Kang Dynasty, before that all fell apart.) But his focused eye and ear for rhythm were only glimpsed in the compulsively rewatchable Shang-Chi, which jolted the pandemic era of the MCU with inspired wuxia-style action.Through Brand New Day, Cretton finds new angles, literally, in how Spidey sees New York: from web-slinging skyscrapers to his acrobatic brawls against muggers, ninjas, and bad guys in mechanized suits. It’s all one breathtaking new point of view for a superhero whose perspective we thought was figured out, in a city long ago mapped out by decades of cinema. (Comparisons to the Insomniac games are apt; there were honest-to-goodness times I reminded myself I wasn’t holding a PlayStation controller.) Though the MCU still drives me nuts with its fetish for overcast skies, Cretton’s verve brings style to a Marvel sub-series that’s now four movies deep, and retroactively puts said movies to shame for their vanilla flavoring.Jay MaidmentA few Marvel-ous allies join Spider-Man in Brand New Day, like Jon Bernthal’s gritty antihero: The Punisher.But following up an unintelligible spectacle like No Way Home, a movie engineered for super-stans to scream for TikTok, means a “soft reboot” is about the only logical strategy this franchise could play until Avengers: Doomsday. (Unless there’s still any talk of a Venom-verse crossover—talk about shooting webs.) It isn’t a wholly original premise to begin with; the title is sourced from a very unpopular Amazing Spider-Man storyline where Peter Parker resumes his life after the demon Mephisto scrubbed all memory of his unmasking in Civil War. (The comic, not the Captain America sequel from a decade ago, or what will happen after the midterms in November.) It’s a gambit for Marvel that pays off well, but it’s difficult to square that it took this long and this many sequels for the MCU’s Spider-Man to actually feel at home. And it bodes ill for what else is left. Thankfully, Spidey has some amazing friends he can count on to save his ass. May we all be so lucky.Though uncertainty looms for Spider-Man, Brand New Day is precisely the reorientation this franchise needs to make the Marvel Cinematic Universe still worth exploring. That Spidey’s New York looks an awful lot like the New York where I saw this movie—which a month ago reveled in shared euphoria over the Knicks championship—further sells Stan Lee’s old promise about Marvel reflecting the world outside the window. Marvel has spent the last decade and a half blowing up the multiverse, but Brand New Day makes a moving case that the people who love us, and really know us, are the only universe we’ll ever need.