Spider-Man: Brand New Day doesn’t live up to the promise of resetting the MCU, despite some interesting ideas and great performances from Tom Holland and Zendaya.
The ‘Brand New Day’ subtitle of this instalment of Spider-Man promises change. Change to the messy Marvel storytelling formula. Change to the usual Peter Parker and Spider-Man narrative. Hell, just change in general, because the wider MCU is so narratively tangled that it’s practically begging for a much-needed reset. But as this movie likes to keep reminding us, Spider-Man can’t do this alone despite his best efforts.
It’s been a few years since Peter Parker (Tom Holland) wiped himself from the world’s collective consciousness. Burying himself in his work isn’t going to brush away everyone’s memory cobwebs, but he is still pining for his beloved MJ (Zendaya). Pining for any semblance of human connection. Pining, quite unashamedly, for the best parts of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2, and for some inexplicable reason, The Amazing Spider-Man 2.
At least New York City absolutely loves Spider-Man. Even Mamdani couldn’t hold a candle to ol’ Spidey, but public affection does not equate to human connection. Okay, Peter does have a Tom and Jerry-esque thing going on with Frank Castle (Jon Bernthal), but a loose-cannon vigilante isn’t exactly best friend material in the same vein as Ned (Jacob Batalon). So Peter throws himself into work, which is depicted in mind-numbing fashion by director Destin Daniel Cretton, who is seemingly ticking off Marvel’s to-do list. Gratuitous cameos? Check. Overly glossy CGI fight scenes? Check. Quips? Hoo boy, check.
That’s not to say that Brand New Day isn’t watchable. It is indeed quite entertaining, as nothing shuts your brain off quicker than Spidey doing acrobatic action scenes, like the first-person web-swinging scenes that were aped from The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (which were one of the few parts that worked in that movie). But I expect more from a Spider-Man movie because it’s proven to be possible.
The moments where Brand New Day is at its most balanced and functional are where Peter is not doing any Spider-Man stuff at all. When he’s on Instagram watching his two closest friends live their best lives or shopping by himself, those are some of the movie’s most emotionally truthful moments because they touch upon the very real issue of loneliness and isolation. For a few fleeting moments, Cretton makes the most of his Marvel shackles and manages to push Brand New Day within the vicinity of Spider-Man 2 by simply having Peter and MJ talk in fleeting yet meaningful ways.
Zendaya and Holland are only together briefly, but the raw emotion over past actions and subsequent consequences is immediately felt. It helps that they’re happily married, of course, but their moments together showcase their ability to command the screen. It’s why Zendaya can be convincingly haunting in The Odyssey while being hilarious in The Drama. It’s why Holland works as Telemachus. Both are capable of doing a lot with very little; her channeling years of magic-induced amnesia, him frantically web-slinging between self-pity, loneliness, and yearning.
Brand New Day does also capture the pure essence of Spider-Man as a character in that his Ls are greater than his Ws. But there’s never any excitement over whether Peter can overcome this latest struggle because the plot telegraphs what the next beat is faster than the character’s Spider-Sense. With no less than four different story and thematic threads to juggle, Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers’ script is as overstuffed and tonally messy as Spider-Man 3. There’s no room for Peter to have any actual agency or introspection. Any change — physical or emotional — feels like we’re led there on rails rather than, ahem, organically.
I get that Raimi’s 2004 masterpiece remains Marvel’s North Star for what makes Peter Parker a fascinating hero. But we’ve seen him struggle with his powers before. It was great watching Tobey Maguire trying and failing to shoot his webs. It’s less interesting to see that same shot replicated with Holland, but with crappier lighting. At least there’s a somewhat interesting idea by having Holland’s Peter react to his bodily changes with disgust (clearly a clunky metaphor about his dissatisfaction with life) in contrast to Maguire’s Peter’s gleeful excitement.
What’s incredibly frustrating is how the script requires Peter to be incredibly stupid or to embark on seemingly random side quests for the plot to move forward. When the big third act arrives, it all feels forcibly contrived in the usual Marvel way rather than anything revelatory. If those six extra months to finesse the script resulted in clunky storytelling like this, I shudder to think of what Brand New Day would’ve been like had Marvel pushed on as originally planned.
By the time we get to the end of Brand New Day after a 145-minute journey, very little has shifted in the world of Peter Parker and in the wider universe, which begs the question of where exactly Spider-Man fits into the MCU at this point in time. He is in almost the same place, literally and emotionally, which further solidifies his solo movies as little more than setting up future movie arcs. At least he has organic web shooters in his arsenal whenever he next appears, whether it’s in Avengers: Doomsday or something else.
Try as Marvel, Destin Daniel Cretton, and Tom Holland might, we’re shown once again that the MCU is a beast that refuses to change. Just as we get something interesting to sink our teeth into, Marvel falls back into its worst impulses by refusing to let Peter Parker grow in any purposeful way that isn’t laying down more track. Spider-Man: Brand New Day is nothing more than a broken promise at best and a cosmic joke at its absolute worst.
