Spider-Man: Brand New Day Review
One of Marvel’s biggest names is back, and while not everything it tries works, it finds itself on favourable webbing.
Peter Parker (Tom Holland) lives alone, forgotten by everybody he knows and loves after the events of No Way Home. He goes about his life as a fulltime Spiderman, fighting crime. But when a new threat emerges, one only he can sense and see, he finds himself in an increasingly dangerous battle to save not just himself, but the friends who no longer remember him. On top of that, the mounting pressure triggers a dangerous physical change in him, and his powers start to shift and change.
Brand New Day is the fourth film in the Holland-led franchise iteration (excluding other film appearances and Avengers-esque things). And the good thing about this film is that it manages to find new angles and depths in a franchise that could have otherwise felt tired. Holland’s Spiderman feels almost grown up now, certainly more so than the previous films, and charting his character's personal growth really hits home with some of the loneliness and heartbreak this character goes through in the film.
The highlight of the film is the action. Destin Daniel Cretton really does fantastic work with the action set pieces - with cool web-slinging sequences, amazing slow motion frames, and some brutal moments when Peter goes full Spider. Couple that with some fun powers on display from other characters knocking about, and its a film that hits the gas when the fighting starts.
Then there are some lovely quieter moments. This is a story that builds off Peter’s decision to make everyone forget him, and it does a great job of interrogating all of that pain and loneliness that he has inflicted on himself. The MJ and Peter throughline is strong, and Zendaya is fantastic. Some of the scenes are brutal, and you can feel Peter’s breaking heart shattering in his Spider chest. Holland is at his absolute best here, and the pair really earn the emotion.
At the same time, this is a very crowded film. There are so many plotlines, so many threads picked up and dropped. The villain feels like a bit of an X-Men shoehorn, and the body horror elements of Peter upping his arachnid percentage never really goes anywhere. It’s all a bit muddled at times, and one wonders whether, had they felt less like building up the X-Men and more like diving deeper into interrogating Peter’s changes and MJ forgetting him, would we have had a less exciting, but more emotionally engaging film?
But we’ll never really know. What we do know is that this is a film that shrugs off a lot of the MCUs recent failures, and continues to deliver on one of their marquee heroes in ways that make you keen to see more of Holland’s Spiderman.
