Spider-Man: Brand New Day – Spoiler Free Review

After two decades of cinematic storytelling, one would think that Spider-Man’s time on the big screen would have begun to grow stale. At least, that’s how I began to feel during the first twenty-five minutes of Spider-Man: Brand New Day. While visually brilliant and full of a fun energy, the film opens with a sense of aimless familiarity that was hard to shake, rushing through a greatest-hits reel of the character with choppy editing. But, like all good films, it snaps into focus the moment its emotional core reveals itself, leading to one of the best Spider-Man films since Sam Raimi’s time with the character.

Steeped in a love for not just the character but his strangest eras of publication, I was floored by the cinematic weight of director Daniel Destin Cretton’s vision for Spider-Man was given how much its plot and vibes pulled from smaller Spider-Man stories, such as those written by Gerry Conway, JM DeMatties and Peter David in the pages of Spectacular Spider-Man. The team did a wonderful job balancing the operatic melodrama of a young man staring into the void of loneliness with that of a superhero standing at the apex of success.

That opening salvo, full of sugary Spider-Man adventure, is a lie that hides Peter’s pain, which grows more potent as his delusions of heroism grow sour with each passing frame. There’s a brilliant command of character from start to finish, with the creative team utilizing every tool in the filmmaking toolbox to drag the viewer into a heartfelt tale that explores the emotional burden of characters hiding the responsibility of their humanity behind the powers they wield.

This is a film that wows with its spectacle. It’s a visual feast, save for the occasional CGI blemish, utilizing color and lighting in ways I thought impossible for a film crafted within the great big Marvel machine. Every action scene is to die for, thrilling in its rhythmic choreography and sweeping camerawork, but even amid all of that, the film remains grounded in its character writing, making every burst of adrenaline as emotionally engaging as it is visually exhilarating. All of the big trailer fights, even those that initially seemed designed to please fans first and serve the themes second, ultimately exist in service of the greater narrative. Is it beyond exciting to live in a world where Spider-Man, the Hulk, and the Punisher share a major fight scene full of dynamite cinematography? Of course. But what makes it special is how much those characters actually mean to the themes of the movie, and how they serve to showcase the dangers of isolation.

That kind of character-focused writing is the special sauce of Spider-Man: Brand New Day. The film is driven by Tom Holland delivering a career-best performance as Peter Parker, embodying the character’s duality in a way that sees him completely disappear into Peter’s emotionality with genuine sincerity. His journey is one that requires the entire picture to fully appreciate, and in lieu of spoilers, it’s difficult to discuss. On some level, it’s a quintessential Spider-Man struggle, Peter slowly being consumed by his Spider-Man identity. But the way the film frames that as an act of cowardice, how Peter deludes himself into believing it’s for the good of others that he suffers alone, is ingenious, leading to emotional gut punch after emotional gut punch that carries just as much weight as the film’s biggest, crowd-pleasing moments.

This is all heightened by the excellent performances from everyone in this. Jon Bernthal’s Punisher is a scene-stealer, with his relationship with Peter proving surprisingly wholesome and becoming one of the film’s greatest sources of joy for me. Sadie Sink plays the role of a mystery antagonist with tremendous pathos and menace, her thematic parallels to the web-head culminating in one of the boldest third acts in Spider-Man movie history. While Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk has a relatively minor role, everything involving him is the stuff of dreams, his scenes ripped straight out of the imagination of every kid who smashed Marvel action figures together yet written with the perspective of someone who grew up and saw the monstrous potential of a character forever at war with the monster inside him.

As a return to the more traditional tone for this character, I couldn’t love this film more. The decision to age Peter beyond his plucky MCU stature is exactly what Spider-Man fans have wanted from Holland’s tenure. What surprised me most, however, was the creative team’s commitment to the stranger, more singular aspects of this iteration of Spider-Man. There is so much connective tissue between the original trilogy and this entry, most of it employed to devastating emotional effect, stirring tears in scenes I never could have predicted. Zendaya gives yet another knockout performance as MJ, getting to shine as a character in ways she hadn’t before. Jacob Batalon continues to be a reliable source of comedic relief as Ned Leeds, but he’s also given small thematic moments that most definitely tug at my heartstrings.