Though I can’t quite believe how fast the time has flown by since I was a first-year university student sitting down in December 2021 to watch Spider-Man: No Way Home with feverish excitement.
It’s been nearly five years since Tom Holland last graced our screens as the web-slinging hero. A lot has changed in that time – as long a stretch as the years between this iteration’s first appearance in Captain America: Civil War and his sixth – and the MCU has seen a less-than-steady decline in the interim period.
‘Why don’t you just be honest with yourself? Are you Peter Parker or are you Spider-Man?’
With the greater franchise unable to surmount the shadow of its previous heights, the MCU’s true make-or-break test will surely come with the release of Avengers: Doomsday in December. This new instalment in their Spider-Man strand, Brand New Day, marks Holland’s seventh outing in the role.
Kicking off from the ground with all the power of a web catapult strung between two lampposts, the film has an entirely different MO in mind than its multiversally-minded big brother coming this Christmas.
While gods and kings fight amidst the stars, Brand New Day looks to do exactly what it says on the tin and offer a breath of fresh air for the MCU’s Spidey. Though Tom Holland has always been generally regarded as a golden pick for the Spider-Man mantle, his story thus far has been markedly overshadowed by other characters.
His first two ‘solo’ adventures saw him playing struggling to find an identity as someone other than Iron Man’s protege (even in death, Tony Stark loomed large). No Way Home felt like a step in the right direction, but this Spidey’s own heroism couldn’t help but feel sidelined when his two predecessors – played by Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield – found themselves teleported in for a cathartic victory lap.
In many ways, Brand New Day is the first MCU Spider-Man film that actually feels like Holland’s own movie, through and through. We last saw a reinvigorated Spidey set free from his inhibitions, inspired by meeting his alternate counterparts, and operating out of a tiny, dingy apartment to fight street-level crimes as the comic gods intended. It’s incredibly refreshing, then, to rejoin Peter Parker four years on and feel as though we’re in the company of a capable and confident Spidey in his own right, with his own pre-established friendships and rivalries.
There was a certain stretch of time where the MCU felt obliged to show us everything – every character’s origin and every meeting. After a deluge of glacial content over the last few years, however, it’s great to see Sony and Marvel operate with more of a ‘Why not?’ approach that sheds a lot of that stubborn set-up.
The result is a New York (shot in Glasgow) that feels interconnected and vibrant, with fan-pleasing appearances of well-known characters and some new faces, too.
The marketing around this film has done a lot to obfuscate quite who turns up in this movie and who doesn’t, but Jon Bernthal’s Punisher, for example, works brilliantly here. Yes, he has a rich history of prior MCU appearances (he first showed up in Netflix’s Daredevil series over a decade ago) but his characterisation and arc here comes with enough explanation to make us care about him just off of the basis of what he does here, rather than alienating new viewers. This was the first time I’d actually seen his iteration on the Frank Castle character, but I never once felt as though I needed to do several days’ worth of homework to appreciate his inclusion, which definitely can’t be said of previous MCU cameos which really did rely on good faith from the past.
The MCU has had a real kicking in the years since Endgame for being overly-referential and downright impenetrable for new viewers. If you wanted to tackle every Marvel film, show and one-off special from the last eighteen years to catch up on everything, you would surely have to retreat to a snowy, isolated temple and study the arts of the superhero blockbuster for many months. It seems that after such a string of diminishing returns, Marvel has realised that that’s perhaps not the best way to cultivate new viewers and this new approach seen here feels like a good way to have their cake and eat it, in a sense. It rewards long-time fans who’ve studied every line without pulling up the ladder entirely.
Ironically, this kind of ‘hop in; hop out’ storytelling has been a crucial part of the long term success of the comics, and yet the films have taken twenty years to realise the value of such an attitude.
Going into this, I was a little worried that the wide assortment of other characters and heroes would once again take screen time away from Spidey himself and the core story at play, but I was surprised by how well the team managed to wrangle such disparate and (on paper) incongruous elements together. The result is a story that feels eventful and detailed without just descending into complete mayhem as other Spider-Man movies have.
It’s rather hard to discuss what Peter and company are fighting against in this movie – the trailers and such seemed intentionally vague – but it’s a decisively smaller scale story that aims for that street level feel of the original material. In a lot of ways, this feels more like a live-action take on Insomniac’s incredibly popular Spider-Man games on the PlayStation, right down to Peter liaising with the local police force and utilising a vast arsenal of impressive web gadgets and doohickeys that crackle impressively on-screen.
Shang-Chi director Destin Daniel Cretton steps into the hot seat for this new trilogy, taking over from Jon Watts’ more journeyman direction of the previous three instalments, delivering on the same kinetic action that made his martial arts hero flick such a success for the MCU back in 2021. From the very first sequence, his guiding hand feels like yet another bold new step in the right direction for the franchise, with a healthy mix of gorgeously lit neon vistas, thrilling swings and flashy set-pieces. The colour palette is more vivid too – not as bright and in your face as Raimi’s 2000s trilogy, but completely in keeping with the idea of a comic book come to life.
While some character arcs and story beats fare better than others, and I do think the film could stand to lose a little of its 145-minute runtime, I was really pleasantly surprised by how invested I was in Peter’s emotional journey, and how much time we were able to spend following that particular story along.
Amidst all the noise and chaos of his day-to-day life as a Friendly Neighbourhood Spider-Man, he still feels a sense of isolation after the events of No Way Home, and his longing to reconnect with MJ, the love of his life, and Ned, his best friend, looms even larger than the promotional material would have you think. I won’t tell you anything, but I had my doubts as to how such a thread would be handled and came out of the film feeling as though they couldn’t have found a better way to slice it!
Spider-Man: Brand New Day is a jam-packed new addition to Tom Holland’s Spidey line-up that really does feel like a step away from the trappings of the past. It’s an emotionally driven and relatively low -key, ‘small potatoes’ affair but considering the cosmic story Sony was originally batting for, I think a much more grounded and character-focused film was a smart choice, especially when viewed as the starting point of a new trilogy. While there are one or two elements that I might’ve swapped out or cut for time, this really does feel as Brand New as its title would have you believe.
BBFC: Rated 12A for moderate violence, threat, injury detail, implied strong language.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day is in cinemas now.
