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[Editor’s Note: Obviously I meant to get this review up before I went on vacation, but I didn’t. Anyway, I’m back now, and regular posting shall resume.]
When I sat down to watch Spider-Man: Brand New Day on opening day, I didn’t entirely know why I was doing it. It was certainly more out of a kind of inertia — I write about movies, this was the big new movie; I’ve sat through almost every other Marvel movie in the past, I might as well sit through this one — than out of any genuine enthusiasm for the product. Which is to say, a new installment of the Spider-Man and/or Marvel (and/or X-Men) universes. I do genuinely love the second Raimi Spider-Man movie, made back when superhero movies used to be both much simpler and much weirder, but beyond that, I’d mostly rate the three previous Tom Holland Spider-Man movies a collective “meh plus.”
Does it still make sense to treat every new Marvel movie as a watercooler event for general cinephiles? Or have comic book movies been downgraded back to niche offerings for self-selecting nerd completists?
It’s starting to feel more like the latter, though you wouldn’t know it from the box office, where Spider-Man: Brand New Day managed the biggest North American opening weekend ever ($360m), and earned almost a billion dollars worldwide in a single weekend. I don’t think that means Marvel can pretend it’s 2017 again and just start releasing any superhero movie, but “event movies” seem to be back. And a new Spider-Man is still more plausibly an “event” than, say, Supergirl.
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A win for the category, certainly, but whether that actually makes Brand New Day a better movie is tougher to answer. My main takeaway from this latest installment was the sense of a lot of genuinely talented people doing their best to enliven a thing that, narratively speaking, once again only seems to exist in order to tie in universes.
There’s a great quote that’s been going around, from a profile that GQ did about Christopher Nolan and Tom Holland, who is in both Nolan’s The Odyssey and Spider-Man, where Holland apparently experience what making a good movie felt like and came back to Sony with some new ideas:
During The Odyssey’s production, Holland’s collaborators on Spider-Man got used to hearing about Christopher Nolan. “I was really able to lay down the law and say, ‘We are not going to come to set and figure it out,’ ” Holland said. “ ‘We need to know why we are making this movie beyond the fact that it’s Spider-Man 4 and they make loads of money and we’re going to just have a big summer. Why are we making this movie?’ And Destin was super instrumental in that, but it was just really great to constantly be calling up the studio and [producers] Amy [Pascal] and Rachel [O’Connor], who I love, and be like, ‘Well, Chris is doing it this way. This is how I think we should be doing it.’ ”
That sense, of Holland and director Destin Daniel Cretton (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Short Term 12) actually aspiring to make a real movie pervades Spider-Man: Brand New Day. But it does so mostly on a textural level, where there was evidently real care taken to create interesting shots and capture genuine emotions, even as the whole thing is still hamstrung by its essential nature as a superhero tie-in delivery device.
The press release would boast that this one has X-Men people, Avengers people, Fantastic Four people, and Spider-Man people — unheard of in the days before Marvel subsumed the Sony (Spider-Man) and Fox (X-Men) Marvel superhero universes. Hooray? We love corporate consolidation, don’t we, folks? Probably the last thing any of these movies needed was even more characters to squeeze in, and meanwhile, the one thing this one doesn’t have is a genuine villain. Or maybe the real villain was Peter Parker’s work-life balance. Or is it loneliness?
Real issues, I suppose, and admirable, that, but also not that fun. Scrape away all the tie-ins (supposedly it was considered “spoiler” territory to acknowledge that Sadie Sink plays Jean Grey) and Spider-Man: Brand New Day is sort of a slightly above-average teenage melodrama with some superheroes in it.
Maybe that’s for the best. Maybe middle-aged film critics were never meant to care about superhero movies for tweens and teens, and true to demographics, I didn’t really care about this one. It’s fine though? The stakes seem lower now (no portals, no time or inter dimensional travel), which is nice, but the demands of tying in and reintroducing mostly superfluous characters means that even when Brand New Day admirably drags things back down to human scale, it still can’t quite land the plane. I kept waiting for it to resolve the story about Spider-Man being a lonely bachelor but mostly it just got bogged down in an utterly forgettable and nearly impenetrable drama about Jean Grey and her sister.
If anyone suffers from the commercial demands of maintaining an absurdly sprawling superhero universe, it’s Tom Holland, who, despite it all, does some of the best acting of the whole franchise and maybe of his career. Previously it was only really the villains and side characters who could shine, like Willem Dafoe as Green Goblin and Alfred Molina as Doctor Otto Octavious, and JK Simmons as J Jonah Jameson (all in the Raimi trilogy). A Spider-Man movie with Holland as Peter Parker and the tone of one of the Raimi Spider-Mans could’ve been a real hoot.
Holland’s Parker now has to suffer through his girlfriend and best friend (Zendaya’s Mary Jane and Jacob Batalon’s Ned) not knowing who is, having made them forget him in order to save the world in the last movie. That means that they get to live out Peter’s dream of attending MIT alongside their high school pals, while Peter is left anonymously fighting crime from his sad bachelor hovel. (Side note: remember when Mary Jane was an actress and Peter a photographer? It sucks that every superhero movie is STEM propaganda now.) Meanwhile, Peter keeps tabs on Zendaya and Ned via social media and composes heartfelt love letters to Mary Jane that his personal sense of duty won’t allow him to deliver.
If that wasn’t bad enough, Peter is also going through some kind of Spider puberty. He’s producing too much web goo for his suit to handle and his Spidey sense is always on overdrive. This is actually a pretty clever conceit for making your movie starring married 30-year-olds still feel like a teen drama (Holland also famously said recently that The Odyssey was his last run at playing a boy).
Anyway, decent set up. Meanwhile, there’s a villain on the loose in the city whose shtick is being able to possess different people and jump from body to body. How do you fight a supernatural entity that seems to lack corporeal form, even when you can control your spider goo?
The villain, unfortunately, turns out not to be a villain at all, but a complicated confluence of Jean Grey, government experiments conducted by a shady functionary played by Tramell Tillman, and various Spider-Man frenemies, from Frank Castle the Punisher (Jon Bernthal), to Black Widow (Florence Pew-Pew), to Bruce Banner (Mark Ruff dog), to the Puerto Rican lady from The Bear (Liza Colón-Zayas, playing a friendly cop). This casting is so excellent, and still the whole thing ends up feeling like ten pounds of shit stuffed into a five-pound bag.”}]] 
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