Spider Man: Brand New Day Review

I did all my calculations, looked at the next couple of weekends and realised that I had to watch Spider Man: Brand New Day this weekend. If I missed it now, there was a very real chance that I would just keep postponing it until the movie disappeared from theatres.

The next weekend could get hectic, or at least that is what I told myself, so somehow I had to make time for it now.

There was just one problem.

I had no one to go with.

And that is exactly when I came up with the master plan of kidnapping and gaslighting DJ into watching the movie with me.

In my defence, he was excited about the movie.

In his defence, the poor chap has barely watched Marvel movies.

I told him we would hang out.

Evil chuckles.

The poor chap believed me.

Anyway, coming to the actual movie.

Brand New Day is the fourth Spider Man movie with Tom Holland playing Peter Parker in the MCU, and the first thing that surprised me was how fresh it felt.

I have always had this weird issue with Peter in the MCU. I like Tom Holland as Spider Man, but at times it felt like Peter himself never really got a space that completely belonged to him. There was always something bigger happening around him. Avengers, Stark technology, multiverse chaos, cameos, world ending problems.

This movie feels different.

And I think the biggest reason is that it finally feels more interested in Peter Parker.

So what actually feels different?

The movie spends much more time with Peter as a person and less time treating Spider Man like somebody whose only job is to swing across New York and stop whatever giant threat happens to appear that week.

There are still multiple characters who create problems for him. There are villains, anti hero characters and other threats in the story, but surprisingly, none of them completely pull the movie away from Peter.

That worked for me.

Because Spider Man has always been more interesting when Peter’s normal life is just as much of a disaster as his superhero life.

You are not only watching a dude swing around New York trying to stop crime. You actually see Peter trying to manage his life while also dealing with everything that comes with being Spider Man.

And somewhere while watching all of this, I started getting flashes of the Sam Raimi Spider Man movies.

Not because the movie is copying them, but because it remembers something those movies understood really well.

Peter Parker struggling with life is part of Spider Man.

Sometimes it is money. Sometimes relationships. Sometimes loneliness. Sometimes he is just exhausted and trying to keep everything from falling apart.

That stuff matters.

The cinematography also surprised me. The colour grading, the framing and even the way certain scenes are allowed to breathe feel different from what the MCU has been doing with Spider Man for a while.

There are moments where the movie actually lets Peter exist without immediately throwing another joke, explosion or reference at you.

I liked that a lot.

Now for the things that did not completely work

Welp.

It is Spider Man.

And I am a complete loverboy when it comes to Spider Man movies, so getting complaints out of me is already difficult.

But I do think Scorpion and Jean Grey could have been handled better.

It is not that they should have taken over the movie. In fact, I am glad they did not. But their impact on the story felt like it could have been stronger.

There were moments where I kept thinking, okay, surely this character is going to become much more important now.

And then the movie moved on.

At the same time, I understand why they did it.

If the whole point of this movie is to bring the attention back to Peter, then giving every other character a giant storyline would probably create the exact same problem the movie is trying to avoid.

Still, I wanted a little more.

And then comes the Marvel movie disease

The what if phase.

Every time a Marvel movie ends, my brain immediately starts rewriting parts of it.

What if the stakes were slightly higher?

What if there was a little more Spider Man fighting the villains during the first fifteen minutes?

What if Scorpion got more time?

What if this scene went differently?

What if that character did something else?

It never ends.

And obviously you can keep doing this forever until you have invented an entirely different movie in your head.

But even with all those what ifs, there is one thing I genuinely appreciated about Brand New Day.

It does not depend on cameo chaos.

Thank God.

There is no constant feeling that the movie is desperately waiting for somebody famous to walk through a portal so the audience can scream.

It is not constantly poking you and saying, remember this guy?

Remember this movie?

Remember this thing from twelve years ago?

Look who is back.

Please clap.

And I think Spider Man desperately needed that.

I like cameos. I like stupid Marvel surprises. I will absolutely lose my mind in a theatre if the right character appears.

But that cannot be the entire meal every single time.

At some point Peter Parker has to be interesting enough on his own.

And Brand New Day finally seems confident about that.

Is the movie perfect?

No.

Could some characters have been used better?

Definitely.

Could the stakes have been higher?

Probably.

But did it finally feel like Tom Holland’s Peter Parker was getting a Spider Man story that actually belonged to him?

For me, yes.

And honestly, that is what I wanted from this movie more than anything else.

So if you are a Spider Man fan or a Marvel fan and you still have not watched Brand New Day…

I genuinely do not know what you are doing.

Go watch it.