I’m going to avoid spoilers in this post, but I’d honestly recommend knowing as little as possible about Spider-Man: Brand New Day before seeing it.
I’m still not sure how I managed to go this long knowing nothing about it apart from “it’s the fourth Tom Holland Spider-Man movie,” but it made the experience so much better. I kept being surprised over and over again.
Even though I’ve never been a particularly big fan of Spider-Man, I’ve really enjoyed the first three movies of this incarnation, and his appearances in the MCU crossovers. I’m sure that studios would love to figure out what exactly is the formula to build a franchise that keeps cranking out solid installments, but it really is as simple as the basics: combine a popular character1i.e., not you, Morbius, Kraven, or Madame Web with really charismatic and intensely likeable actors.
But of course, there’s more to it than that, which quickly becomes apparent in the first 30 minutes or so of Brand New Day. Because I kept feeling like none of what I was seeing should work at all, and yet it totally did.
Even as somebody who watched the first three Spider-Man movies in this series, it felt like they were trying to cram way too many different stories into one movie. Not just picking up from the previous installment, which is what I’d expected the entirety of this movie to be. There were new character introductions, check-ins with known characters, flashbacks, multiple villains, lots and lots of cameos, and a seemingly new storyline for Spider-Man that could’ve been the entire focus of its own movie. Plus the comically gratuitous product placement, of course; this is, after all, a Sony movie. Also, scenes that had to be included simply to give Holland a chance to show off his physique.
I was worried that it was going to be like Spider-Man 3, which felt like Sony was so terrified of not having enough of its IP on screen in its successful franchise, that it insisted every villain in the Spider-Man universe had to be crammed into one movie, thereby ruining the franchise. But to my surprise, Brand New Day managed to juggle all of the disparate elements and not only keep any of them from crashing to the ground, but actually tied them all together by the end.
A key part of it is the “just be charming” rule. Assemble a bunch of charming people who are fun to watch and all seem to have chemistry with each other. But I think another part of it is to have confidence in how much you actually need to explain to an audience who’s already sat down for the fourth installment in a super-hero franchise.
Near the start of the movie, there’s a montage of Spider-Man’s adventures thwarting various criminals in New York City. And as somebody who knows Spider-Man because of course I do, but has read a maximum of maybe 3 Spider-Man comics in my lifetime, I could instantly tell, “This is for fans of the comics.” There were several shots that seemed to be references to notable comic book covers or splash pages, but I couldn’t confirm that, and I definitely couldn’t tell you which ones. There were villains I didn’t recognize and would never be able to name.
It was a lengthy sequence that might as well have had “fan service” flashing on the screen the whole time, and I was acutely aware that it was for a fandom that I am not a part of. And I enjoyed the hell out of it. People need to remember that comics aren’t actually that complicated. Especially super-hero comics. They’re designed to work on a gut level.
It’s become a mantra as franchises have had more and more installments: “I shouldn’t have to do homework to see this movie!” I used to have more sympathy for the complaint, but I increasingly want to call bullshit on it. If a bloated super-hero movie doesn’t work, it’s not because you didn’t see the first dozen or so in the series. It’s because it probably wasn’t a very good movie.
I found much of the Infinity War storyline impenetrable, for instance, especially by the time they started to wrap everything up, and I’d already forgotten the earlier installments. But I didn’t need to know every character’s name and back-story to enjoy it. I just needed to know “that’s a bad guy.”
And that’s something that Brand New Day gets right. Outside the MCU “proper,” I know just enough about Marvel comics from a lifetime of cultural diffusion.2My favorite bit from Cloverfield: “You know who Superman is? Whoa whoa… are you aware of Garfield?” So I could have a synapse fire off at a vague mention of a name from the comics I might’ve heard decades ago, or I could just sail through blissfully ignorant of the reference and just appreciate how it worked in the movie. So much of it just read as, “this wasn’t made explicitly for me, and that’s awesome.”
But the best trick of Brand New Day is something I appreciate just from a screenwriting perspective: it manages to take all of these disparate elements and not have them tie together just in terms of plot — this event leads to this event leads to this — but in terms of theme. By the end, the movie seems to suggest that this is what the story was about the whole time, and the last act works well enough that I was willing to believe them.
I keep hearing that Spider-Man works best as a character when he’s miserable and everyone hates him. Throughout Brand New Day, there’s one idea that plays out over and over: everybody loves Spider-Man. It hits a crescendo in the last act, and it even had me tearing up a tiny bit, in much the same way as seeing the outpouring of kindness in Paddington. When there was a similar moment in Spider-Man 2, I remember trying to translate it into DC Comics terms I might understand, thinking “wow, people really do love this character, huh?” At the end of Brand New Day, I was thinking “I totally get it.”
A couple of random observations:
- All the performances are great, Zendaya and Tom Holland in particular. It sounds like Holland worked with a dialect coach to sound more like a kid from New York, and it charmingly often sounds like he’s doing a Columbo impression. Spider-Man: One More Thing
- There are several sequences that look like a flash mob breaking out across New York City. The choreography is designed to be more “immediately readable” than “believable,” and I found its weirdness charming as hell. It has a similar energy to an early-2000s Gap or Old Navy ad.
- Most of the corniest moments are saved for the last act, and damn if they didn’t all work on me exactly as intended.
- I really appreciated how Spider-Man uses his webbing on someone to prevent the movie from getting an R rating.
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