RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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It’s never been easy being Spider-Man, but the movies bring a whole new dimension of challenges to perhaps the most beloved of all superhero characters. As soon as an actor is cast as a live-action Peter Parker, he begins the inexorable process of aging out of the role, at least with respect to the vague thirtysomething cap that appears to be in place on the comics version(s). Like Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield before him, Tom Holland has crossed that dread offscreen line into his thirties, though he’s gotten more Spidey hang-time than his predecessors. In just six years, he starred in three Spider-Man movies for the Marvel Cinematic Universe and appeared as a supporting character in several crossover films. He even squeezed in a fourth installment, Spider-Man: Brand New Day , before he turned 30 last month, lasting long enough to become the first Spider-Man to ever engage in his own soft reboot.
Brand New Day doesn’t reset continuity for the whole Marvel universe; that daunting change seems to be in the mail for the next two Avengers installments, to some degree or another. The new Spider-Man adventure is a more modest one-man reboot, in keeping with the decision made at the end of the multiverse-centric Spider-Man: No Way Home . Thanks to a spell from Doctor Stephen Strange, the multiverse-threatening public revelation that Peter Parker is actually Spider-Man was erased from existence—and with it, any memories of Parker himself. Brand New Day then spends its opening moments catching us up on what should have been Peter’s college years. As he uses his Spidey sense—er, wait, that’s just Instagram—to surreptitiously peep the progress of his former bestie Ned (Jacob Batalon) and former girlfriend MJ (Zendaya) at MIT, the hero himself hangs back in New York, fighting various costumed bad guys and re-endearing himself to the city.
This catch-up is depicted with surprising vigor by director Destin Daniel Cretton, new to the characters but not the MCU, having helmed the fun but disappointingly murky Shang-Chi movie some years back, as well as the recent Wonder Man TV series. In a montage that incorporates rhythmic repetitions, multiple comic-book cover poses, and the kind of genuinely cool mid-aughts needle-drop that might have made it onto the Spider-Man 3 soundtrack back in ’07, Cretton announces himself as willing to play within the basic MCU rules while assembling something that more closely resembles a real movie. Though the series remains weirdly attached to the idea that New York is typically overcast and/or wet, Cretton recruits his frequent cinematographer Brett Pawlak and seems to encourage composing in images, rather than duct-taping together those flashy comics covers come to life with a bunch of obvious green-screen and panicked-reshoot compositing.
After his experience working with Christopher Nolan on The Odyssey , Holland reportedly pushed to tighten up the sometimes-slipshod MCU assembly line. (For what it’s worth Challengers screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes quietly receives an “additional literary material” credit in the end crawl.) No one would mistake Brand New Day for an entry in the Dark Knight trilogy, yet there are faint echoes of those movies here: Peter gets his own Commissioner Gordon figure in Jean DeWolff (Liza Colón-Zayas), a local cop who gives him some friendly leeway; some comics villains are included without ascending to Big Bad level; the movie’s black tones look like actual shadows, not washed-out grays; and one particular set of shots alternating silent close-ups of Holland and Zendaya during a web-swinging sequence serves a very different purpose than the famous shot of Heath Ledger’s Joker blissfully extending his head outside a car window, but is similarly evocative. Moreover, there’s some attendance to themes and storylines venturing outside the strict purview of the MCU itself, which has become many of these films’ primary subject.
Specifically, the theme of facing young-adult change reverberates throughout the movie, as if to prepare the audience for the possibility that this Spider-Man may ultimately enter previously unforeseen levels of oldness. Though Holland is still safely playing an early-twenties Peter, the character’s all-heroism routine is interrupted by a number of shifts in the recent status quo. First, Ned and MJ graduate from MIT and return to New York as (platonic) roommates, forcing Peter to consider whether he might attempt to re-establish connections with them. Perhaps more pressing, his spider powers begin to mutate and amplify—but to such a degree that it makes his everyday crime-fighting increasingly difficult. As he struggles to return his abilities to manageable levels, including a consultation with Dr. Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), our hero faces another mystery in the form of an invisible antagonist who hops between different bodies in an attempt to breach the security at Damage Control, the government office first seen in Spider-Man: Homecoming .
That first installment in the MCU Spider-Man series refreshingly reframed the antics of a massively popular superhero as a teen comedy (at least partially). Brand New Day attempts to leap into the bigger leagues of postgrad (if still preapocalyptic) problems, specifically how (or if) to acclimate yourself to fundamental life changes you never anticipated. If it’s not especially close to the majesty of Spider-Man 2 (and lacks the delirious highs of Spider-Man 3 ), it’s also pretty handily the best MCU Spider-Man movie since Homecoming . Just as No Way Home got some unexpected juice from the fan-service move of bringing in Spider-Men from other universes, this one does surprisingly well with what more casual viewers of the MCU have come to dread: Pulling in multiple characters from other Marvel properties to bounce off of each other.
In fact, this comes close to a platonic ideal of that technique, something glimpsed only occasionally in recen...
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