It should come as a hot take to pretty much nobody that I think the MCU has lost a lot of its lustre.
The onslaught of movies and streaming series that have come out since Avengers Endgame have been at best uneven in quality. And while the most recent entries have begun to show signs of narrative direction in the buildup to Avengers Doomsday, that doesn’t mean they are actually any good.
So with all this is in mind I was looking forward to Spider-Man: Brand New Day with more caution than enthusiasm. But that didn’t stop me from going to see it on its opening day!
(To be clear, this was mostly because my daughter, who was very much looking forward to it, was going away for a couple of weeks that night, and so it was a nice sending off present for her, and a nice way to do stuff together with the family before she left).
And pleasantly, I ended up liking it quite a bit.
A lot of this is informed by my general preferences when it comes to way Spider-Man is depicted in general. My “platonic ideal” for wall-crawler is that he is a young adult and not a teenager, that he swings around Manhattan and not Europe or outer space, and that he has a costume that is made of fabric and not nanites. And for the first time in many years, this is the Spider-Man that we got on screen.
I understand why that’s been. The Marvel Cinematic Universe’s version of Spider-Man debuted on the the very recent heels of two more traditional takes on the character, so naturally (and wisely) they did a bunch of things to make their iteration different. There was no origin story, there was no Uncle Ben, he had a best bud who served as his “man in the chair” and he hung out with Iron Man whole bunch. So while I mostly liked these movies, they rarely felt like “my” Spider-Man.
That’s not a big deal or anything–I think it’s foolish to hold too tightly to our view of an adaptation’s source material if we want to have a hope of enjoying a movie. But that didn’t stop me from getting some solid enjoyment out of the fact that Brand New Day‘s Spider-Man was so much closer to baseline impressions of the character.
The fact that Tom Holland has finally aged up to the point where he’s believably playing a guy in his 20s helps a great deal as well.
So yeah, this movie is full of web-slinging action through the streets of New York City, and I couldn’t have been happier. It’s been a long time since we saw such classic-style Spider-action, and director Destin Daniel Cretton and his team bring it to life with some legitimately thrilling set pieces.
But of course the movie is more than that. There’s a story going on too, which mostly works. The film is comprised of three main threads. The main one has to do with Spider-Man facing off with a a bizarre enemy who can “hop into” the body of anyone nearby, and who is angrily attacking the Department of Damage Control (one of those recurring MCU concepts, a government office that keeps an eye on super-powered people and technology). This is enjoyable enough providing opportunity for some inventive visuals including a bit of mid-movie spectacle with Spider-Man having to duke it out with an out-of-control Hulk and a beautiful fight scene at the end with a bunch of ninjas all dressed in red. I really enjoyed how this storyline ultimately resolves via Peter and his adversary talking things and bonding over their individual trauma.
The second overlapping story thread involves Peter’s isolation since the events of No Way Home (where everyone has completely forgotten ever knowing him), and the way he continues to long for the impossible: to be reunited with with his girlfriend and best friend Ned.
I thought the movie did a good job with this as well, giving all these characters some good and heartfelt moments.
The third part of the story is where things are the weakest, and is why I can’t agree with one friend and give the movie a 10/10. In this part of the plot, Peter finds he is experiencing strange genetic mutations which are upping the amount of “arachnid DNA” that’s operating in his system, resulting in things like organic webs and surges of violent behavior when his eyes turn all black. Peter is obviously freaked out by this but it’s clear that the movie wants to take you to a place where he has to learn to accept all the different sides to himself. In the end this does happen, as the narrative demands, but in my opinion it’s completely unearned and comes quite abruptly during the film’s climax.
It’s the only part of the film that I felt really didn’t pay off at all, which was a shame because other than that I liked the whole thing a lot. The movie looks great and has a cohesive stylistic identity that I enjoy. Even though it has evident ties to the larger MCU, it feels like all its attention is on telling its own story, which I often a lost art in these sorts of big movie franchises. The performances, including Tom Holland, Zendaya (as MJ) and Jon Bernthal (as the Punisher) are all really good. Overall, I’d say this is the strongest of the MCU’s Spider-Man movies, and thus probably the best live-action film in the franchise since 2004’s Spider-Man 2.
Oh, also, Sadie Sink in the movie in a part that was kept secret prior to the film coming out, but which everyone pretty much guessed correctly was Jean Grey (of X-Men fame). Sadie Sink was one of the best parts of the last couple seasons of Stranger Things and she works fine here as well. But what makes her role significant is that this is, I think, the first indication of the MCU doing something original with the X-Men franchise, and not just dusting off actors from the Fox movies to parade around for nostalgia hits. I don’t have any strong opinions about Jean Grey’s depiction here, but I 100% prefer to see the MCU doing its own thing and not just retreading the past.
PakarPBN
A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a collection of websites that are controlled by a single individual or organization and used primarily to build backlinks to a “money site” in order to influence its ranking in search engines such as Google. The core idea behind a PBN is based on the importance of backlinks in Google’s ranking algorithm. Since Google views backlinks as signals of authority and trust, some website owners attempt to artificially create these signals through a controlled network of sites.
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