Spider-MAN: Brand New Day - R3alKrispy’s Spoiler Review

This is my full spoiler review of Spider-Man: Brand New Day. The movie's been out long enough, so we're spoiling. I'm putting my full sack on the table and I apologize for absolutely fucking nothing. If you haven't seen it, web over to a theater if you've got 'em and come back. Otherwise, welcome.

What's up, guys? My name is Peter Krispy, and I just got back from Spider-Man: Brand New Day. So that theater was packed. I feel like I walked into a mass alien abduction by accident. I walked into a crime scene. There's blood on my hands from the people I had to beat to a proper seat and with the crowd I saw, I buy that this is the film that beat Avengers: Endgame's opening record. And I get it. We haven't had a proper Spider-Man film in five years. Like a lot of people, I was a thirsty bitch walking in there. Does the movie quench? Has it earned the hype? The numbers? And the answer, for the most part, is yes.

The opening montage SLAPS

I'm just gonna say it: I love this movie. Am I lockstep with the crowd calling it the best Spider-Man movie ever made? No. Spider-Verse it ain't. But there I was for a hot minute thinking about whether or not it topped Spider-Man 2. …It doesn’t. But I had to think about it. That should tell you plenty.

This scene was heavy.

And I think it comes down to one thing: of every MCU Spider-Man film so far, this is the one that, by far, feels the most like a Spider-Man movie. Spider-Boy is gone. Iron Man Jr moved out after being the most problematic roommate you could ask for. And what's left is Spider-Man, the beautiful, the amazing, the oh-so-sexy Spider-Man. And they waste zero time. The origin? Skip. High school? Skip. The movie gives Peter the Ferrari and lets him be Spider-Man right out the gate.

It's been four years since No Way Home, where Peter saved the world by erasing himself from the memory of every living person in it. He lives in a crummy warehouse apartment with asbestos as the closest thing he has to a roommate. He doesn't talk to Ned and MJ anymore; he just scrolls through their social media feeds, haunting them from afar like a just-here-to-watch ghost. He has no friends and no connections. His life is Spider-Man and nothing else.

The opening montage is a gorgeous comic-esque composition showing us how the job's been going for the last four years and it's…well, amazing. Scorpion? Webbed up. Tombstone? Taken down a peg. The Hand? Jobbed. We're shown a New York where Spider-Man's a pro; crime’s the climate, but for him, kicking its ass is Tuesday. Now, reducing one of the best rogues' galleries of any superhero to little more than a highlight reel might sound criminal, but the movie makes it work. New York adores this guy and not even J. Jonah Jameson's around to muddy his PR…yet under the mask he's quietly falling apart. And that contradiction is the thing that keeps this movie's sense tingling.

This world's gotta rob Peter to pay Spidey; them's the rules.

We get a scene where he crashes MJ and Ned's party just to share part of their space, yet he can't even bring himself to properly say hi. If No Way Home gave us three as the magic number, BND gives us one as the loneliest number and, this is important: Peter chose this. He's dying inside and letting it happen, convinced it's necessary for Spider-Man to live and prevail. That's noble. …Right?

And before you say it's just the same tune as Raimi's Spider-Man 2, let me tell you about the outcome swap.

In Spider-Man 2, Peter's emotional baggage gives his powers the suck, his body telling him to call it quits and go and smell the roses. Here, his spider DNA is overtaking his human DNA. Peter's own body is huffing, and it's puffing, and it's signing his eviction notice. It's clever shit…when the film's not spelling out the metaphor instead of trusting us to have the emotional intelligence to figure it out. More on that later.

Thought they would suck, but they carried

As far as characters go, there are three MVPs in this movie. I want to let the first two share the spotlight first: MJ and Ned. I thought these two were going to suck. But no, they didn’t go the easy route of true love's kiss curing amnesia. They fake you out with it, but just as you're rolling your eyes and bracing for the lame, it turns out it's not MJ. It's Jean Grey playing puppeteer with her body to put a knife in Peter's chest and twist the blade. And it's brutal.

But then they follow it up with the real version, and it's the best scene in the movie. Peter writes MJ a letter describing the life they shared before it got erased. MJ finds it, and it gets you hopeful. You want it to play out like a love story, but it plays out more like the finale of Teen Titans, where Terra just has to tell Beast Boy, "That girl's gone. That's not me anymore." That's exactly what happens here. MJ's not cruel about it, but she's honest. Peter is a stranger to her. So of course she's not just gonna switch those feelings back on. It's a mature decision. It's heartbreaking, but it also respects MJ's autonomy as a character. Zendaya plays it so well. Her heart is breaking for Peter, and it's easily her best acting in these films. It's a double hadoken to the heart and the dick and it makes you feel for both of them.

The movie earns the pain it takes from you, and the tears that it puts in its tiny little vial for its cocktails. So it’s just cold af, right? Wrong. There's a scene right after with a beanbag and Legos. Peter finally gets to sit down with MJ and Ned. Peter and Ned build a set while MJ draws the moment, with Peter and Ned quoting LotR back and forth. And it's not just some charming lighter beat like it would be in any other Spider-Man movie. It's like wandering through a desert for days and finally finding an oasis. We're watching a man who has deliberately denied himself human connection for four years finally letting himself have it. That's what makes this movie great. It understands that people need people, and we can only deny ourselves for so long.

Now I gotta get to the third MVP of this film that I did not expect to be so pleased with: The Punisher. For those of you expecting a cameo, no. Frank Castle's basically the deuteragonist of this movie. And like a lot of people, I’m sure, I did feel like I got ripped off just a bit by this version. He's not the stoic, ice-cold Daredevil foil. He's a lighter, bickering buddy cop. But it still works, because Holland and Bernthal's chemistry is excellent. It gives us the funniest parts of the movie, but it also works thematically. Just like Frank was a mirror to Daredevil, he's a mirror to Peter too. These are two lone gunmen obsessed with the mission, both convinced that connection means weakness.

But the crucial difference is that Peter chose to go it alone. Frank never got the choice. There's this quiet gut punch of a scene where Frank tells Peter that if he could trade everything he has and everything he’s done for one more minute with the people he loved, he'd do it without hesitating. Frank has gone way further down the lonely-brick road than Peter has; he makes Parker’s situation look like amateur hour, and he’s the walking argument for why our guy’s making a mistake. In that vein, I respect this movie for rejecting the popular fan pick of Daredevil as Peter's partner here and sticking with the character who made more sense for the story. I'm glad Marvel stuck to their guns on this one.

Now we gotta talk about the weakest element of the movie: the overextension that begins when the Hulk enters the movie.

So Peter goes to Bruce Banner, who teaches at ESU now. I guess the Professor Hulk experiment fell apart, because now he's just back to repressing the angry Hulk, which is a little disappointing. I always liked the Jekyll and Hyde dichotomy better, but with overall Hulk lore, I always thought Banner was at his best when he was juggling all the different facets and versions, like Devil Hulk or Joe Fixit. It kind of sucks that we haven't seen a cinematic Hulk jump into that potential yet, but what we got is still better than what we were getting before. Anyway, he's using inhibitor tech to keep the Hulk in, and Peter wants to pick his brain to help his own situation. From there, the movie starts juggling too many balls and loses the tight sense of focus that made the first half of the film so great.

But then one thing leads to another, Jean mind controls Banner, gets him to Hulk out, and we get a Spider-Man/Hulk fight. It's a really good fight, pure velocity and momentum. There's this gorgeous bit of cinematography where the camera spins around Spider-Man so that it looks like he's upright while the world spins around him, and it's great. However, the fight is there for a second act spectacle and nothing else. It's a set piece, and all we get from it is Hulk leaving and never being mentioned again. So, yeah, a total of two and a half scenes with Bruce Banner. Also, what the hell is with the Punisher's bullets even bothering the Hulk at all? He's spraying him in the face, and Hulk's just like, "Stahp, I can’t move now" when he's tanked so much worse without flinching.

And now we come to my personal mixed bag in this pile of goodies: the villain, Sadie Sink as Jean Grey. Now, I like a good body-hopping villain as much as the next guy. You could have just replaced her with the Scarlet Witch, and not much would have changed, but it still works beautifully. No one in a 33-foot radius of her is safe. She wears people like costumes and taunts Spider-Man while gunning for the loved ones he thought he was keeping safe by self-isolating. It's great. It's almost like something out of a horror movie.

And it works for the movie because Jean is such a good foil to Spider-Man. Like him, she’s grieving and in pain, seeking revenge for the sister she lost. Peter, the guy who hoards secrets and keeps to himself to protect the people he loves, is suddenly facing someone he can’t hide from. She can wear anybody, and she can walk straight into any vault Peter tries to keep locked down. It's great thematically, and it's a good performance by Sadie Sink.

But here's my personal problem, and I don't see a lot of people talking about it. Peter's finally free from having his personal story hijacked by the MCU. You’ve got the whole roster from, at worst, the fourth best rogues gallery behind Batman’s, Superman’s, and Courage the Cowardly Dog’s. …And you have him go up against an X-Men character. Her origin story flashback even made me forget I was watching a Spider-Man film for a second. I thought we were getting the X-Men Origins: Jean Grey that we never got.

And that's not even getting into a moral logic fumble similar to Supergirl’s. You've seen this climax before. "You can't do this. You're not a killer." A non-argument that redefines don’t ask a woman her body count. She possessed MJ and tossed her off a roof with no guarantee that Peter could catch her. She looses the Hulk on a populated building. Oh, and another thing: she possesses a man and has him walk into traffic, where he gets hit in the hip by a Taxi so hard that his body makes an L-shape. Looked pretty fucking killed to me. Why are we so worried about her crossing the line when she's been playing hopscotch with it already?

But if those elements are birds flying into the plane, the ending is Sully landing it anyway. Because there comes a point toward the end when Peter finally stops running, lets Jean into his mind, and we get this great flashback scene to Aunt May right after she found out Peter was Spider-Man. Marisa Tomei returns to the role, and it goes double duty because we have May giving Peter a pep talk about how no one should carry their burdens alone. It's the lesson Peter has been repressing the whole movie. It's what he needs to hear, and it's what Jean needs to hear too, because she's hearing it from a parental figure she never had. It's two people in pain finding the same lifeline, and it's great.

And it escalates, because Frank tries to snipe Jean, and Peter takes the bullet. This is how you know the movie works. I actually thought we were about to lose Peter for good. No “everyone comes back.” I thought Peter was never gonna feel so good again, Mr. Stark, but Jean uses her powers to keep him alive long enough to reach the hospital and stay breathing while the doctors do their part, where Frank brings him in and sits by his bed until he wakes up. Peter spent the whole movie refusing connection, yet in the end, that’s what saves him.

He walks out of the hospital and is treated to an entire crowd cheering for Spider-Man, allowing him to feel, truly feel, the community he had been building without even realizing it. The cherry on top: Peter at May's grave, doing this alone no more. Spider-Man alone, no more. Little moments add to it afterward like him finally taking the time to rest with a cup of coffee on the Empire State Building, then remembering Jean DeWolff’s kids’ names where he couldn’t be bothered at the beginning. Then the final beat of the film: he spots Ned at the bodega, and he hesitates. But then he walks up to him, and they do their secret handshake from back when they were friends, and something in Ned's memory seems to click. We don't know if it's a full reset button or just the start of something new. Ned just says "Peter," and it leaves us, the audience, to interpret the meaning on our own. It's beautiful, and it's earned, which means I gotta give this movie even more credit where it's due.

It's easily the best directed of the Holland movies, and I never realized how lacking these movies were in visual identity until I saw this one, because Destin Daniel Cretton, the new director, does such a good job making this movie look like a comic. It's colorful. The shadows are great. The colors are vibrant, not like the desaturated paste we’re always getting now. We get a real Spidey suit with real fabric, not those weightless polygons on the all-CG nanosuit, and it’s one of the best-looking Spidey suits we’ve ever gotten in anything, right down to these great see-through eyepieces we get POV shots through. The swinging and the action are also consistently the best in these films by far. 4DX just came to one of my local theaters, so I’ll let y’all know how the second viewing there goes.

There are some flaws with the visuals. We get some Hulk close-ups where he looks like a plastic action figure and a couple of CG shots of Spidey where he looks like he's made of rubber. But again, it looks like a genuine film, and I’m here for it.

Tom Holland gives what’s easily his best performance as Peter so far. He even leans into the same New York accent that Andrew Garfield had down. He has this really earnest and wholesome scene with MJ on the other side of a curtain.

It's so good that, frankly, all I have left to complain about are a few nitpicks:

They never tell us how Peter's paying rent even though they spend so much energy selling that he's got no life outside of Spider-Man. Did Spidey finally negotiate a payroll with the city?

Eevee, the movie’s Temu Jarvis, feels like a missed opportunity. Did you hear about those scenes where Peter tries to confide in her, but just gets non-answers like something out of ChatGPT that make you feel how truly alone he really is? No? Well they’re not in there because she’s too busy being an exposition tool.

There's this shady government organization called Damage Control that Peter just goes ahead and trusts. You'd think he would have learned his lesson after Mysterio betrayed him, but he just lathers, rinses, and repeats the same mistake, and it makes him look like an idiot.

And then there's the post-credit scene, which is one of the weakest in MCU history. All it is is a graphic of this Spider-Man tracking app pinning “Spider-Man” in space. What is this anomaly? Is it Doctor Doom? Is it the first stroke of Secret Wars? Is it actually another Spider-Man from space? It looked like it was cobbled together in 15 minutes; in the second of silence that followed, I shouted “the fuck was that” and the whole theater started laughing, so clearly it wasn’t just me who thought they fumbled. Also, what the hell’s with the Spider-Man tracking app? Couldn't some bad rando pick it up and use it to find Spider-Man wherever he is? Also, no Venom. Apparently that symbiote's just chilling in that bar until Tom Holland needs him.

Okay, so those are a little bigger than nitpicks when I really think about them, but that doesn't change the fact that I love this movie. I think there are gonna be some people who are tired of the MCU and are gonna have a more cynical read on this film, and I've been dealing with a little bit of that myself. I get where y'all are coming from. So all I can say is I empathize, but agree to disagree. Personally, I did not find any of my fatigue here. I think as far as movies go, the MCU just might be finding its footing again. Thunderbolts was good. I know First Steps has its detractors, but personally, I loved it. And now we've got this.

It doesn’t exist to be homework for the next big move on the MCU's board. You can watch this movie on its own without having seen a single other MCU film and still enjoy the hell out of it. It actually has something to say, talking about loneliness and the lie we often tell ourselves that we can protect others by "staying out of the way."

But it's a movie about how we all need help sometimes, even if we’re Spider-Man. In this era that seems to be more and more pervaded by the death cult that is hyper-individualism, I think it's a movie that we need. It’s the Spider-Man movie for its time and place and actually makes Spider-Man feel like an active character in his own story who''s having a solid, real effect on the world, unlike the other movies in this universe where it just feels like Spider-Man is a passive character whose life is just happening to him.

Again, it's not a perfect movie. It's overstuffed, especially in the second half after Banner’s first scene. I still wish we'd gotten a proper Spider-Man villain from the rogues' gallery. The moral math ain’t moral mathing, again, just like Supergirl.

Oh gee, I wonder if Krispy wrote a Supergirl review too. Is that anywhere out there? God, I’d love to read that.

It's self-contained. It's visually gorgeous. The best action of any Spider-Man film in the MCU, and the best Tom Holland performance to go with it. And the themes carry. Not the best Spider-Man film, but I'd confidently say it's one of the best, because it reminds me why I love Spider-Man at a moment when I didn't realize how badly I needed the reminder. If you haven't seen this movie yet, go see it. For the most part, it earns the hype.

9/10