Each new day is another opportunity. To fuck things up again.
dir: Destin Daniel Cretton
2026
Tom Holland must feel like King / Queen of the World at the moment. He’s in the two biggest films of the year, one being the critically acclaimed and commercially successful Odyssey, and the other being this ninth Spider-Man movie, Brand New Day, which has made a billion dollars in less than a week.
But there are more important things than money, apparently. He got married too, to Zendaya, and every second woman on public transport keeps reposting that video of him dancing and lip-synching to Rihanna’s Umbrella in a manner that goes well beyond mere thirst.
So, all in all a good year. He will be, as long as he stays away from drugs and doesn’t do anything stupid, which is hard for any of us to do, riding on a wave that he has earned from putting in the hard yards for over a decade. It is weird thinking of him as this perennial ‘kid’. He’s 30 now. The character he plays, like all the Spider-Men, is still usually thought of as a boy.
But even here he cannot stop the march of time or the tide, and he is playing someone who, like most people who get older, cannot hide his disappointment that life didn’t turn out the way he wanted.
Because of a noble, selfless decision he made at the end of the last Spider-Man movie, No Way Home, he has lost the two people he still had in his life (after his beloved Aunt May’s death), the people he knew best in this life and loved the most. He lost them in the sense that all their memories of him were gone by the end of the film, so they got to live without him, and he had to live without them.
As a plot device, a letter written to maybe give to someone, clutched tightly to the chest, is so quaint, and so terrible, and having such a tremendous impact on a story makes you feel like you’re not watching a superhero movie made and set in the 2020s: you feel like maybe you’re trapped in an epistolary novel from the 1800s or earlier, where the discovery of a single letter can have such devastating effects on a whole host of townsfolk. Used as a plot device, allowing someone, whether it’s the villain in this flick or the villain in, say, The Dark Knight Rises to find out something he otherwise would never have known, is beyond risible. It’s faintly embarrassing. We tend to skip over things like this because, well, we don’t want to seem petty, but in this instance, I am the jerk that won’t let it go. It’s bad and the writers who wrote it should feel bad.
About the kindest argument I can think of is that sure, maybe it’s dumb, but it’s necessary. So much of modern life is excused in such a fashion, so I guess I have to go along with it lest this becomes a rant on clouds and their various configurations.
The opening half hour is very tightly controlled. It’s showing the passage of time over about three or four years, and it’s showing how Peter deals with both his Auntie-appointed role as the protector of New York / Queens, uneasily working alongside the police (in the form of the great Liza Colon-Zayas (best known currently for playing Tina in The Bear, I would think, but she does ok here in a tiny role), who tolerate him even though the ‘climate’ around heroes has significantly changed.
That change in vibe can best be described as having gone from “save us oh mighty heroes” to “so what valuable nutrients can we extract from these hero’s corpses?”
Sure, he’s a superhero, but he’s not saving the world, or the universe, or even the solar system. He’s just looking after his town. Of course it’s a massive town with a population of 8.6 million souls, so that’s a lot of crims, of both the regular and enhanced kind.
His greatest problem, like for most of us, isn’t the events of years ago like when he got turned to dust for five years of oblivion, but social media. He keeps watching the friends he had to let go of on IG living their lives at MIT, smashing it as students, and basically living utterly fulfilled lives completely oblivious to his existence. All he does is fight crime, yearn for what he used to have, and once a year buy flowers and visit Aunt May’s grave.
Yearning. So much yearning. Longing, too.
Ned (Jacob Batalon) and MJ (Zendaya) get through their various years of study, make other friends and seem pretty happy without him. Conspicuously happy without him. It’s almost like they’re taunting him. He clutches a letter he was about to give MJ at the coffee shop she used to work at that explains their connection to each other, but he keeps chickening out, or sniffing the letter to scent his own tears, or variations thereof.
It’s sad. I felt sad for him. It’s not completely bathetic, as in, it’s not like he’s writing atrocious poetry or taking out his frustrations on people who look like MJ or Ned (by befriending lookalikes or, even way worse, dating them). But he can’t stop himself from getting somewhat close to them (sometimes by chance, sometimes clearly by choice), and then pulling away, thinking that, if I could leave them be for their own safety for so many literal years, I should continue leaving them alone so that they continue to be safe.
An excellent strategy for continued mental health and equilibrium.
Sanity is overrated anyway. As he is isolated and sad, he forgets the poetic dictum John Donne set into stone four centuries prior when he declared that no man is an island, entire in itself; every man is a piece of the continent. That it is our connections to each other that make us or keep us human.
Connections, you say? The delicate web of connections that weaves us all into a tapestry of love, kindness and meaning? What’s a Spider-Man to do?
Well, without those connections he becomes more spider than man. Literally. His hormones and DNA start changing in response to his trauma, and it seems like his ‘true’ nature, of what he is becoming, begins butting heads with the constrained technological version of himself that he’s been living with thus far.
The solution clearly is more technology and more repression. He visits someone who should have learnt something by now about repressing his emerging, disturbing changes, and that person is Dr Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), lecturing somewhere to students who only want to ask stupid questions about why Thanos did or didn’t do certain things all those years ago.
To which the answer, inevitably, is “Hulk Smash”.
When engaged in conversation with Peter, Banner intuits that there is a dark purpose behind their discussions. The good doctor has mastered some technological marvel that prevents him from going green whenever he’s angry, hangry or horny, and Peter wants to replicate it himself through an inhibitor chip, and Peter’s like “that’s the answer to all my prayers, and hopefully the headaches and unintended ejaculations of spider-silk all over the place will also stop.”
But Bruce is like “no, my dude, what if you need to make these changes? What if you have to change?”
Peter is in denial, but it’s not helping that another threat, yet another enemy, emerges from nowhere to make his life hell.
While pursuing a runaway tank through city streets, which also results in a certain gun-totting psychopath coming out of the Netflix series and now Disney+ woodwork in order to antagonise / help Spidey, stopping the tank results in a person inside it acting like a smartarse for a few seconds and then going “what’s going on, how did I get here?” It’s the antagonist / villain that’s really hard to get right in “these” kinds of flicks, which is an enemy who can flit about taking over people’s consciousnesses seemingly at will. Whoever is doing it has a plan and no compunctions about getting people killed.
The government, in the form of Damage Control, is run in this instance by Bill Metzger, and though he feigns friendliness to Spider-Man, he is clearly a piece of shit because he’s a high level bureaucrat. No level of bureaucrat has ever been anything but a piece of shit in any film ever, or in any government department ever. You would think that it would help that he’s played by Tramell Tillman, who I adore as Mr Milchick on Severance, but here he doesn’t get to play the role sassy or salty at all, and there’s little to the role being anything other than blandly evil (which is such a shame, because he’s so good at it).
Nothing is less trustworthy than a person who tells you to trust them. No-one is less on the up and up than some who tells you their purpose in life is to take dangerous potential threats (like the red clad ninjas known as The Hand who he keeps parading around), and making them safe and productive members of the organisation. It’s the how of it that makes is all so evil.
So this powerful, metaphysical opponent has it in for Damage Control, and for Spidey, who she resents because she can’t get inside his head, and she really does end up doing some remarkably cruel things to him. Horrible, manipulative, life-destroying things, but they really do further the plot along, and they do force Spidey to look in on MJ and Ned, which is all we could ever ask for.
Plot, plot, plot, no-one, ironically, should care about plot in a flick like this. This didn’t make a billion in less than a week because of its plot. It made it because of goodwill. It made it because of hope. It made it because Spider-Man, the character, and how well realised he is by Tom Holland, stands somewhat apart from all the other superhero films and the fatigue we keep being told kicked in twenty films ago.
What does he have that other superhero characters don’t? This might sound superficial, but I think it really comes down to how well they portray him moving around the city on lines of spider silk. It’s that motion we can’t get enough of, and the (when it works) brilliant way they incorporate that into the action sequences where he’s trying to protect a bunch of people or capture the evil doers.
Other heroes fly, sure, but he swings.
For my money, in my opinion, in my humble estimation, there are sequences here as good as the best these flicks since the 1st one with Tobey Maguire ever managed, and that this flick achieves the almost impossible, in that I feel it’s almost as good as Spider-Man 2, which has been the pinnacle for decades. Of course I’m not ignoring the Miles Morales animated ones which thus far have been superb, but it’s way easier to do in animation what they do versus making it look credible in “live” action, which lets face it is mostly digital effects anyway.
But it looks so great… the opening fight with the tank and the Punisher is pretty amazing, but the one where he’s fighting the Scorpion is also pretty strong, when he’s fighting and trying to survive the Hulk going ape shit is pretty amazing. But the pinnacle of action sequences is probably the one where he fights a hive mind collective controlling all the Hand ninjas in the Damage Control facility while an innocent villain was being tortured, where anyone else but Spidey would have been cut to shreds a thousand times over.
And yet the finale, the climax, the catharsis is not in a huge explosion or in a smackdown showdown that levels a city block: it comes from Spidey letting someone see that they’re not completely alone.
And, oh, of course, Spidey yet again sacrificing himself to save someone else.
As shocked as I was by that sequence, I never thought, we weren’t meant to think he was going to, you know, crawl up like he’d been sprayed with Mortein. It was still shocking, and it did make me say out loud “Frank, you fucking idiot”, but I’m still glad Spidey saved his enemy in the end.
This film was glorious. It looked amazing, so many compositions were sublime, and I even loved the framing of the shots over the end credits (the post credit scene was nothing, don’t stick around, you’re not missing anything). Best of all, Tom shines as this character, buff as all hell, confused, sad, hopeful and really one of the goodest of good guys.
His Spidey is now the new benchmark. Act accordingly.
8 times there’s no hope with MJ, but maybe there’s some hope with Ned? out of 10
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“My sister died in this room surrounded by these men. And her only crime was that she was special. Just like you. Just like me. People like us don't get to live a normal life. We don't get to have friends or a family. Those people are gone. That life is over. So why don't you just be honest with yourself? Are you Peter Parker or are you Spider-Man?” – neither, he’s Umbrella Man! - Spider-Man: Brand New Day
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