JONESING FOR FILMS

Spider-Man has always been my favorite superhero. I think I have probably started off every review of a Spider-Man movie with that caveat and how I am maybe a little more predisposed to liking them than most other movies. But I don’t think you have to be completely in the bag to say that the Tom Holland Spider-Man films have been very successful and entertaining and top notch MCU movies. Spider-Man: Brand New Day continues that healthy trend.

When last we left our friendly neighborhood webslinger, the world had gone from knowing Peter Parker (Holland) was Spider-Man to nobody knowing his identity after Dr. Strange cast a spell to make everyone forget. This meant losing his girlfriend, Mary Jane (Zendaya), and his best friend, Ned (Jacob Batalon) and watching them go off to college at MIT while he stays in Queens and fights crime anonymously. But his anonymity kept them safe, and it was a personal sacrifice he was willing to make for them.

Four years later, Peter has dived headlong into his crime fighting, becoming beloved by the citizens and trusted by the local police, having taken down several bad guys and a criminal syndicate or two. Meanwhile, MJ and Ned are graduating from MIT and moving back to NYC. While he has kept tabs on them from afar via social media, he has little in his life that constitutes real connections. The urge to try to reintroduce himself into their lives proves too strong, but an all-together new and mysterious threat emerges that present a new and fresh danger to his loved ones.

As Spider-Man: Brand New Day is an MCU movie, there are elements that tie into the larger Marvel mythos. Three pre-existing MCU characters are mixed into the story, Jon Bernthal’s Frank Castle/Punisher, Mark Ruffalo’s Dr. Bruce Banner/The Hulk, and Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova/Black Widow. All three are integrated into the plot with varying degrees of involvement, with Pugh’s Yelena be a glorified cameo role that evoked Margot Robbie in The Big Short. Banner/Hulk is given two scenes, one for scientific plot exposition and then, obviously, for inevitable smashing. Bernthal gets the biggest supporting role as Frank and Spidey have an odd couple working relationship (Bernthal is a blast in this movie).

Sadie Sink also has a role in the movie as the worst kept secret of a characters identity that I’ve seen in quite some time; honestly, I don’t know why the studio even attempted to play coy with it. Having seen the previews and how long it took for Sink to finally appear on screen, I was slightly embarrassed by how long it took me to figure out how her character was going to be involved in the story, and when the lightbulb came on in my brain, it was an, “Oh, yeah, of course” realization. I liked the connection that is created between her character and Spider-Man.

Brand New Day is about more than just the greater MCU, though; it is about the growth and evolution of Peter Parker and Spider-Man. Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2 had Tobey Maguire’s Peter Parker experience some issues with his powers. There is a similar issues in Brand New Day, with Holland’s Peter Parker undergoing a kind of metamorphosis, with a spike in his spider DNA causing an imbalance. This imbalance causes some physical changes, heightens some senses and causes a fluctuation in some others. It also makes Peter more dangerous.

One of the dynamics of Spider-Man, and superheroes in general, has been the duality of the superhero and the alter ego. Peter Parker’s personal life has always suffered because of his calling as Spider-Man and the struggle to find a balance between the man in Peter Parker and the hero in the suit. This is a physical manifestation of the dichotomy and struggle, whether he can fully be Peter Parker and Spider-Man or if one has to be dominant over the the other.

That question also relates to Peter’s nonexistent personal life, how he has allowed himself to be consumed by his work, which he does as a coping mechanism for the loss of Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) and the his friends. A lot of people throw themselves into their work because it keeps them busy and they do not need to deal with their junk or stop and think about things.

Peter Parker is a person who is alone. He leads a lonely existence because he fears endangering the ones he loves. If he keeps people at a distance, they can’t get hurt because of him. Part of the message of Brand New Day is that you can’t do life alone. You have to have community. Peter keeping tabs on the friends from a distance is commentary on how para-social relationships and the loneliness epidemic that plagues a society that increasingly online and isolated.

Holland has put in the work over four Spider-Man movies and several other MCU movies to make Spider-Man his own. I think it safe to say that he is now the definitive Spider-Man, striking the best balance of Peter and Spidey. He has a much more noticeable New York accent in this film than I remember him having in any of the other previous movies. He’s also great with the quips. They go to great lengths to keep him in the suit this time around (apparently this was partly because he was also doing shooting for The Odyssey at the same time).

Another aspect of the film that is handled well is the use the Department of Damage Control, an organization that has evolved from the cleanup post-Avengers after the Battle of New York to a bureaucratic, quasi-governmental organization that is potentially overstepping and abusing civil rights in the name of public safety. Its leader, Bill Metzger (Tramell Tillman), enlists Spider-Man’s help because the unseen threat is trying to infiltrate the DODC.

There are a lot of little bits and pieces that director Destin Daniel Cretton and company have put into this movie that shows love and care for the character and the comic book source material. There are several shots in the movie that are distinctly pulled from the covers of several Spider-Man comic book issues. They do a great job with the fighting and the action. It is perhaps the most Spider-Man movie that most feels like the comic book come to life. It also felt like the Sony Spider-Man games that have been made in the last few years for Playstation, mostly in the weaponry that Spider-Man finds himself against.

The studio took their time with coming out with this fourth Spider-Man movie with Tom Holland under the mask. By all accounts, Holland pushed for them to be sure they had a reason for the movie to exist rather than to just be a cash grab. In my opinion, they succeeded. In doing so, they’ve created a wildly successful blockbuster that managed to break the opening weekend record previously held by Avengers: Endgame. They managed to tell a good story about connection and identity while still laying groundwork for future MCU movies and future Spider-Man stories.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars