Brand New Day - Review: The MCU Locks In For The First Time in Years

 This movie has so many good elements but I still feel like it was missing something. The action is the best its been in a decade, Holland’s Peter feels like he’s finally grown up, and you can tell Cretton & Co really do actually give a fuck, which is something that’s been sorely missing in Spider-Man movies since Raimi stopped making them. The best part of the movie is Peter’s arc, I think it’s something new and inventive that is executed very well by all involved. Every part of the movie all plays into his arc, and that’s sorta the problem. There’s so much going on and it feels like the rest of the cast doesn’t get to be developed outside of the immediate story, this is the fourth movie in a row where Ned and MJ don’t really have character arcs despite Zendaya’s stellar acting selling the emotions of MJ really well. Despite this, I think the movie still largely succeeds because of Holland and Cretton’s direction, they’re both really good at what they do and they’re finally being allowed to do what they want with Spidey. If you’ve wanted Holland to go through a real emotional journey, I think this movie has a lot of stuff for you.

Spoilers beyond this point!

Like I said earlier, I feel like the movie is missing something, and that something is a Spidey villain. With a big movie like this that tries to bring Spider-Man back to basics, I think it was a really weird choice to make the villain Jean Grey and use it as a tease for the X-Men movie that will inevitably come out after the Doomsday reboot. Her journey feels very disconnected from Spidey’s until the end, and I think the movie suffered a bit because it didn’t have a clear throughline with a villain that actively wants his demise, I think Scorpion could’ve been really good as a villain but he was unfortunately only used as cannon fodder by Jean. I like the theme of accepting your “mutation” but did we need an actual mutant to get that message across? I just wish there was an actual Spider-Man villain driving the plot forward instead of her. Despite this, Sink is still really good. I appreciate the role she has in the story, her story was good and believable and I think Peter accidentally inventing a mutant cure is a fascinating thing to explore later on. Her powers in the former half of the movie are really cool, there’s some trippy sequences with body hopping that I actually loved to watch, and her origin is well done to the point where I’m actually excited to see where she goes from here, I just wish it didn’t take away from this movie.

MJ and Ned continue to suffer from these movies' lack of focus on the supporting cast. It’s more acceptable with this movie since the whole movie is about how Peter is choosing to not focus on them, but I just wish they had more things to do in any of these movies. Ned has never had an arc outside of guy-in-the-chair jokes and MJ is very well acted but she also didn’t really do anything in the last 3 movies, which makes the stuff in this movie not hit as hard for me unfortunately. I just miss when the Coffee Bean gang was as well developed as Spider-Man himself, and the MCU seems to be uninterested in developing them extensively like that. Despite this, the stuff with MJ in this movie still pretty much works for me. Holland and Zendaya are at the absolute top of their game and I think the scenes focused on the drama between them are probably the best part of the movie! I like how it doesn’t really get resolved, they are forced to just live with that love inside them forever waiting, it’s a beautiful tragedy. The movie just suffers from not focusing on MJ’s emotional journey as much, you literally have THEE Zendaya to play her and she still only has a few scenes! It’s so fucked up! Really, I think the movie needed 1 more throughline throughout besides Peter’s arc to be truly amazing, whether it be a different or tweaked villain or focusing more on MJ. His arc is very good and I think the plot serves it well, and I love the main theme of isolation and loneliness because being lost in your 20s is the exact kind of arc Spider-Man needs right now in our current cultural moment. It just needed an extra push to make it truly spectacular.