Spider-Man: Brand New Day is the first Marvel movie worth really talking about in a hot minute. Tom Holland’s fourth spin as the webslinger feels the most true to Spider-Man’s melodramatic, soap-opera roots the whole way through as Peter Parker swings through a world that has forgotten about him. Despite Peter being in his sad boy era, the movie has some pretty great moments of highs and lows, so we figured we’d run through some of them.
Basically all the body-jumping stuff
Throughout the first half of the film, the presumed antagonist (later revealed as Jean Grey) has some mysterious, then-unknown power to take full control of an individual’s body as long as they are within a certain distance and she can see them. She can then “jump” from that person to any other person within that same range of the body they’re currently inhabiting. This results in multiple very cool scenes where Jean “jumps” from person to person, either in an effort to escape Spider-Man or to reach some other goal faster than him. These scenes end up looking very cool, as you watch a steady domino line of individuals in a big crowd briefly flail as though whomped by some unseen force, one after another, allowing the viewer to follow Jean’s jump progression without actually seeing her character on screen.
I really like all these scenes—it’s a cool idea, a great way to make a superpower visually distinct without using a bunch of fancy effects, and probably took some serious coordination in the moments where it all lines up perfectly in a single shot. My favorite example of this is the first time the power is on display, as Jean jumps from person to person to run against a fleeing crowd in the Damage Control building. There’s one nice, long shot where the camera moves “against” the flow of the crowd and you see everyone running one way while individual people stagger, one after another, as Jean makes her way upstream. It’s just very well done! —Rebekah Valentine
Any scene with Yelena in it
I (Rebekah Valentine) am barely a Marvel fan, and prefer my Marvel with as few Marvel dudes in it as possible so I can just focus on whichever one the story happens to be about. The more extra Marvel guys you add to my Marvel film from other Marvel films, the more irritated I get. Brand New Day was very judicious in its use of bonus Marvel guys, which is one of the reasons why I enjoyed it. It was focused and did not waste a lot of my time trying to set up plots for other things that were not Brand New Day.
It did, however, add a couple of bonus Marvel guys, in the form of Bruce Banner (I’ll get to him momentarily), and Yelena, aka Florence Pugh. Yelena is a permanent exception, for me, to my irritation with bonus Marvel guys being added to other Marvel films. I love her. Florence Pugh is beautiful, Yelena is a goddamn delight of a character, and I chuckle every time I imagine her holding top secret, world-saving, “large potato” meetings in the bath. Ms. Pugh is welcome in any Marvel movie I watch, for as much screentime as she likes. —Rebekah Valentine
Fighting the Hulk
As I just mentioned, Brand New Day does not overuse the rest of the Marvel cast and remains largely focused on Spider-Man. Apart from Yelena, its other main cameo is Bruce Banner, who initially just shows up as Bruce the Professor for a cute scene with him and Peter. I was fine with just this, but then Banner also pops into the big scene at Damage Control while Peter and Frank Castle are trying to capture Jean. Jean is, of course, possessing Banner, and forces him to remove his inhibitor, turning him into the Hulk and causing him to fight Peter and Frank. This scene was lots of fun. It gave Peter someone powerful and properly scary to fight who wasn’t just a series of random nameless dudes with guns, which was sorely needed in a film where the assumed-antagonist is a tortured teenager and the actual antagonist is just A Guy With No Powers. The scene went on exactly long enough, caused a sufficient amount of building destruction, included several fun quips from both Castle and Spider-Man, and at one point everyone almost fell out of and off a building. Excellent stuff! —Rebekah Valentine
“Go ahead, Peter”
Jean Grey is not actually the villain of Brand New Day, but she starts out as an antagonistic force in Spider-Man’s field of view. In that time, she certainly does some monstrous things. The worst of them may be when she takes over the mind of MJ, Peter’s ex-girlfriend who he still pines for after she’s forgotten him, and then puppets her into pretending she remembers her long lost love. The way the movie pulls the rug out from under both Peter and the audience is vicious, offering the catharsis of reunion and then instead giving us a swift kick to the gut. Zendaya’s performance as Jean by proxy is chilling. — Kenneth Shepard
Punisher being cunty for a split second when Jean takes over him
Speaking of actors embodying Jean while Sadie Sink’s character possesses them, Jon Bernthal’s Punisher is usually incredibly self-serious in a way that contrasts with some of the more lighthearted heroism happening on screen. So when he’s briefly possessed by Jean while watching Spider-Man try to fight the Hulk, gingerly walking through the destroyed Damage Control offices and telling Peter, “good luck with that” with Jean’s teenage inflection? He ate. — Kenneth Shepard
“I don’t love you”
Zendaya makes the most of the emotional scenes she has in Brand New Day. Later in the film when MJ has her mind back, she discovers that Peter wrote her a letter he never gave her in which he tried to tell her about the love they shared before Doctor Strange erased him from everyone’s memory. Though she’s clearly moved by the way Peter writes about her, she tearfully tells him that she can’t replicate those feelings she once had. “I don’t love you because I don’t even know you.”
Brutal, but it does get back to some of the more realistic feelings on Peter’s situation that Jean voiced while she possessed MJ, frankly telling Peter that there is no memory of him, no love for him, anywhere in MJ’s mind. Later, the real MJ talks about how any sort of idealistic vision Peter had of their reunion, that if he just said the right thing he could “break the spell” with “true love’s kiss,” isn’t going to happen. MJ is not cruel here, but she is firm. She’s an intuitive, empathetic person, but she can’t create feelings for someone she doesn’t even remember. It’s mature, and the movie doesn’t take the easy route by sweeping all those complicated feelings (or absences of feelings) under the rug. — Kenneth Shepard
The V-Max reveal
Throughout Brand New Day, Jean is looking for her telepathic sister Sara, who has been kidnapped by Damage Control and seemingly held captive. The last communication she had from her sister was a psychic message about something called “V-Max,” and despite her searching, Jean isn’t able to find any mention of it in Damage Control’s systems. It isn’t until Jean is captured herself and taken to the same holding cell where Sara was tested on that she realizes that V-Max was actually just a worn “Vent Max” label on the ceiling vent of the cell. The last thing Sara saw, the final message she could give her sister, was from a meaningless label inside the cell before Damage Control’s telepathic experiments killed her. By this point, the movie has done a good job of positioning Jean as a misunderstood victim of Damage Control, who has only done the things she has in a desperate, destructive attempt to find her sister, no matter the cost. Now the foundation Jean’s walked on this entire movie falls out from under her, and the audience falls with her down into the chasm of despair below. — Kenneth Shepard
“I’m both”
As Peter realizes that Jean is actually a victim in all of this and attempts to save her from Damage Control, he must first convince her that there’s a way out. Jean, ever the analyst picking apart the minds of the people around her, tells Peter that people like them, “special” people, don’t get to live normal lives. Peter has been dealing with this internally throughout the whole film as he tries to suppress his growing spider-DNA and try to simply be human. For all this time, he’s viewed his roles as Spider-Man and Peter Parker as incompatible with one another, using dangerous tech to try to keep the Spider side in check. In order to reach Jean, he finally lets the internal wall down, and decides that these two sides of him are only in conflict with each other if he views them as being in opposition to one another.
“Are you Peter Parker or are you Spider-Man?”
“I’m both.” — Kenneth Shepard
The crowd goes wild for Spider-Man
After the fighting is over and Peter has been hospitalized, New York City is rallying around Spider-Man, waiting outside his hospital and cheering him on as he recovers. Once Peter’s able to walk out, Frank puts on his mask and waves to a crowd of people to signal to them that Spider-Man is okay and distracting them so that Peter is able to slowly walk through the crowd, invisible to them, but still able to soak in all the love and support. Despite every trial and tribulation Peter has dealt with, he at least has moments like this to help him remember why he protects the city in the first place. — Kenneth Shepard
The handshake
The final moment of the movie shows Peter reuniting with his best friend Ned and, despite the latter having forgotten him, doing their signature, elaborate, corny handshake. Though the specifics of what Ned might know are left ambiguous, to the point where fans cannot stop debating what they think is happening in this moment, whatever it all means, Peter at least knows there’s a future where he doesn’t have to keep being Spider-Man alone. — Kenneth Shepard
