Hot damn Spider-Man: Brand New Day made me happy.

I’ve been a big fan of the Tom Holland Spider-Man movies. I don’t love them all equally, but I feel like they’ve held onto what really makes a Spider-Man story shine: heart.

These movies aren’t about massive alien invasions, or angry purple men, or any of that (to borrow a phrase from Brand New Day) “big potatoes” stuff. They’re all about small potatoes. When there are “big potato” events, these movies focus instead on the effect those big events have on smaller people in their everyday lives. They focus on how people wrestle with the consequences of those big things on a much smaller and more intimate scale. They’re about struggling to balance the responsibilities of being a hero with the responsibilities of being a regular person, and they’re about the costs of that struggle.

As it turns out…

I like these intimate, personal superhero movies a lot more than I like the big bombastic world-shattering superhero movies. I love the ways that these movies have been better able to deliver powerful emotional and narrative arcs and delve into the complications of everyday life for the characters. Maybe because of that focus, these movies have also mostly avoided the distracting, inaccessible, too-big-to-care conflicts and the repetitive fight scenes that lack meaningful beats or interesting character moments (a weak spot which has dogged Marvel movies for decades).

Again, these movies have been all about that “heart” I mentioned above. They have created meaningful emotional and narrative arcs built first and foremost around coming to terms with personal struggles, with big superhero business taking second billing, and I’ve loved them for it. Specifically, I love Homecoming and No Way Home for doing this so well (Far From Home is good too, it just feels slightly less intimate to me).  Spider-Man: Brand New Day delighted me because it continues to focus so strongly on those themes of the heart, and because it lands the arcs of the previous movies with aplomb.

Side note: yes, I also love the Spider-Verse movies for very similar reasons. I’m not comparing them for now because they’re developed and produced by a totally different creative team (outside of Marvel’s direct control). Rest assured that I think they’re great too, and are good examples of what I love about superhero stories grounded in heart.

So… arcs. Brand New Day picks up where No Way Home left off. If you haven’t seen No Way Home, this is your chance to leave before I spoil it. Know that I love No Way Home and think you should watch it.

I’ll try to avoid spoiling BND for a bit longer, but you might get some light hints and you’ll learn about the beginning of the movie. This will be a bit awkward. I’m going to say some things that seem obvious to me as a writer and genre fiction fan, but which you might not want to be spoiled for.

Ready?

Here there be *SPOILERS*.

No Way Home has a heartwarming bittersweet downer of an ending. It’s well-written, it’s painful; Peter did incredible work offering new chances at life to a bunch of his alternate-reality foes and (with the help of the other Peters Parker) held onto his desire to help people without going full dark-side. But to save reality, he also accepted losing all his connections to the world. Nobody remembers who he is, not even his hero-friends, his best friend, or his girlfriend. Worse, his Aunt May just died and he throws himself into hero-ing to fill the void and… it’s bleak!

I loved that ending. I also worried that it was valorizing a pattern of self-isolation that already has too much brain-share in our culture. I saw the possibility that the movie was setting this up to problematize it later, but in isolation I had mixed feelings about it. Pop Culture Detective has a good short video on this.

Brand New Day resolved my fears. It reassured me that my read of No Way Home’s ending was correct. The first few minutes of Brand New Day show Peter digging himself deeper and deeper and deeper into heroic isolation, telling himself over and over again that he’s “fine.” It’s also obvious that he’s anything but fine. This was a relief.

 Of course, that relief also meant that I knew where the movie was going. A competently written modern movie plot won’t establish this kind of problem in the very beginning of the movie without that problem being central to the story. All the snippets of framing dialogue and all the brief montage moments supported my reading of this. I felt a little like I was watching someone plant gigantic flag after gigantic flag saying “PLOT GOES THIS WAY!”

I wasn’t mad about it. I was too busy having fun. Plus, I was still riding my relief that the movie was taking a direction that I wanted instead of doubling down on a trope that I don’t like.

Now, if you were watching this movie to experience novelty and surprise then this obviousness might be pretty dissatisfying. I mean, I hope you aren’t reading this while still planning to watch Brand New Day in hopes of novelty, because you’re here in the spoiler section. But if someone told me that they didn’t like the movie because it was too predictable, I’d understand.

Despite the predictable trajectory, Brand New Day still gave me what I wanted in ways that I hadn’t realized I wanted. I wasn’t surprised by what happened; I was surprised by how it happened. I was surprised by how well the writers (and everyone else in the creative team) drew on their established stable of characters to push Peter out of his self-imposed isolation and obsession with lonely heroism. The thematic exploration felt extremely Truby-esque, like a how-to of writing characters as variations on your movie’s central theme.

So it’s no surprise that I loved how well those characters made meaningful and poignant contributions to the movie’s themes. But what I really loved was how those characters felt like they remained true to themselves, instead of feeling unbelievable or like they’d been dragged into the film for cheap punchlines or crossover appeal. That was true of all the characters (like Ned and MJ), but I really noticed it with the movie’s treatment of the other MCU headliners.

The MCU has had a bad habit of cheapening their crossover characters or conveniently forgetting those characters’ established growth. I remember this feeling especially bad in the big ensemble Avengers movies, where characters sometimes felt like they’d regressed or were being used to deliver cheap punchlines that didn’t feel connected to them as characters. Maybe that’s an inevitable byproduct of the coordination challenge of making so many movies at once, or the desire to offer a consistent brand of humor and genre across multiple films. Maybe the MCU as a whole has grown out of that habit. I wouldn’t know, I haven’t kept up.

Regardless, Brand New Day felt like a breath of fresh air. The established lead characters who are pulled into supporting roles in Brand New Day (Bruce Banner / The Hulk, and Frank Castle / The Punisher) felt like they were honest to themselves. Their contributions to the story made sense and felt meaningful, and they were sincerely part of BND’s themes and plot. They didn’t feel like tie-ins who were included because this movie needed more connections to the larger MCU. They felt like natural elements of the story. To this movie’s huge benefit, that also meant that their own emotional moments and decisions felt more real and impactful.

I know that’s vague. I’m really trying not to spoil the movie for you, okay? Suffice to say that Bruce Banner and Frank Castle have feels, and their choices and fears and regrets felt right to me. That meant a lot, given how the MCU has previously screwed this particular pooch. 

Jumping subjects: I mentioned this at the top, but fight scenes are another place the MCU has occasionally faceplanted. Some MCU fight scenes are good. Some are just fine. Some are overly flashy yawn-fests padding out the run time to make sure I have to get up and go to the bathroom during the movie.

If you make a fight scene where I can just find out who wins and miss nothing important, your fight scene had damn well better be good. Two obvious (not mutually exclusive) paths to this are to keep things short (so as to not waste viewing time), and delivering artistry (beyond high quality CGI). The problem is that MCU movies don’t regularly deliver a “good-martial-arts-movie” level of fight scene quality, let alone a John Wick film’s level of technical perfection.

But you don’t need to be John Wick-pretty to make fight scenes that don’t hinge on the question of “who wins?” You can make the fight scene meaningful in other ways. You can include powerful narrative beats, or establish and explore other themes and character elements that show up elsewhere in the story. Accented Cinema has several good videos on this and related topics.

The other Tom Holland Spider-Man movies have (mostly) done well with their fight scenes, generally by focusing on the narrative and emotional sides of things rather than fixating on being martial arts movies. While not perfect, their fights haven’t felt as much like filler as Black Panther’s final fight between T’Challa and Killmonger or (sigh) most of the fights in Deadpool & Wolverine.

I think Brand New Day follows that trend with its fight scenes. They’re…

Okay screw it, there are *MORE BRAND NEW DAY SPOILERS* here. Jump to the next big bold text to avoid them.

The big fight in the middle of the movie incorporates fun and interesting thematic foreshadowing with Frank. He wants to help, he does his best to pitch in and support his friend, and he’s ultimately a well-meaning liability when he’s in over his head. But he means well. He is earnestly trying to support Peter. He feels connected to Peter, and he wants to protect Peter if he can. I love that, and it works so well for establishing his choices near the end of the movie as well as clearly showing off his particular take on the central themes of escaping self-imposed isolation and heroic loneliness. That fight also gives us a window into Bruce’s emotional experience, and deepens our understanding of the perspective and advice that he shares with Peter. Finally, the fight lays out vital clues to the final resolution of the plot and sets in motion the movie’s final not-inside-Peter conflict.

It’s good stuff.

The final fight scene feels less multilayered and more predictable. I didn’t like it nearly as much. But that final fight does wrap up one of Peter’s big internal conflicts and neatly sets the stage for the very very good culmination of the movie’s other big conflicts (both internal and external). It’s even pretty.

Okay.

*END SPOILERS*

All of that is to say, I really liked this movie. You probably guessed that from my first line but here we are. Spider-Man: Brand New Day is heartwarming and good and directly counters a trope that I detest, doing everything I’d hoped for at the end of No Way Home and then some.

There are so many extra little details I want to share, but I’ve already put far more time into this than I’d planned on. I strongly recommend that you watch the movie and find those good little things for yourself. Enjoy.