Ten out of ten. I have not handed a superhero film that number in a very long time, and I was planning my second viewing before the credits finished rolling.
Full spoilers from here. Brand New Day opened five days ago and I went in nearly clean myself, so if you are still dodging everything, close the tab and come back once you have seen it.
The swinging got me before the story did
I want to start with the web-swinging, because it landed on me before a single plot beat did.
There is a sequence in the Battlestar Galactica remake, the first real sortie, where the Vipers launch against the Cylons and the camera behaves like a documentary crew that got dragged into a war by accident. Snap zooms. Focus hunting. Ships whipping past the lens too fast to track. I sat forward in my chair the first time I watched it, and I have never entirely shaken that reaction. It is most of why that show worked when it had no business working.
Destin Daniel Cretton’s swinging scenes did the same thing to my stomach. It is shot to make you feel the drop and the catch rather than to present a man in a suit tracing a tidy arc across a skyline. You feel the height. You feel the half-second where the line goes taut and the whole body snaps forward.
Every Spider-Man film has had good swinging. This one made it frightening and joyful in the same shot, and it did that inside the first five minutes, before I had reached a single reveal.
What I had missed was the two of them
I did not go in expecting to be emotional about casting. Then Tom Holland and Zendaya were on screen together and I realised how much I had missed watching these two specific actors play these two specific people. You’d think after the Odyssey I’d have had enough of them, but you’d be wrong!
Their chemistry is the quiet engine of this entire run. Peter and MJ as the two of them write it, in the gaps between lines as much as in the lines, is the most believable teenage relationship the MCU has managed. And No Way Home ended by taking it away in the cruellest possible fashion. She is alive. She is fine. She is standing right there, and she has no idea who he is.
I spent a lot of this film wanting them magically back together. I know that is not how the story works, and I know the wanting is the point. I wanted it anyway.
Jon Bernthal is still the best casting Marvel has done
The Punisher is the standout of the supporting cast, and Jon Bernthal is playing him exactly as the books wrote him. Not a softened version. Not a misunderstood-outsider version with a redemption arc waiting in act three. Frank Castle, doing what Frank Castle does, with all the moral arithmetic that has always made him uncomfortable to read and impossible to look away from.
The scene where he roars while unloading into the Hulk is the best straight action beat in the movie. It is also perfectly in character: a man with guns against a thing guns do not work on, who keeps firing because stopping is not something he knows how to do. His earlier shooting is just as good. Nobody in this universe handles a weapon like he does, and it is because the actor decided a long time ago that Frank is not a superhero and never plays him as one.
I have been in on this casting since Daredevil Season 2. Ten years on, he has not slipped an inch.
This Hulk is finally a monster
The Hulk here is bigger. Meaningfully, wrongly bigger, in a way the MCU has mostly avoided since it decided Bruce Banner should be a likeable science guy in a cardigan. This version reads as something that should not exist, and the film is not shy about what he can do.
What he does is demolish Spider-Man. Not narrowly beat him. Demolish him.
That is the correct read on the character. The Hulk I grew up reading, the one on all those covers, was never a superhero with anger issues. He was a disaster that happened to be pointed away from us that week. Seeing a film finally treat him as the monster in the room, rather than the team’s heavy artillery, is worth the ticket by itself.
Jean Grey, the reveal, and the part I am arguing with
Jean Grey’s reveal is one of the film’s better swings, and it is also where most of my complaints live.
She is played far too young. The Jean in my head is the Claremont-era adult, a woman carrying the Phoenix and the consequences of it, and this Jean reads as a schoolgirl. The character did debut in 1963 as a teenage Marvel Girl, so there is a defence available. A defence is not the same as it working on screen, and it did not work for me.
The turn to villain landed better. Outside of the Dark Phoenix run, which is the whole reason Inferno sits so high on my X-Men list, Jean has always been one of the reliably good ones. Making this version a person who quietly takes control of other people is genuinely unsettling, and it is the kind of choice I did not see coming.
The new sibling I would cut. It does not earn its screen time and the same job could have been done another way.
Are mutants just here now?
The reveal opens a much bigger question than the character does, and I have not stopped chewing on it since.
I have seen the Doomsday trailers. The X-Men are in it, and I had assumed they were arriving from another universe, borrowed for an event and returned afterwards. If Jean is in this film as a native, then mutants are simply part of this timeline. They have been here the whole time.
That is an enormous unlock. Every mutant story worth telling runs on the world knowing what they are and being frightened of it, and the MCU has never had that texture available before. If they commit to it, the next decade of stories gets a great deal more interesting than another sky-portal.
Three things that did not add up
The distance limitation on Jean is established early and then bypassed once she has taken MJ. I never worked out how. If a rule matters enough to state out loud, it matters enough to break deliberately and show the audience why.
Peter’s finances bother me more, and this one is my own fault for loving how the last film ended. I spent a whole review praising the image of him broke, anonymous and hand-sewing his suit in a tiny apartment, because that is the comics character. Fine. So who is paying the rent? Where is the food coming from? Where is he sourcing suit materials, and the hardware for all the hacking and building he does across this movie? Poverty is a wonderful character note. It is a terrible logistics plan.
Third, and this is more curiosity than complaint: Ned and MJ are written as seriously brilliant, which I like enormously, because Peter being the only smart one in the room has always flattened his friends. But are actual MIT students operating at that level? Genuine question. Somebody tell me.
The spider inside him
The arachnid genome taking over his body is the thread I understand least and want to see most.
His declaration that he is both Peter and Spider-Man is very well played, and it clearly gives him the control he needs to hold the thing inside him in place. It also functions as a straight power-up. His speed jumps. His senses jump. He can shoot webbing directly now, which puts him back in line with the original character in a way the MCU has been dancing around for four films.
Where this gets interesting is the scaling. As a teenager with borrowed tech and no upgrades at all, he already fought Bucky, Falcon and Captain America to a standstill in the airport. In this film he takes the Hulk’s worst while actively inhibited and keeps getting back up.
Take the inhibitor away and I genuinely do not know where the ceiling is. That is not a criticism. That is the thing I most want the next film to answer.
The verdict
Ten out of ten, and I will be watching it again.
I ran through Homecoming, Far From Home and No Way Home in the week beforehand, which I would recommend to anyone going. They hold up as one continuous story about a kid being stripped of everything he leans on, and Brand New Day is the film where he stops leaning and stands on his own.
I went in wanting to enjoy a Spider-Man movie. I came out wanting to know what he is now.