Spider-Man: Brand New Day is all about letting go of the MCU we loved

“Are you Peter Parker? Or are you Spider-Man?”

You can boil Spider-Man: Brand New Day down to this essential question asked of our hero in the climactic showdown. It is a film about dichotomies. Man vs monster. Hero or villain. As all superhero films are, it is a film about identity. Peter Parker made a choice to give up who he was, even his name, to protect those he loved. He chose to become Spider-Man above all else, which is where the film begins.

More than anything, however, Destin Daniel Cretton’s film feels mostly about two different Marvel Cinematic Universe’s. Not in the literal, multiverse sense the series has spent the last five years playing in, indeed this is one of the few projects Marvel have done lately that doesn’t go anywhere near that broader concept. Rather, the idea of old and new approaches to a franchise that has dominated cinematic popular culture over the last two decades.

Until recently, that is, where despite continued healthy box office receipts, the MCU has lost a step within that cultural firmament. Since the dawning of Avengers: Endgame, few Marvel movies have felt like appointment viewing. The last one truly in that vein, with a billion-dollar box office to show for it, was Spider-Man: No Way Home no less, but probably because it avoided the bigger MCU narratives to bring together a broad, unified Spider-Man universe of three different versions of the character and allow much needed closure for Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield’s incarnations.

That film if anything felt more like a Doctor Who multi-Doctor story, focused primarily on celebrating the wider Marvel cinematic past while developing the ongoing story. Avengers: Doomsday could be heading for a similar approach, as I recently suggested, and maybe the mixture will be as successful. In Brand New Day, it is more diffuse. Cretton’s film underscores the problem the MCU has grappled with since Endgame. How do you reconcile a series with so many characters, so many strands, so many universes now, without compromising the essentials of each individual project?

Therefore in Brand New Day, we of course get the comedown for Tom Holland’s web-slinger after his magic-infused sacrifice at the end of No Way Home, and how he reconciles being part of the life of his lost love MJ (an excellent Zendaya, threading a tricky character needle) and best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon) when neither of them remember anything about him. Yet at the same time, Cretton’s film throws in Bruce Banner/The Hulk, Frank Castle\The Punisher, a cameo from Yelena Belova/Black Widow, and particularly the introduction of Jean Grey, as played here by Sadie Sink rather than Famke Janssen or Sophie Turner.

To criticise an MCU film for wearing various hats at once almost feels disingenuous now. Almost every film since 2008 has had one foot in the future while telling a present story. There is no true standalone MCU vehicle, even those only distantly tethered to everything else going on. Brand New Day does even by that degree egregiously try and point toward the future of the franchise while trying to give Spider-Man fans what they want. Jean Grey is expressly a link not to Doomsday but the Avengers film to follow, Secret Wars, with the open secret of that film being it will presage the biggest full-scale reboot and reconciling of the MCU to date.

Brand New Day, at the same time, fights to be an MCU film of old, perhaps even indicative of the early days of what became the ‘Infinity Saga’ or even akin to independent Marvel films before the formation of the MCU. Spider-Man in an extended prologue leans into the role best-known from the comics - the friendly neighbourhood hero foiling robberies across New York or stopping more resolutely small-scale, albeit outlandish villains such as Scorpion (Better Call Saul’s Michael Mando). The kind of bad guys more interested in controlling a city rather than destroying entire universes.

The MCU has perhaps inured us too greatly with those kind of reality-altering bad guys, whether it be Thanos or Kang or Galactus or now Dr. Doom to come. In the old days, our villains were grand in their own way but far smaller in scale, such as Dr. Octopus or even the Green Goblin. Iconic themselves but proportionate. Even early MCU films cleaved to these kinds of villains, be it Iron Monger or the Abomination. As the franchise has expanded, so has the scale of film and associated threat. Brand New Day tries to put Spider-Man back on street level, and works best when he is.

The temptation remains to include bigger fish. Mark Ruffalo is always fun as Banner but what does this really tell us of the Hulk that we didn’t already know? Much as Jon Bernthal, falling unexpectedly in the Peter-mentor role we have previously seen Robert Downey. Jr or Samuel L. Jackson essay, is great fun here, surely this PG-13, anti-hero with a heart portrayal of the Punisher will make comic purists wince? As for Jean, much as Sadie Sink is good casting for an angst-filled redhead after Stranger Things, this is just her origin story. Her time will come in the post-Secret Wars age.

Ultimately, the dichotomy between old and new MCU is one that Brand New Day cannot reconcile. Returning to the question posed at the beginning of this piece, Peter—having gone through his own personal and physical metamorphosis across the picture—responds with:

“I’m both!”

Brand New Day is a prologue of change. It wants us to remember we can preserve the MCU we’ve loved, hence flashbacks Peter has to the earlier films and even a brief, etherial moment where Marisa Tomei’s Aunt May appears to dispense key advice to Jean (sort of), in a scene that oddly reminded me of what happened to Thanos after the snap. It wants to equally embrace the change this heralds, the evolution the MCU is about to take, and in some respects let go of our attachment to what came before. Some of the characters in this film represent the past, others arguably the future.

In the end, as Peter does, we can embrace both of these things. Spider-Man: Brand New Day somewhat awkwardly tries to play in both sandboxes, in the end as a result failing to capture the same magic Tom Holland’s previous films in the role managed to do, so one hopes the ‘new boss, same as the old boss’ future of this franchise gets back to more cleanly balancing stories of now and stories to come. You can’t help leaving this film feeling however, even while it promises Spider-Man will return, that something is over. Something we’ll never quite get back in the same way.

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