Have you ever lost a friend? Sure you have – we all have. Maybe you grew apart, maybe the connection was cut abruptly, or maybe you walked away because you knew they were better off without you.
Peter Parker lost his two best friends – Ned and MJ – for that last reason. At the end of Spider-Man: No Way Home, after his beloved Aunt May died amid the chaos unleashed by his exposed identity, he chooses not to make himself known to the two people closest to him. He believes they will be safer without him in their lives.
Years later, he still has not recovered. In Spider-Man: Brand New Day, the world loves Spider-Man again because it has forgotten the flawed, complicated young man beneath the mask. He has become a friendly neighbourhood symbol once more – uncomplicated, dependable and entirely alone.
It is hard to remember who you are without the people who knew you best. Peter, without them, is lost. He not only never found his way home, he has no direction forward, and so he’s stuck in arrested development, going through the motions and keeping tabs on his friends from afar by stalking their social media. When they stop posting, he shows up at their apartment and introduces himself under a false name.
MJ wasn’t just a friend, though. She was the love of his life – and when he sees at a party that she has moved on with another man, something in him breaks. He wakes up the next morning to find that his spider-powers have gone out of control. He’s evolving into something new, and he refuses to accept it.
The changes overwhelm him. Whoever this new person is must be a monster, he thinks. After meeting some familiar names from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, he becomes determined to develop an inhibitor he can stick on the back of his neck, keeping himself forever the same – and potentially doing the same to everyone else.
There’s a lot of Marvelness happening too, of course. Alongside Tom Holland’s Spider-Man, Zendaya’s MJ and Jacob Batalon’s Ned, there’s Jon Bernthal’s Punisher, Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk, Florence Pugh’s Black Widow and Sadie Sink’s she-who-must-not-be-named.
This is supposed to be the grounded Spider-Man film after the over-the-top fantasy of the previous instalment, with a new director Destin Daniel Cretton, physical stunts filmed in actual locations and enough blood, sweat and tears to fill every New York pothole.
The action is certainly better for it. Bodies hit walls, feet touch pavements and New York once again feels like a place Spider-Man actually lives in rather than something assembled around him on a green screen. But while it is more tangible, little of it is memorable. For all the effort put into bringing the character back down to earth, the fights are still the least interesting thing happening to him.
After so many years into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, all of it feels boring, and increasingly like homework. I no longer need to know how everything fits together. I don't need a destructive battle scene. I’m not impressed by a cameo or an end-credits sequence, and superhero-ness in general feels stretched too thin for reinvention.
What I crave are human stories. Endless sequels mean nothing if we don’t get to see how people grow and change. Progress is illusory if choices don’t have consequences.
And the reason Spider-Man: Brand New Day works is because its strongest, most developed thread is precisely that – a simple story about whether Peter can find his way back to the people he lost, after all they’ve been through.
It helps that Holland has developed so much as an actor, even as he’s kept his boyish charm. In one scene, he finds himself alone with MJ, who quickly works out that they were once lovers, kisses him to see if the feelings are still buried within her, and remembers him instantly.
Peter breaks down in tears, overwhelmed by the emotional tidal wave of getting everything he had ever wanted, only to find out soon after that none of it was real.
In reality, there’s no way to undo the things you did, no matter how hard you regret them. And you’ll never find happiness staying who you are forever – even if you’re doing so because that’s the version of yourself that they once loved.
In Peter’s story, all of that holds true. The question is whether he’s willing to accept that the new person he’s becoming may be worthy of love too, both from himself and others.
Is this the best Spider-Man film we’ve ever had? It can’t live up to the verve of Sam Raimi’s first two, and it’s hard to be original with so familiar a character. This version of Peter still feels a little too privileged, too. There’s never any real sense that he struggles for money, even though financial precarity has been fundamental to the character from the outset – one of the things that has always kept him grounded, no matter how extraordinary his life becomes.
But more important than originality is emotional honesty – and this film has it. You may not believe in magic, but you’ll believe in friendship. And it will make you forget its flaws.
