What I liked most about Spider-Man: Brand New Day is that Peter Parker finally feels like an adult. I’ve always liked Tom Holland as Spider-Man, but now that Peter is older and closer to my age, I found him much more relatable. He’s living alone, struggling with normal responsibilities, and trying to figure out what his life is supposed to look like. He feels like what Spider-Man is supposed to be: a normal person living in a city who also happens to have superpowers.
I was especially interested in this movie because of how No Way Home ended. Everyone forgetting Peter was such a weird and lonely place to leave the character, and I really wanted to see what his life would actually look like afterward. There was an edit of the movie set to Noah Kahan’s Godlight that got me even more excited to see it because it captured that lonely version of Peter so well. Thankfully, Brand New Day actually commits to it. Peter doesn’t immediately get MJ and Ned back and return to normal. We get to see them living their own lives without him, while he has to awkwardly figure out how, or even if, he should become friends with them again.
I actually missed MJ and Ned being part of Peter’s life, but I think that’s part of why their absence works. Peter pours himself into being Spider-Man because he doesn’t really have anything else. That felt very real to me. People do that with their jobs all the time without realizing how much they need other people around them. The movie doesn’t beat you over the head with that idea either. Peter is lonely, but the movie never becomes miserable.
That more grounded approach carries over into Spider-Man himself. I liked seeing him work with the police and actually feel like a New York superhero again. Hulk surprisingly fits into that too. Even though he’s obviously a huge MCU character, his involvement didn’t feel like the movie screaming, “Look who showed up!” He was just another problem happening in the city. I also liked seeing a more dangerous Hulk again. It felt more real than some of the lighter versions we’ve gotten recently. This was also my first real exposure to Punisher, and I thought he worked well, even if the whole “Punisher kills, Spider-Man doesn’t” dynamic was pretty much what I expected.
The villain was probably one of the weaker parts for me. I liked the mystery surrounding her and not knowing exactly what she was doing, but I also didn’t leave the theater dying to learn more about her. The action, on the other hand, worked really well. Keeping things more physical and street-level made the fights feel more exciting to me than another giant CGI battle. The humor was still there too, but it never felt overbearing. I liked that this was a more serious Spider-Man movie and that the emotional moments were allowed to actually be emotional.
My biggest issue was probably the ending. It dragged a little, and eventually I started feeling the larger MCU creeping back into a movie that had worked so well without it. Some of the setup for whatever comes next felt unnecessary. The best parts of Brand New Day are Peter dealing with his own life and protecting New York. I would have been perfectly happy if the movie stayed in that world all the way through the credits.
I don’t know if I’d call Brand New Day better than No Way Home, because they’re trying to do completely different things. What I do know is that I really like this version of Peter Parker. He’s more mature, more isolated, and somehow more human because of it. No Way Home made me excited to see what Peter’s life would look like when nobody knew who he was. Brand New Day gave me the answer I was hoping for.