This USA film has Spider-Man trying to protect New York City from new, disturbing threats.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Directed by Distin Cretton. Starring: Tom Holland, Mark Ruffalo, Jacob Batalon, Jon Bernthal, Michael Mando, Zenddaya et al. Rated M (violence). 145m.
Review by Peter W Sheehan, Jesuit Media Australia
The film is based on the Marvel Comics character, Spider-Man. It lies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), a shared Universe containing Superhero films, and is the fourth film in the Spider-Man Series. It is written primarily by Chris McKenna, and Eric Sommers. Tom Holland plays Peter Parker/Spider-Man.
Peter Parker has protected New York City as Spider-Man for a long time, but the city now faces dangerous new threats. The film itself resets the history and status of Spider-Man. The world has forgotten that Peter Parker and Spider Man ever existed, and Spider-Man is now forced to use his Superpowers to protect New York City once more, because the City is experiencing strange, and disturbing new crimes. The film features Micheal Mando as The Scorpion, and he has battled Spider-Man in the past.
To help cope with what is happening, Spider-Man turns to The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo). The film “Spider-Man: No Way Home” (a 1921 action sci-fi movie) was previously presented as the perfect send-off for Peter Parker, and The Hulk enters the franchise again. New York City is being threatened by an unseen foe, and Peter Parker has to cope with a powerful villain that no one can see. He fears he may not have the power to control what is happening to his beloved city and to the world around him, and the film shows the Hulk developing a criminal persona.
The film progresses the series with promise of multiple Spider-Man films to come, and is the first film in a new Spider-Man trilogy. There are too many sub-plots in this film, however, that begin to lose contact with each other, and their emerging complexity starts to challenge the coherence of the Spider-Man series as a whole. While the multiplicity of plots establish a new look for Spider- Man, Tom Holland is also forging fresh character portrayals elsewhere – he plays the young prince of Ithaca, Telemachus, in Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s Ancient Greek epic poem, The Odyssey, that was released in mid-2026.
It will be a major challenge for the next Spider-Man movie to distil the central thrust of the complexity that this film has established. “Brand New Day” is the longest Spider-Man film in the series so far. It is a cavalcade of special effects that are impressive, well produced and photographed, but they come at a cost to thematic unity. The film concludes with an adoring NYC crowd welcoming a critically wounded Peter Parker back as Spider-man, with more special effects ahead.
Peter W. Sheehan, an Associate of Jesuit Media