A Brand New Day for Spider-Man

Like many kids of my generation, I grew up with a general fondness for superheroes. But none compared to my love for Spider-Man and the X-Men: the outsiders, underdogs, and nerds. It didn’t hurt that I shared a first name with Peter Parker, or that the original Spider-Man and X-Men movies came out at formative parts of my childhood.

I no longer have that same level of childhood investment in superhero stories. But there will always be a special place in my heart for Spider-Man. That’s part of the reason I’ve been so disappointed in the recent output of movies about the character, which have felt like largely lifeless, craven attempts to capitalize on IP rather than real stories set in those worlds. I hated the decision to make Spider-Man the mentee of a tech billionaire who fights with autonomous drones, and the MCU movies lacked the color, vibrancy, and personality of the Raimi series. I liked some things about the new movies – Zendaya is tremendous as MJ, Tom Holland is a great fit as Peter Parker, the first two movies had interesting villains, and there’s a general youthful energy to the whole thing. But I remained skeptical about the newest movie, Brand New Day, even after the extremely positive reception.

Then I saw it, and was mostly delighted. It has some of the same quirks that make the MCU an occasionally exhausting project, but it’s a real movie about real things that confronts my issues with the previous three movies directly, moving Spider-Man out of the shadow of Iron Man and back to being Peter Parker, an overworked and overwhelmed kid just trying to do his best.