Brand New Day, True to Form Spiderman - How Spiderman: Brand New Day Respects the Material and Tells a Powerful Story

It feels good to really love something you’ve been waiting for for a long time. These days it’s been hard to get me on the MCU hype train for any reason, as it felt almost like we were in the last gasps of a franchise that had been THE thing for decades. But I love Spiderman, and ever since Into the Spiderverse, there’s no Marvel main character I want to see more than our friendly neighborhood Spiderman.  

Now, for a bit of background, I wasn’t a comic book kid growing up other than some Archie and Jughead or Batman once in a while, so I don’t have a depth of knowledge going back to Issue #1 and I certainly didn’t really have a lot of exposure to our webslinging hero outside Toby Maguire and Andrew Garfield’s portrayals before we got to where we are now.  Which is a shame, because the whip-smart, quippy, caring Peter Parker/Spidey/Miles Morales isn’t just impressive for brains, brawn and wit, he’s actually literally the people’s hero. He's there when your cat climbs a tree, and he's there when your apartment gets blown up by some rage filled villain. Heck, he's at the bodega you go to grabbing some milk. It's humanizing and grounding and lends a fantastical universe full of superheroes, gods and aliens a sense of reality. 

I’ve gotta be honest, though. When the movie kicked off with Punisher and Spidey in the midst of a heated argument/action scene, I wasn’t super thrilled. Sure, that’s opening the door for Daredevil to be around the next corner, but I’ve long considered The Punisher problematic. In a world where superheroes are trying to do the right thing and be heroic, I found Punisher to lean way more towards a villain, only in it for “justice” which in his case was mostly revenge. No room for nuance, no time for research. Only kill. And, well, that’s not a world I want to live in, nor a person I want to be around.

But, just like with this movie, there’s so much more to it.

Let’s get into it.

Brand New Day clearly starts on a Monday. Or at least, that’s how it feels. “Previously on” Spiderman, Peter Parker was forced to give up the love of his life to protect her, and worse still, had to make MJ and Ned forget him. 

This isn’t a small thing for anyone, but this is most of Peter Parker’s world being taken from him and simultaneously paraded in front of him so he can’t heal from it. Not to cross the fandom streams too much, but Peter Parker’s a lot like Miles O’Brien from Star Trek. They both must suffer. It’s not for nothing though - again, it’s part of what makes him who he is, and part of what binds him to his “friendly neighborhood” moniker. He’s not a millionaire, but his parents are dead. And his uncle, and his aunt. He’s just a kid, but he’s seen a lot more than most kids his age. He’s incredibly smart, sure, and had friends like Tony Stark (who he also lost) but at the end of the day, he’s isolated.

Peter Parker needs his community the way the community needs him. The place he grew up is the place he connects to the people he loved and lost. Four years after the forgetting, it’s more or less all he’s got, other than the Punisher, who, despite his gruff demeanor and constant bitching, seems to hold some affection for Spider-Man, even if begrudgingly.

Not to put too fine a point on the “grounding” nature of the story, but were you to be a masked superhero trying to save lives and not get your identity revealed, your life WOULD be pretty lonely. Even lonelier if all you could do is watch your friends move on to fulfill their big dreams and the person you love make out with some other dude right in front of your face. Add to this some sort of spider puberty and you’ve got a recipe for some severe misery.  

Misery loves company, and while he’s doing the regular neighborhood patrols like some sort of automaton, we find out there’s a bigger bad lurking in the wings. Sure, Scorpion’s enough on his own while we’re going through spider-puberty, but now there’s something worse, and more insidious - and it’s infiltrating minds, bouncing from person to person - and worse, still - targeting Spiderman. 

Before long it’s pulling some awful tricks, too. It gets a hold of MJ, and in one of the most heartbreaking scenes I’ve seen recently, lets Peter get that moment he’s probably thought of over and over and over in the last four years - the relief of being remembered - only to have that beautiful reuniting kiss and get it all yanked away.  Of course it wasn’t her. And of course, MJ isn’t safe. That’s why the forgetting was so important.

Now, where can Spiderman possibly turn? If only there was a hypervigilant friend of his that had a big off the grid bunker in town that’s nigh impenetrable, and if only that person also had a mind so hyperfocused on not letting one more person lose the love of their life the way he did. 

Oh wait, we know that guy. That’s the Punisher. And what’s the Punisher’s superpower? He’s a combat veteran struggling with PTSD.  That’s not a joke, that’s a fact. The Punisher is an elite soldier who has excelled in every area of his training. Not only that, he’s locked in soldier mode because of, you guessed it, massive trauma. Frank Castle believed fully in what he did, and he does it well. But it didn’t keep him from losing the love of his life, and it’s the pain of having that taken away from him that drives almost everything he does. 

So Spiderman shows up to Punisher’s bunker with MJ. And it’s where I realize so many things that work together so well in this scenario. Peter Parker and Frank Castle aren’t that different at this point. Both are lonely, in immense pain, and still want to believe in their power to stop bad things from happening to innocent people. Peter brings MJ there because he knows that Castle will understand that protecting MJ is of the highest priority, and while he might not be the best host, he is the absolute best person on the planet to keep her safe.  You can see the pain returning to his eyes when he understand what he has to do, and the flash of fear that he might not be able to do it, but there’s nothing in the world that will stop him from trying. 

Meanwhile, Spiderman’s off to figure out what he can do about his spider-puberty. At this point Peter’s fully rejecting the changes the spider evolution is bringing, and his own attempts to control it are failing. He needs someone brilliant who can understand why he’d need to essentially handicap his own powers - and someone who understands the burden of needing to do so. And of course, that can be no one other than The Hulk - or Bruce Banner. Now Banner’s teaching university, and he’s also got the limiter thing pretty well worked out.  And here’s another perfect thing about this story involving the Hulk: He’s suffering, too. Bruce Banner carries the weight of his own strength and power and the loss of control he experiences every time he “hulks out.” It’s a power borne of anger, and it means that he completely loses himself to use it. He’s an unstoppable force, even to his own mind. He created the inhibitor so he could have some semblance of control over it. 

Unfortunately, the telepath manages to break that, using her powers to get him to take off the Inhibitor, and we get a fully triggered, full power Hulk.  Now, The Hulk wasn’t a character I knew much about either until I was brought into the comic lore and MCU lore by my partner, but what I’ve come to know is it’s TROUBLE when the Hulk is hulking out, and he’s near impossible to stop.  

It’s at this point I think it’s prescient to point out that Spiderman often gets the short end of the stick as far as superheroes go. His moniker tends to do him a little wrong, I think. And perhaps his age. I know that sometimes casual fans see him as a smart kid who got bit by a spider and got some powers, but the truth about Spiderman is that he’s not just a smart kid. He’s brilliant. He’s got ideas that rival Bruce Banner’s, and Bruce Banner, by the way - also a genius, in any form.  Not only that, but Spiderman has a healing factor, and is INCREDIBLY strong. Like, if there’s any chance of someone putting Hulk back in the bottle, so to speak, it’s gonna be Spidey. 

And that leads me to this: Brand New Day does a great job of tailoring everything around Spiderman and what he truly is. The problems that arise require everything that makes Spiderman special, from his “friendly” nature that allows him to work within the city and have some help from shop owners, law enforcement and beyond, to his brilliance in being able to create and tweak an inhibitor with a little help from his friends. This isn’t a movie that just throws bad guys out in front of him for fun - it’s well thought out. 

After the argument that led Frank to reveal to Spiderman and MJ that he had lost someone very close to him, MJ continues to peel back the layers and manages to convince him to go out and help Spiderman face the Hulk. And I think the only reason it takes convincing is that he’s concerned about leaving MJ, but as we said before, his bunker’s a pretty safe place to be.

Here’s where my heart grew three sizes for The Punisher. Frank Castle vs. The Hulk. Because remember, The Punisher is a man. His super power is soldier, and I think if you’ve had the privilege of knowing an infantryman, you know that that is also not a joke. He’s highly trained, incredibly smart and capable, and has an unbreakable will. He’s there to fight until the very end, and he absolutely will not be stopped. The Hulk, by contrast, is an incredibly powerful superhero, and he’s bulletproof. Which means that almost nothing Frank Castle has in his arsenal will do anything at all to him. But Frank Castle never once even thinks of himself - he’s there to protect his friend, to protect MJ, and to help The Hulk, and he will stop at nothing to do it. Then again, neither will Spiderman, and he eventually is able to convince him that they’re friends, and he’s able to snap him out of it.  

 Somewhere along the way, we get the big reveal of the whole movie - we’ve been dealing with Jean Grey. Just before she’s about to kill Metzger, he intervenes with an inhibitor, just in time to save him, and as she’s wheeled away she mutters “Sara…”

Back at the bunker, we find out that MJ found Peter’s letter, and he has this second chance, it seems, to have something with her. After the cruelty of Grey’s trick earlier, it feels like this will be a great moment, but it’s dashed on the rocks with the simple reality that MJ just doesn’t remember any of it.  She doesn’t remember the good times, the bad times, or any times, and worse, she has no feelings for him. In one of the most heartbreaking scenes in any Marvel movie, he silently swings her through the city and back to her place, where he’s able to “meet” Ned, who’s excited, but tragically, and logically, doesn’t remember knowing him.

Through a random mention of not remembering anything when Jean possessed her, MJ helps Spiderman realize there’s a lot more to the story that Metzger was lying about, and through Yelena he finds out that Sara was Grey’s sister, and Jean had to watch DODC cart her away. Now that we know DODC are the bad guys, he realizes she’s in danger and heads off to help.

Metzger’s got Jean Grey strapped to a chair and is performing experiments on her - trying to see how far her range goes. While in the room, Grey realizes that the V-Max we’ve been chasing the entire story was simply a part of the ventilation system in the room where her sister had been trapped, experimented on and killed, and, well, she goes into a white hot rage, which for Grey, means world burning. She sends a wave of psychic energy through the entire city that essentially freezes everyone in place. Except Frank, who’s out of range and equipped with a sniper rifle, and except Spiderman, who’s taken off his inhibitor and finally accepted the enhanced genes the spider part of him has brought with it. 

After dealing with The Hand, he’s faced with Jean, who’s got shards of glass all pointed at Metzger, ready to shred him to pieces in an instant. 

And here’s where it all comes together. 

Every single person in this story has suffered greatly. Every single one has been taken down by PTSD and trauma, and felt alone, angry and scared.  They’ve fought through and struggled and are all standing at this precipice. There’s a million ways this could go down, and one of them’s a bullet, but it’s at this moment that Peter Parker solves the problem as the “friendly” neighborhood Spiderman. He lets Jean in his head, despite the risk, and instead of showing her the pain and suffering so she’ll know he’s on her side, he gives her the gift of a moment of understanding, acceptance, love and comfort that he received from his Aunt May.  He gives her the love she was missing, and this? Absolutely broke me. He could’ve done anything. There were so many ways to solve this puzzle,but he does it by showing her she’s not alone, and that there’s healing. She backs down, but Frank, having not got the message, fires the shot that would kill her. 

And Spiderman? Well, he takes that shot himself. And while he does have a healing factor, this is as close as he’s come to death. He’s down for the count, and the city mourns the loss - until he wakes up, Frank Castle at his side, as he has been. The whole time. The whole city’s got the news he’s back and better, and instead of letting it end with a final Spiderman swingout, Frank wears the mask and gloves and takes on the “hero” role so that Peter can slip out into the crowd and finally get to experience the love the city has for him.  He sees Ned and we get a glimmer of hope that the memories can return when he’s able to recall their secret handshake, and then, with a promise of Spiderman in space, we roll out. 

This movie isn’t just a great Spiderman movie - it’s a great film.  The MCU has been churning these out for years, and while they’re worth a bucket of popcorn and some face paint most of the time, I feel like especially lately, they’ve lost the gravitas. Until now. 

Spiderman: Brand New Day is firing on all cylinders. The villains are specifically tailored to show off Spiderman as he’s rarely been shown - in true to form brilliance, strength and character. But it’s also about something more important - loss, suffering, trauma, and how we as individuals process it, for better or worse. It’s about reaching out to others who are suffering and being willing to be vulnerable, learning to care and trust again, and fighting alongside folks in good faith for the greater good. It’s about letting people know they’re not alone, and giving them love they so desperately need even in a moment it feels like they’re unsaveable.  And that is epic, and beautiful, and something I think Stan Lee would be proud to see his name behind. 

Yeah, it’s a superhero story. But it’s also a human story. And it’s something I’ll take with me for a long time because of it.