Spider-Man: Brand New Day feels a lot like seeing Civil War for the first time. Marvel found a way to combine some of its most exciting new actors into a single cohesive film without making it feel too much like a casting call or highlight reel. I saw this movie opening weekend with Friend in a packed theater as God intended with basically the knowledge that all of you had when you saw the trailer: the villain is some alien copypasta of the Fallen from 1998 and no one knows who Peter Parker is so he creeps on his wife-girlfriend while she dates some other jabrony in the apartment across the hall.
So now for some spoilers, because it’s October and if you haven’t seen this billion dollar movie since August, I really have no reason to take your resistance to spoilers seriously. The movie sort of still works if you know that it’s rolling out the red(headed) carpet for the next iteration of the X-Men. This works especially well as a reveal because it gives us a means of rooting for both sides equally–Spider-Man is trying to bring the mind control alien to justice while the audience knows through a bit of dramatic irony that Jean Grey is a class 9 mutant or whatever and her childhood trauma at the hands of the Government Good Guys is going to require years of therapy and some very private schooling.
Parker’s conflict requires that he get some help from some friends in low places, which necessitates a meeting in Florence Pugh’s office which is really fab as a scene. A lot of this movie feels like it was composed by fan fic writers on tumblr, which I think Spider-Man has said as much in his own role in shaping the plot. The movie is a creature of the internet from the visual jokes about his origins to the will-they-won’t-they kiss(es) to the jizz webs he shoots. The inclusion of what we can safely call the Lesser Avenger Hulk and a very useful Punisher deepen the universe and show elements of what made Thor: Ragnarok and the early Guardians of the Galaxy movies. The Spider-Man movies are easily the showcase of the youngest and freshest talent in the Marvel Universe while the rest of the movies are, as Nick Cage says, a “well-funded and glorified WWE” for ageing actors.
