Monday night in Los Angeles was the premiere, and by the time the credits rolled, people had already started to talk about it. People saw Spider-Man: Brand New Day for the first time in front of a real audience, and what they said was something like, “This is really good, possibly great, and also a lot.”
Starting with Tom Holland, he is getting praise that makes you think this might be the play that his fans have always thought he could make. A lot of critics said, “Never been better.” One entertainment reporter said that the movie had a “strong emotional center” and was “deeply sincere” in how it was made. This sounds like notes from a director who cared about the story being told, not just the spectacle around it. Holland has always been good in the part. It looks like he’s found a new gear here.
This movie starts four years after No Way Home. Peter Parker is struggling with the fact that people don’t remember him. MJ and Ned are part of that, which makes for a great setting for a real emotional story. Most people agree that director Destin Daniel Cretton did something cool with that idea. Someone who watched it said it was “an emotionally meaty dwelling on loneliness.” Someone else said that you “really feel Peter’s pain and sorrow.” People don’t use those words to describe movies that only rely on special effects.
Also, the movie seems to have made an impression on people’s eyes. A lot of people thought the cinematography was much better than what the MCU usually does. They also pointed out that the colorist has worked on movies like Drive and Euphoria, which, once you hear it, probably explains why some trailer screenshots looked different. It looks like the webslinger has never looked quite this way before. Some people are already calling a certain Hulk scene one of the best Marvel action scenes in recent years.
Still, there’s a word that comes up a lot in these responses: “overstuffed.” There were enough of them to make it important. The movie is said to be about two hours and forty-five minutes long, and some people thought the third act’s pace slacked because of all the things it was trying to do. One viewer said it reminded them of Spider-Man 3 because it tries to balance a lot of different stories. That same person also said they loved the movie and thought it had a lot of good points. Because of this kind of criticism, a movie might not be bad after all. Hero movies that people love are sometimes messy. Spider-Man 2 is a mess. What matters is whether the emotional core makes it through all the other stuff. It looks like it mostly does here.
People are paying close attention to Sadie Sink, whose character Marvel has refused to reveal to the press the whole time. “Devastating” was one word that was used. “She’s perfect” was another. The movie clearly makes up for the fact that her role is a mystery—people who didn’t know what she was playing were genuinely surprised. Reading these reactions makes me think that her presence adds something to the Tom Holland movies that they didn’t have before: a real-life bad guy.
