Brand New Day offers the same old banality.
The amnesia conceit behind Spider-Man: Brand New Day is torturous. Peter Parker (Tom Holland) was able to save the world in the 2021 Spider-Man: No Way Home only by being erased from the memory of his sweetheart MJ (Zendaya), and now he must restore his place in her affections as well as recover his own sense of purpose.
As if a comic book hero’s existential crisis wasn’t hoary enough, the convoluted storyline of Brand New Day refuses to let audiences start fresh. That’s the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s method. Brand New Day enlists other Marvel Cinematic Universe figures (Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk, Florence Pugh’s Black Widow, Jon Bernthal’s Punisher) and adds new ones (Sadie Sink’s Jean Grey, Michael Mando’s Scorpion) for future iterations. MCU weaves a web of narrative deceit that amounts to mindless consumer addiction — overstuffing fanboy memory banks with junk that will keep them coming back for more in perpetuity.
It would probably be outside the scope of criticism to mention that Brand New Day took in an estimated $360 million domestically over its opening weekend, breaking the all-time record for the biggest domestic box office debut in history — while Spider-Man: No Way Home grossed $800 million in the U.S. and $2 billion worldwide — except that the MCU enterprise is also outside the realm of aesthetics.
Director Destin Daniel Cretton, the former indie filmmaker (Room), joins the MCU team of F/X tradesmen to supply the requisite antiseptic action sequences. But, as usual with MCU, the spectacles are not just fingerprint-free but impersonal; they achieve a comic book/graphic novel idea in which visceral stimulation occurs without sensual or spiritual excitement.
Here lies the pop culture compulsion of adolescence, in the synthesis of both Spidey’s never-changing story and in Brand New Day’s most arresting set piece: Spidey battling The Hand, a group of ninjas in red garb that evokes the Hong Kong movie trend. It’s a departure from the gimmick of Spidey swinging among skyscrapers, which has become de rigueur. It’s also a reminder of how the MCU co-opts any brand of commercial entertainment that nerds can mistake for thematic consistency.
Cretton and screenwriters Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers mislead their followers whenever Spidey, his best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon), and MJ get personal. These gestures at bonhomie and sentimentality only expose the insincerity of this financial enterprise. When Peter asks Professor Banner (The Hulk) about “a way to suppress mutating DNA,” Spidey’s identity crisis is revealed as nothing more than another gimmick to perpetuate Marvel’s comic book cycle.
This sinister masterplan was first exposed in Spider-Man: Homecoming when Peter wore a “Fun Is Real” T-shirt (the essence of the telepathic games at the core of Brand New Day). Everything objectionable about this mundane series can be traced to Peter’s Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) saying “I’m not a fan of that Tony Stark” (Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man/industrialist alter ego). “You’re distracted all the time. He’s got you in your head.” MCU addicts are similarly in their heads, victims of conglomerate-think that they bizarrely, aberrantly take personally. (In Homecoming, one bad guy taunted another: “You’re trying to upsell me?”)
Being in thrall to MCU’s meta narrative is what used to be called “Pirandellian” (after the Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello), describing a work that inspires viewers to recognize the structure, artifice, and processes of entertainment. But now it should now be called Hollywood entrapment. Each action sequence in Brand New Day amounts to a telepathic dupe, whether those red ninjas, Scorpion’s mechanical tail stinger, or images of apocalyptic — never permanent — destruction.
Starting with the first of ten Spider-Man movies (so far) that began in 2002, computer-graphic imagery advanced into an easy, expensive digital routine. Remember when Ang Lee’s Hulk (2003) tried to literalize comic book panels? A version of that effort has become the standard for those MCU fans who reject Zack Snyder’s poetic, visionary action scenes. Now we know that Snyder never had the common touch; his artistry exceeded what makes this series banal, thus popular. (Similarly, Mission: Impossible fans have forgotten the splendor that Brian De Palma brought to the franchise.) This anti-aesthetic MCU intuits that unimaginative adolescent ambition is at home with Tom Holland’s boyish Peter Parker, a Peter Pan substitute for the millennium’s dissolute masses.
