Brand New Day isn't just some phony lip service title. The entire film is a reflection of the transformation Parker has gone through after the events of No Way Home and how he continues to evolve as he's handed a new set of obstacles including figuring who is responsible for a mysterious string of attacks on various facilities around NYC that are owned by a company called Damage Control where the perpetrators are unknowingly carrying out these attacks and reuniting with MJ (Zendaya) and Ned (Jacob Batalon) after they moved back to New York following their graduation from MIT. Parker has clearly been hurting from all of the isolation he's experienced over the past 5 years and his only coping mechanism is throwing himself even harder into being Spider-Man. His efforts to completely bury himself in work were working well enough until he sees MJ and Ned again and then, the pain of his loneliness begins to overwhelm him to the point where it's impacting his ability to be the hero that his community has relied on for so long.
Veteran director Daniel Destin Cretton was the perfect person to lead Spider-Man into this more mature era as he has this really innate understanding of human emotions from all of the time he's spent making character-driven dramas (Just Mercy, The Glass Castle, Short Term 12). Parker's emotional arc is one that is packed with vulnerability and doesn't contain a single false note as he puts in the work to get back to a place where has the courage to try and connect with people without being consumed by the fear that he could eventually lose them. It's a real blessing that Holland and Cretton took the assignment of exploring Parker's emotional state post-No Way Home so seriously as it's not exactly difficult to envision a scenario where there was far less care put into Parker's journey of putting the pieces of his life back together and we ended up with something that didn't have much in the way of real emotional resonance. It was time for Parker to evolve, and his metamorphosis really couldn't have been more graceful than what is portrayed here.
The bonus side effect of having Parker go on a weightier emotional journey here is that it presented the opportunity to make better use of the acting gifts of Holland and Zendaya. Holland does a tremendous job of embodying someone who's burdened by the weight of loss and being alone in this cruel world trying to find their way again. As great as he in the rest of the film, his performance peaks when he's sharing scenes with Zendaya. The emotional conflict of the movie really kicks into high gear when Parker and MJ reunite, and Parker has to face the fact that he's now a stranger to MJ. Their understanding of the characters and each other as performers is second to none and that familiarity and knowledge makes for some really powerful moments that deserve to go down as some of the most impactful in the entire history of the MCU. Casting these two was one of the best decisions Feige has ever made and Brand New Day is an occasion that is worthy of another victory lap for this monumental triumph.
When you go beyond the emotional journey of Parker, the success rate of Brand New Day is a little more mixed. On the plus side, the action proficiency that Cretton showed on Shang-Chi carries over here as it contains easily the most exciting, clearly legible fight scenes of the MCU Spider-Man entries thus far while Jon Bernthal's cold, gruff antihero Frank Castle makes for the ideal foil for Holland's morally consistent, good-natured hero. On the downside, Sadie Sink-who is pretty good in her "secret" role-is incorporated into this storyline in a pretty clunky fashion and the emotional catharsis that's supposed to be attached to her arc makes only a small fraction of the impact that Parker's does. Still, Brand New Day presents an exciting path forward for the character and I'd be pretty surprised if this didn't end up surpassing Homecoming as my new favorite Holland-era Spider-Man movie in time.
Grade: B+
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