Spider-Man: Brand New Day Reviews: The 90% Fresh Score Hides How Little Is New

The title is a confession. “Brand New Day” is what Marvel called the comics gambit, run almost twenty years ago, that wiped Peter Parker’s marriage out of existence and made the entire world forget his face, all so the character could begin again — lean, single, back down at street level. Destin Daniel Cretton’s film borrows the name and the premise in one motion, and the first wave of reviews has decided, mostly, to be charmed by exactly that.

The word writing itself across the early reactions is “grounded,” closely followed by “mature”: a Spider-Man who has traded the multiverse for a lonely apartment and a city that no longer knows his name. Critics who came up on Sam Raimi keep reaching for the same compliment — the best web-slinger in two decades, the one that finally remembers Spider-Man is a neighborhood before he is a cosmic event. It is a warm reception. Read closely, it is also a reception built almost entirely on nostalgia.

The scoreboard cooperates and quietly undercuts at the same time. The film opened Certified Fresh at ninety percent, which reads like a coronation until you set it beside its own siblings. Homecoming, Far From Home and No Way Home all scored higher; as Forbes pointed out, this is the lowest-rated chapter of the Holland trilogy. The aggregate did not climb. It slipped — even as the first previews insisted this was the best of the bunch.

Recommended ReadingSpider-Man: Brand New Day Strands Tom Holland in a New York That Forgot His Name

That gap is where the real story lives. Beneath a single reassuring number sit two incompatible movies. The Independent, the Telegraph and Polygon file it beside Raimi’s Spider-Man 2, still the high-water mark of the whole superhero medium; the Daily Beast calls it the best Spidey to date. And then IndieWire shrugs at “a dull and downbeat sequel,” The Guardian sighs at “generic déjà vu” and asks out loud for a radical reboot, Rolling Stone finds “nothing new,” and Variety — the lone real pan among the trades — calls the thing arduous and self-serious, a good half-hour too long, a film you can feel straining to matter. What one camp receives as maturity, the other receives as fatigue. Same movie. Same grounding.

What almost nobody says out loud is that “grounded,” here, is a synonym for “reset.” This is at least the fourth time in a quarter-century that Spider-Man has been marched back to square one on screen — Raimi, then Marc Webb a decade on, then Jon Watts, now Cretton — and every relaunch sells its erasures as freshness. Brand New Day is simply the most literal yet: it does not recast the role, it wipes the memory of everyone in the story, which is a tidy metaphor for what the franchise asks of the people watching. Forget that No Way Home cost him everyone who knew him. Enjoy the clean slate.

Even the admirers concede the center will not hold. DiscussingFilm, three generous stars, notes that Sadie Sink’s mystery newcomer does not arrive until forty minutes in and then annexes the picture, leaving Peter’s own “strange new evolution” — the actual premise, the entire reason for the reset — idling in the wings. A film that erases its hero’s life in order to look at him keeps getting distracted from him.

None of this makes Brand New Day bad. Ninety percent of critics are not easily waved off, and the swinging, by every account, is glorious — practical, vertiginous, occasionally shot from inside the mask. It makes it familiar: a very well-made act of forgetting. The tell is the benchmark everyone keeps reaching for, the best Spider-Man since 2004. When the highest praise a brand new day can earn is that it feels like an old one, the morning is not new. The alarm has simply gone off again.

Tags: Tom Holland, Destin Daniel Cretton, spider-man, Spider-Man: Brand New Day, movie reviews

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