Spider-Man: Brand New Day Movie Review: The Solitude of a Superhero

Spider-Man: Brand New Day | Director: Destin Daniel Cretton | Cast: Tom Holland, Zendaya

Tom Holland and Zendaya are having the year of their lives. Marriage, acting in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, and now reunited as Peter Parker and MJ in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, they couldn’t have asked for more. Unfortunately, MJ’s memory is wiped clean of Parker’s presence and she can only feel a twinge when she meets him.

There is Punisher, Parker’s frenemy played by Jon Bernthal who is forever complaining about his babysitting duties; Parker’s professor, Hulk (the inimitable Mark Ruffalo); and the shape shifting and mind controlling Jean Grey (played by Sadie Sink of Stranger Things). If Spider-Man has to survive, Parker has to forget he is an ordinary guy with a girlfriend and buddy, a boy who still feels his beloved aunt’s absence, and a man who is trying to keep his arachnid hormones under control. That is his biggest contradiction. He cannot be both. Male loneliness is an epidemic, or so we are told, and Spider-Man’s superheroic solitude only underlines it.