// KOTAKU — GAMING
The 10 Best Moments From Spider-Man: Brand New Day
Spider-Man: Brand New Day is the first Marvel movie worth really talking about in a hot minute. Tom Holland’s fourth spin as the webslinger feels the most true to Spider-Man’s melodramatic, soap-opera roots the whole way through as Peter Parker swings through a world that has forgotten about him. Despite Peter being in his sad boy era, the movie has some pretty great moments of highs and lows, so we figured we’d run through some of them.
Throughout the first half of the film, the presumed antagonist (later revealed as Jean Grey) has some mysterious, then-unknown power to take full control of an individual’s body as long as they are within a certain distance and she can see them. She can then “jump” from that person to any other person within that same range of the body they’re currently inhabiting. This results in multiple very cool scenes where Jean “jumps” from person to person, either in an effort to escape Spider-Man or to reach some other goal faster than him. These scenes end up looking very cool, as you watch a steady domino line of individuals in a big crowd briefly flail as though whomped by some unseen force, one after another, allowing the viewer to follow Jean’s jump progression without actually seeing her character on screen.
I really like all these scenes—it’s a cool idea, a great way to make a superpower visually distinct without using a bunch of fancy effects, and probably took some serious coordination in the moments where it all lines up perfectly in a single shot. My favorite example of this is the first time the power is on display, as Jean jumps from person to person to run against a fleeing crowd in the Damage Control building. There’s one nice, long shot where the camera moves “against” the flow of the crowd and you see everyone running one way while individual people stagger, one after another, as Jean makes her way upstream. It’s just very well done! —Rebekah Valentine
I (Rebekah Valentine) am barely a Marvel fan, and prefer my Marvel with as few Marvel dudes in it as possible so I can just focus on whichever one the story happens to be about. The more extra Marvel guys you add to my Marvel film from other Marvel films, the more irritated I get. Brand New Day was very judicious in its use of bonus Marvel guys, which is one of the reasons why I enjoyed it. It was focused and did not waste a lot of my time trying to set up plots for other things that were not Brand New Day.
It did, however, add a couple of bonus Marvel guys, in the form of Bruce Banner (I’ll get to him momentarily), and Yelena, aka Florence Pugh. Yelena is a permanent exception, for me, to my irritation with bonus Marvel guys being added to other Marvel films. I love her. Florence Pugh is beautiful, Yelena is a goddamn delight of a character, and I chuckle every time I imagine her holding top secret, world-saving, “large potato” meetings in the bath. Ms. Pugh is welcome in any Marvel movie I watch, for as much screentime as she likes. —Rebekah Valentine
As I just mentioned, Brand New Day does not overuse the rest of the Marvel cast and remains largely focused on Spider-Man. Apart from Yelena, its other main cameo is Bruce Banner, who initially just shows up as Bruce the Professor for a cute scene with him and Peter. I was fine with just this, but then Banner also pops into the big scene at Damage Control while Peter and Frank Castle are trying to capture Jean. Jean is, of course, possessing Banner, and forces him to remove his inhibitor, turning him into the Hulk and causing him to fight Peter and Frank. This scene was lots of fun. It gave Peter someone powerful and properly scary to fight who wasn’t just a series of random nameless dudes with guns, which was sorely needed in a film where the assumed-antagonist is a tortured teenager and the actual antagonist is just A Guy With No Powers. The scene went on exactly long enough, caused a sufficient amount of building destruction, included several fun quips from both Castle and Spider-