Film Review: Spider-Man: Brand New Day 蜘蛛俠：英雄重生 (2026) - USA
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critics Circle of Australia)
I rated it 9/10
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ 1/2
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Spider-Man has always been the most human of the costumed heroes, because his greatest battles are never with villains. They are with rent, with grief, with the knowledge that doing the right thing will cost him the people he loves. Destin Daniel Cretton’s Brand New Day understands this better than any live-action Spider-Man film since Sam Raimi’s second. It is not a victory lap. It is a reckoning.
Four years have passed since Peter Parker asked Doctor Strange to erase him from the world’s memory. The spell worked. Michelle Jones is at M.I.T., laughing in photographs Peter is not supposed to look at. Ned Leeds built an app that tracks Spider-Man the way other people track the weather. Aunt May is a grave. Peter lives in a walk-up that smells of damp plaster and instant noodles, and he has made a decision that would have horrified the boy in Homecoming: he will be Spider-Man all the time. No dual life. No college. No one left who can say his name and mean it.
Tom Holland has grown into the role the way a man grows into a suit he once borrowed. The boyish brightness is still there, but it now sits on top of something harder and sadder. Watch him in the early scenes, repairing his own webs on a homemade fabricator that looks like a sewing machine dreamed up by a desperate engineering student. He is not playing a superhero who happens to be lonely. He is playing a young man who has chosen loneliness as a form of love, and is beginning to suspect the choice may kill him.
The film’s best invention is the way that loneliness starts to change the body. Peter’s powers evolve under pressure — not as a cool upgrade, but as a symptom. Cretton and the writers (Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, who have been with this Peter from the beginning) treat the mutation the way a good doctor treats a fever: as information. Something is wrong. Something is trying to be born. The action sequences that follow are the most physically witty since Raimi’s train fight, because they have to invent new grammar for a hero who no longer moves the way he used to.
Jon Bernthal’s Punisher is the perfect foil. Frank Castle does not want to be Peter’s friend. He wants Peter to stop pretending the world can be saved without blood. Their scenes together have the crackle of two men who recognize each other’s damage and refuse to sentimentalize it. Mark Ruffalo’s Banner arrives like a man who has seen too many young gods burn out. And Sadie Sink, in the role the marketing wisely refused to name, gives the film its moral center: a lost, furious intelligence that has been used by institutions the way Peter has been used by fate. She is not a villain in the old hissable sense. She is what happens when power finds someone who has already been forgotten.
Zendaya and Jacob Batalon have less screen time than before, which is the point. The movie is honest about absence. When they do appear, the ache is specific — not the generic “will they remember?” tease, but the quieter horror of watching people you love become happy without you. Cretton has the good sense not to rush the reunion the audience thinks it wants. He understands that some doors, once closed for the right reasons, stay closed for a while.
Is the plot overcrowded? A little. The Department of Damage Control, a returning street-level rogue, a cameo that exists mostly so we can have Hulk time — the MCU still cannot resist laying extra track. But the extra track does not derail the train. What stays with you is not the mythology. It is a handshake. It is a man introducing himself by his real name to someone who used to know it by heart. It is the sight of New York at dusk, web-lines catching the last light, and a hero who has finally accepted that the mask is not a costume. It is the face he has to live with.
I walked out thinking of the line from the comics that this title steals: a brand new day. The film does not pretend the day will be easy. It only insists that it is still possible to meet it. That is more than most superhero movies dare to say. That is enough. (Neo, 2026)
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