Spider-man: Brand New Day- A Love Letter to New York, Postmarked Glasgow
The latest is the best one about New York. Not a frame of it was shot here.
Lower East Side, New York
Thursday, July 30th 2026
…
I queued on Delancey Street with an oversized paper bucket of popcorn I did not need and a pair of 3D glasses smudged by a stranger, and I thought: this is the least dignified I have been all week, and it’s only Thursday.
The pavement in Manhattan was still giving back the heat it had borrowed at noon. A small Puerto Rican man outside the cinema was selling knock-off Spider-Man masks from a folding table, and doing well. Somewhere behind me a child explained the entire plot of “No Way Home” to a grandmother with the patient condescension of a man explaining tax law. I have been in this city long enough to know that this is the good part. The film is the film. The queue is New York.
Then the lights went down, and I sat there for two and a half hours with a lump in my throat like a swallowed golf ball.
Greenwood, Western Australia
A long time ago…
…
I was a kid in a quiet suburb of Perth reading about a kid from Queens. That is the whole thing, really. That is the entire architecture of my life in one sentence.
Greenwood in the late nineties was flat, hot, and profoundly not New York. I’d been blowing my allowance on Spider-Man comics (and MAD) for so long I didn’t have any savings. But I did know how to draw a pretty great Manhattan skyline. The comics arrived at the newsagent months late and out of order, so my understanding of Peter Parker’s life was less a narrative than a series of weather reports from a country I would never visit. Issue #340 in June. Issue #336 in September. I read them in the wrong sequence, sometimes with gaps in between (I had to glean what happened), and loved them anyway, the way you love a song you only ever hear on a bad AM radio.
In my late teens and early twenties, the number plates on my Hyundai said “SPIDEY”. In Red. (I know, I can’t figure out why the ladies weren’t throwing themselves at me either.)
I remember staying up past midnight on June 5th, 2002 with my friend Brent. We drove in Spidey to the only cinema in Perth showing the very first screening of the new, highly-anticipated Spider-Man film by Sam Raimi, starring Tobey Maguire. Australia was a day ahead of the rest of the world, so we were some of the first people to see it. It sparked what would become a 20+ year Hollywood obsession with superhero movies, and by 2008, there was enough evidence that it could sustain a fully-fledged cinematic universe. (Sadly, that MCU would collapse under the weight of its own complexity, but up ‘til Endgame, it was pretty satisfying.)
Now I live in New York, and I can see, from my window, the skyline that boy would have swapped a kidney for. I have not once got over it. I don’t intend to.
Sidenote: The past week in NYC has been absolutely bonkers for Spider-Man. Look at the crap they did to promote this thing:
Lower East Side, New York
Thursday, July 30th 2026
…
What it actually gets right.
Destin Daniel Cretton has made something I genuinely did not think I would live to see: a Spider-Man film that understands that the appeal of Spider-Man is not the punching. It is the falling.
The point-of-view web-slinging sequences (in 3D) are the best argument for going to a cinema that I have encountered in years. Not because they’re loud, but because they are heavy. You feel the arc. You feel the moment at the top of the swing where the line goes slack, and there’s nothing under you but eight hundred feet of Manhattan and a terrible decision.
Brett Pawlak shot it, and Cretton apparently insisted on doing as much of it as possible practically, and it shows in a way that CGI has never once managed. There is weight. There is consequence. There is that specific New York vertigo where you look down a street canyon and briefly realise the city is a cliff face we’ve all agreed to live on.
And then, between the set pieces, it is a very sad film about a man who lives alone.
That is the part nobody warned me about. Four years on from No Way Home, Peter has erased himself from everyone he loves and is now simply a bloke in a flat, doing an enormous job that no one can thank him for, visiting a grave, keeping his head down. May is gone. Ben is long gone. His two best friends walk past him in the street. He has the responsibility and none of the power, which is not the aphorism as written but is, I would argue, the more honest version of it.
I watched a man in a mask do a job nobody knew he was doing and then go home to an empty apartment, and I thought, “Ah. There it is. That’s why I’m choking up at a superhero film alone on a Thursday afternoon.”
At almost two and a half hours, it is a behemoth, and yes, you feel the length. I was never bored. I was, at points, quite badly ambushed, and my bladder is still throbbling.
The love letter was posted from Glasgow.
Here is what I did not know while I was sitting in the dark having a small religious experience about my adopted city.
None of it was filmed here.
