Spider-Man: Brand New Day is a rather perplexing movie for me, because despite being genuinely pumped to see the last one, No Way Home, my excitement for this one was much more lukewarm. My wife and I saw it this past Saturday, about a month after it hit theaters. I really had no idea what the movie was even about, but it’s been hugely commercially successful for Sony (and Disney’s cut), pulling in over 2 billion dollars and making it one of the most financially staggering films to hit the box office. It’ll probably end up the number one film of the entire year unless Avengers: Doomsday or Dune 3 manages to dethrone it. Even showing up as late as we did, the vast majority of seats were already booked online 30 minutes before our showing.

It’s genuinely wild to think it’s been five years since No Way Home hit theaters. I wasn’t even technically married to my wife yet, let alone a stepfather. It feels like it was just yesterday in a way, but for Peter Parker, he’s been living a very lonely existence ever since Doctor Strange had to cast a spell erasing everyone’s memory that Peter Parker was Spider-Man, wiping their minds clean of him ever existing at all.

Much like Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 3 and the previous film, No Way Home, this movie is stuffed with villains, and not all of them are created equal. Mac Gargan, aka Scorpion, is back after I’d genuinely forgotten he existed in the first place, though he’s not the main antagonist this time around. I’ll say I much prefer the 1990s cartoon version of Scorpion to this one.

Bill Metzger, a top government official, genuinely seeks out Spider-Man’s help with a matter involving highly sensitive material, despite having several Avengers and other superheroes he could just as easily ask instead. This new threat really should be handled by someone like Doctor Strange at minimum, not some 20-something kid with super strength and a spider-sense.

This new enemy isn’t something you can simply take down with a super punch or a shot of webbing. They hijack people’s minds and turn them into puppets. There doesn’t seem to be much rhyme or reason to it, which gives the movie a faint, minuscule horror-movie undertone in select moments.

I’ll admit it was kind of sweet watching this now, knowing Tom Holland and Zendaya recently got married after dating since the very first film, almost a decade ago. But since her character no longer remembers Peter Parker, things get pretty hard to watch for the two of them. That gives the movie an emotional weight that’s been building for a while, enough to squeeze out a few tears.

And then there’s the fact that everybody already knows the redheaded girl from Stranger Things (Sadie Sink) has joined the Marvel Cinematic Universe for a nice, comfortable ongoing paycheck. I won’t technically spoil who she plays in the movie, but it was easy enough to guess despite their best efforts to keep it under wraps. Knowing that, she was better in the role than I expected. She’s clearly set up to return for a future project, so fingers crossed on that.

Since the trailer already gave it away, let’s talk about the Incredible Hulk’s role in the movie. I genuinely liked the Bruce Banner material, but I found the overall concept kind of bizarre. At the end of Avengers: Endgame, Bruce Banner had conquered the beast within and could control the green guy without losing himself. This movie basically wipes that slate clean and resets things back to square one, which felt insulting to me and completely unnecessary.

Is it the best Spider-Man movie of all time? Only if you’re counting in American dollars. Is it the best Spider-Man movie in the MCU? I wouldn’t go that far. No Way Home still knocks it out of the park for me, but this one holds up fairly well against the other two. I’d say its strongest quality is its unpredictable story path. This is the first movie in a long time, especially a superhero movie, to genuinely fake me out with a climax that ultimately never happened. At two hours long, it’s quite the sit, and while it fumbles a few things, it also pulls off a lot masterfully. I can’t imagine anyone walking away truly disappointed. And after all the garbage Sony’s tried to churn out, like Morbius, Madame Web, and Kraven the Hunter since the last Spider-Man film, it makes you wonder how they botch those so badly and somehow nail this one, even counting Kevin Feige and Marvel Studios in their corner.