Spider-man: Brand New Day- A Love Letter to New York, Postmarked GlasgowThe latest is the best one about New York. Not a frame of it was shot here.
Lower East Side, New York … 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 … 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 … 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. Not the streets. Not the bodega. Not the skyline you swing past. Time Out went and checked, and the answer is that this is the first time Spider-Man’s New York has been recreated entirely overseas. Principal photography ran from August to December 2025 in Britain. Glasgow city centre was dressed as Manhattan and Queens, with Bothwell Street and Wellington Street signed under the fictional names “Frost Street” and “Franklin Street.” Merchant City did a shift as lower Manhattan. Pinewood Studios built three entire city blocks. A business park in Basingstoke was dressed as 1970s Manhattan. Some of it was shot in Dorset, in Thomas Hardy country, which is roughly as far from Forest Hills as a place can get and still have paved roads. The working title was ‘Blue Oasis’, which now reads less like a code name and more like a confession. So the most New York film of the decade was made by people standing in Scotland, in the rain, looking at reference photographs. I sat with that for a day and waited to feel cheated. Glasgow is now a palimpsest. Somebody wrote New York over the top of it, carefully, fastidiously, with fake street signs and imported taxis and NYPD cruisers shipped across an ocean, and the older writing is still faintly legible underneath if you know where to look. Which is exactly, precisely what happened to me.
I am a Perth kid with New York written over the top. The original text is still showing through: I still say “heaps,” I still flinch at tipping, I still don’t pronounce Houston Street with full confidence in my accent after all these years. But the overwriting took. It’s real now. It’s not less real for having been applied later by hand. That’s the thing about this city that people who were born here sometimes miss; New York is not a birthright, it is a forgery that everyone agrees to accept. Half the people you love here arrived from somewhere flat and hot and beige and drew themselves in. The film understands New York because somebody paid extremely close attention to it from a great distance, which is the only method any of us outsiders have ever had.
Attention beats geography. It always did. Ask any cartoonist who has drawn a room he was never in. And here’s my favourite detail: among the villains flashing past in the early montage is Boomerang, who in the comics is Frederick Myers, an Australian, introduced in 1966. So the one Antipodean in the whole affair is a man who throws boomerangs at people. Truly, we have come so far. I have lived in this country for years, published in the New Yorker, run two national cartooning societies, and my nation’s cinematic ambassador to the Marvel universe remains a bloke with a stick.
Ditko’s fingerprints, and his flat.The comic references are not decoration; they’re argument. There are cover homages stacked at the end and the beginning, the first being Amazing Fantasy #15. Peter wears a Delmar’s Deli shirt, from the Queens deli that has been in all three previous films. The suit itself is what Tom Holland has called a “spider-child” of the Maguire and Garfield costumes: raised webbing, angular lenses, all of it pulling back toward what Ditko and Romita Sr. were drawing sixty years ago. Which brings me to the thing I cannot stop thinking about. Steve Ditko drew the definitive New York. The one I was copying out of the comics as a kid. He gave the character his shape, his red and blue, his web lines, his whole visual grammar of a boy falling through a city. He was famously private. He gave no interviews. He lived and worked in midtown, about a fifteen-minute walk from where I am typing this, and in June 2018, at ninety, he died alone in his apartment and was found some days later when someone came to check on him. 
The man who taught the world what New York looks like from the air died in a room in it, on his own, and nobody noticed for a while. That is not a moral. (I don’t have one.) It just sat down next to me in the cinema during a scene where Peter Parker eats dinner by himself, and it has not got up since. The numbers, for those who prefer numbers to pictures.As of Thursday, Rotten Tomatoes has it at 91% with critics and 98% with audiences, the latter tying the highest audience score of any MCU film. IMDb has it at 8.2. It opened around 93%, wobbled to 90%, and settled. Critics’ consensus praises the set pieces, the emotional stakes, and Holland’s performance, and several have called it the best of the four. Not everyone. Peter Bradshaw at the Guardian gave it a qualified pass and argued a more radical reboot is needed. David Ehrlich at IndieWire was among the top critics who marked it as rotten. I mention this because I would rather you knew I was in a room with dissenters than have you find out later and think me a shill. They’re wrong, obviously. But they’re allowed. The button on the summer.This has been a genuinely historic New York summer. The 250th anniversary of American independence on the Fourth. Seventy-odd tall ships in the harbour. Knicks in Five. The fiftieth Macy’s fireworks, billed as the largest they have ever staged. The World Cup Final across the river at MetLife on the nineteenth. The city has spent three months under scrutiny from the entire planet. And then, at the very end of it, a film that spends two and a half hours saying: yes, and it’s also just a place where a tired man in a mask does a job nobody thanks him for, and goes home, and does it again tomorrow. Made in Glasgow. Loved here. Both things true at once. Go and see it on the biggest screen you can find, and sit through the credits, and then walk home the long way. ‘til next time!
PS. Look, if this actually did something for your brain (or at least distracted you from the creeping dread of your own inbox for six minutes), please consider restacking this and sharing it with your people. It’s the only way the word spreads.
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