Action vs. Emotion: Are Marvel Action Set-Pieces Getting Worse?

Something unusual is happening across the early Brand New Day reviews: four different critics, four different outlets, and not one defense of the action. TIME's Stephanie Zacharek calls the CGI battles “elaborately fake-looking” and “perfunctory and underwhelming.” RogerEbert.com's Brian Tallerico says the most memorable set piece arrives “remarkably late,” with a Scorpion fight he calls “half-hearted” and a Hulk scene that “doesn't really land.” For a Spider-Man movie — a franchise literally built on the visual pleasure of swinging through a city — that's a strange consensus to reach.

The Case That Marvel Is Cutting Corners on Spectacle

Zacharek's phrase — “elaborately fake-looking special effects” — is a pointed one from a critic who spent the rest of her review praising the film for valuing actors over spectacle. That's not a critic who hates action on principle flagging weak CGI; it's a critic who liked almost everything else about the choice to de-emphasize action, still finding the actual effects work weak when the film does lean on it. Pair that with Tallerico's read that the strongest set piece is backloaded and the Hulk beat doesn't land, and the pattern isn't “less action” — it's “less action, and what's there needed more work.”

The Case That This Is a Deliberate, Defensible Trade

The counter-read: every review that criticizes the action is the same review praising the character work it replaced. Nobody's arguing Brand New Day should have cut Peter's isolation arc for a bigger set piece. Den of Geek's David Crow, the most enthusiastic of the four reviews, doesn't spend real space on action quality at all — his four stars are earned almost entirely on performance and direction. If a movie can land at four stars from one outlet and a positive-but-critical read from three others without action being the deciding factor either way, that's evidence the trade Marvel made — dialing back spectacle to buy space for Holland's performance — mostly worked on its own terms.

• TIME: CGI battles "feel perfunctory and underwhelming"
• RogerEbert.com: most notable action sequence comes "remarkably late"; Scorpion fight "half-hearted"; Hulk scene "doesn't really land"
• Den of Geek: doesn't flag action quality as a problem at all — four stars anyway
• The Guardian: calls the web-swinging physics "unconvincing" and destruction sequences repetitive

Where MarvelGossips Lands

This reads less like a franchise-wide action decline and more like a single film consciously under-resourcing its spectacle to protect its character budget — and the reviews split roughly along whether they think that protection was worth the cost. It's worth watching whether this becomes a trend across Phase 6 or stays specific to a film explicitly built around Peter's internal crisis rather than an external threat he can punch his way through.