At the end of 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home, Tom Holland’s Peter Parker/Spider-Man is a young man adrift. His best friend, Jacob Batalan’s Ned, and his girlfriend, Zendaya’s MJ, have been right by his side through most of the movie; at the end, a mystical spell erases their memory of him, ostensibly forever. His Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) has died as the result of a fireball assault by Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe), who, in his human guise, is a man she’d tried to help. Peter is too sunny to let his isolation harden into bitterness, and he’s still dedicated to fighting crime in his hometown of New York City, but he’s miserable, and this is where Spider-Man: Brand New Day begins. “Sometimes Spider-Man has to do the hard thing even if it breaks Peter Parker’s heart,” he explains in the movie’s opening scene, a statement potent enough for three semesters’ worth term papers on the nature of duality.

There are plenty more term-paper themes where that one came from. No man is an island, not even a Spider-Man: You could milk 2,000 words from that one. With great power comes great responsibility: If you can’t squeeze five pages out of that, you’re just not trying. Spider-Man: Brand New Day, directed by Destin Daniel Cretton and written by Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers (drawn, of course, from characters created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko), is so filled with truisms, plot machinations, and ricocheting feelings that it’s sometimes hard to focus on the core story, and even on our poor protagonist’s anguish. There’s a perfectly enjoyable summer entertainment locked inside this Spider-Man, if only the excessively busy mechanics didn’t get in the way.

But then, those mechanics—along with loads of elaborately fake-looking special effects, which now, rather than being dazzling, are just business as usual—are the hallmarks of all Marvel movies. It seems you can’t build one without them. You also can’t really explain the plot of Brand New Day without giving away the arrival of a surprise character, but here, roughly, is how it goes: Sad Peter Parker goes through the motions of being Spider-Man for four long years, as MJ and Ned study hard at MIT, the college the three of them were supposed to attend together. After graduation, MJ and Ned return to New York; Peter spies on them wistfully, and when he finally does get up the guts to talk to them, his face draws blank stares. He regularly leaves fresh flowers at Aunt May’s grave. The rest of his days are spent foiling workaday crimes, until some weird events shake the city: an unseen force capable of taking control of people’s bodies and brains has begun to wreak mayhem. Meanwhile, Spider-Man’s web-shooting capabilities have gone awry. His know-it-all AI assistant E.V.I.E. informs him that this is due to a massive increase in “arachnid hormones,” which is also causing him to be more aggressive. In other words, he’s angry and stressed out, and he has no idea how to handle his rage.

Here and there, Bruce Banner/the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Frank Castle/Punisher (Jon Bernthal), and Mac Gargan/Scorpion (Michael Mando) show up to cause mayhem. The heavy-duty CGI battles that ensue feel perfunctory and underwhelming. At least Florence Pugh’s Yelena/Black Widow briefly shows up, holding court in the waters of a Russian bath, and that’s hardly a bad thing.

Meanwhile, both Peter Parker and Spider-Man are sad, angry, frustrated, and guilt-ridden: These aren’t just teenage emotions, but adult ones, and it’s clear that Brand New Day is hoping to push Marvel product into more emotionally sophisticated territory. That’s not a bad impulse: It seems that even Marvel’s key audience of the early 2000s has outgrown the old formula of massive special-effects scenes interlaced with numbing proclamations about evil forces threatening to destroy the world. But while Cretton—also the director of 2021’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings—is clearly on the right track, the film’s pace never gives us time to let any single emotion or event settle. Loss, mourning, yearning, rage, befuddlement: in Brand New Day, feelings may be taken seriously, but they’re also treated as problems to be cycled through.

But if nothing else, Spider-Man: Brand New Day is proof that you can at least try to build a better Marvel movie—even with its flaws, this one is superior to most. That’s partly thanks to Holland, a smart, sensitive actor who, inside a stretchy suit or not, takes his character’s emotional travails just seriously enough. It doesn’t hurt that as MJ, Zendaya is allowed to do more than scowl disapprovingly. In both The Odyssey and the Dune movies, her spark has been sacrificed to the gods of serious acting, and not for the better. She’s best when there are beats of uncertainty in her dialogue. She shouldn’t be playing roles demanding grandeur and nobility; they only crush her spirit. Brand New Day, at the very least, shows some awareness that actors, and not excessive, soul-killing special effects, are what will keep drawing us to the movies. Everything else is just a distraction from faces, and maybe one that we can’t afford.