[#item_full_content] [[{“value”:”Spider-Man: Brand New Day is an incredible movie with one very big problem.
I’m posting my review of the movie down below (it was previously published at Forbes) but I also wanted to talk a bit about some statements made by the movie’s writers and why they still can’t justify what they did to Jean Grey as a character_._ Spoilers ahead.
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A couple things I really loved about this movie before we get to the meat of this post:
The Odyssey Connection
Brand New Day is Peter Parker’s Odyssey — like Odysseus, when the film starts, he’s lost everything and everyone and become “Nobody.” His legend lives on, but he’s separated from his friends and loved ones and his been alone and stranded for years. Now,he must make his return.
The Subversion of the Fairy Tale Expectations
In the end, instead of “true love’s kiss” breaking Doctor Strange’s spell, it’s true friendship’s secret handshake. I loved that it was Ned, and not MJ, who truly sees Peter and remembers him. This made the movie for me, and I go into great length about it in the review below.
Okay, now to the Jean Grey stuff.
Jean Grey’s murderous arc felt unfinished by the end of the film, and frankly I’m starting to think it felt that way because they took her arc so far in the villain direction that they just had no idea how to actually write her as a misguided, but ultimately redeemable, anti-hero. Grey is one of the most important and most famous of the mutants in the X-Men lineup, along with Gambit and Professor X and Magneto and Wolverine. And she has some dark comic book arcs. But things went a little too far in Brand New Day.
The writers, Erik Sommers (who at least spells his first name correctly) and Chris McKenna have had some post-release ‘splainin’ to do and I think that, as is so often the case, they’ve only made things worse via post-hoc justifications. Not that this is a controversy that’s stirring the nation (Trump’s recent move to open 45 million acres of pristine and previously protected national forests to road construction and logging is a controversy worth getting upset about, but then I suppose I’m just a conservative when it comes to the natural world; I want to conserve it) but it’s still worth discussing because that’s the whole point of movies. They’re fun to watch and then they’re fun to talk about and debate. This one also happens to raise some really big moral questions.
Quoth Sommers on Jean Grey’s actions in the film: “I think technically, she’s not responsible for any deaths. But you come away with the impression, certainly, that she’s caused a lot of destruction [and] mayhem.
“Even if you’re going to have a villain who really is redeemed at the end or goes through a transformation, you have to start them off in a place where they feel formidable,”he continued. “If it doesn’t feel like this is going to be someone who is a challenge to our hero, physically, emotionally, mentally, then you don’t really buy it.”
Now, he’s not wrong at all that you need a villain to be formidable and there’s also no doubt that Grey — mysterious villain for the first half of the film before her identity and backstory are revealed — is a serious challenge for Peter Parker and quite terrifying. Her powers reminded me of the demon Azazel from the Denzel Washington film Fallen (1998). She possesses people and some of them are seriously hurt or almost certainly maimed or killed.
But she also, at one point, possesses MJ and manipulates Peter into thinking she’s remembered who he is, that the spell — for her at least — is broken, and she loves him and . . . well it’s awful and cruel and while the reveal got a big reaction from the theatergoers, it sets up Jean Grey as a genuine psychopath. Beyond mere manipulation, she’s pulling a Wonder Woman 84 as far as consent is concerned (though not nearly as egregiously as in that awful, awful film) and she really has no reason whatsoever to do all of this in the first place. Honestly, to go from being a normal teen (albeit one with superhero powers) to this level of evil is quite startling and unsettling when you think about it.
The problem with all of this is that while Jean Grey’s motives are certainly sympathetic (she’s trying to rescue her sister from the bad guys at Damage Control, only to discover later that she’s already dead) the means by which she attempts to achieve her goals are quite horrific. And the problem with all of that is the fact that in the end, there is no reckoning or redemption. Peter helps her without hesitation. She helps him in turn, but she’s never really confronted with what she’s done. She isn’t forced to make a hard choice. And she’s never held accountable. Maybe that will come in a later movie, but it would have made Brand New Day better if, for instance, she had a run-in with Professor X in a mid-credits stinger. (I’d comment on how all of this relates to the problems with Dark Phoenix but I stopped watching the X-Men movies a long time ago).
But even if there had been a moment of reckoning or some kind of acknowledgement and recognition of what she’d done . . . they just took it too far. Everything she did to Peter was so evil. Just pure, unfettered evil for no reason. You can make a character formidable and even reckless with human life and still give them a path toward redemption, but they didn’t pave that path or lead her there. They just made her a terrible human being. Peter might still help someone like that, but I’m not sure how we’re supposed to reconcile this character going forward, and it makes me nervous about the future of the X-Men in the MCU.
I talk about this and the movie itself at length in my video review below:
My original review is below.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day Review
My Spidey-senses are tingling. I have a good feeling about the opening of Spider-Man: Brand New Day this weekend. If the theater I attended was any indication, this is going to be a massive box office success. There was one moment, which I’ll get to later, that made the whole theater gasp.
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The real winners? Tom Holland, Jon Bernthal and Zendaya, all of whom also starred in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey (here’s my review of that film) which opened to a massive global box office just two weeks prior.
While, the films are about as different as two films can be. There are some very weird similarities between The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day, now that I think about it, but I suppose that makes sense since both come from the heroic tradition.
One is about a lonely hero trying to get back to the ones he loves while encountering strange monsters and other obstacles. The other is about a lonely hero trying to get back to the ones he loves, encountering strange monsters and hoping that his love will still be there waiting when he returns. Both of these men are battered by their pasts, by the actions they took to protect the ones they loved, by the loss and the terrible cost of victory.
Odysseus was just the Spider-Man of Homer’s ancient Greece. Beyond these striking plot similarities, however, these two films could not be more different. And the three major actors who play characters in each film. And an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!
But I digress. Let’s get on with it, shall we?
It’s kind of hard to believe, but Spider-Man: No Way Home came out in 2021. Five years ago! I honestly didn’t realize it had been so long, but then again I hadn’t been thinking about Spider-Man all that much, or Marvel, or superhero movies for that matter. For the most part, these have been pretty lackluster, in both the MCU and DCU. Captain America: Brave New World was pretty awful, proving that it’s really not that easy to swap out Steve Rogers – especially with such a lousy script.
Over in DC-land, Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn promised to bring about a new era of awesomeness, but his opening salvo – Superman – was lackluster and messy, even though they nailed the casting. And while Peacemaker almost made up for that with a solid second season, then along came Supergirl and now DC’s hopes are all pinned to Clayface (of all the villains you could possibly pin any hopes to).
So I’ve been a little checked out when it comes to superhero stuff, not because I don’t enjoy it, but because it’s been, for the most part, so dull and so mediocre outside of the diamond in the rough scattered here and there (and Peacemaker and Wonder Man, gems they may be, are both TV shows).
When Spider-Man: No Way Home came out five years ago, I said it was one of the best superhero movies in years.
I’m repeating myself now, but Spider-Man: Brand New Day is one of the best superhero movies in years. Only, this one is better.
Yes, No Way Home had lots of fun cameos. The three Spideys all together – Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield and Tom Holland were quite the Three Musketeers, and it was a fun gimmick; and, of course, you can never go wrong with Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin.
Still, that film felt like it was all mixed up in all the other problems with the Marvel Cinematic Universe at the time. The obsession with the multiverse. The messy, feckless, rudderless ship that the MCU became after Endgame. In that chaos, a few bright lights shone, but they were still mired in post-Endgame fog. Perhaps Brand New Day really is just that, a turning point for Marvel and the MCU. And perhaps that’s wildly optimistic, and I’m just still buzzing from what was a really fun, if a little clunky at times, movie.
Everyone Has Forgotten Peter Parker, Including Peter Parker
So Peter Parker had Doctor Strange wipe the entire world’s memory of him from existence. Not of Spider-Man, but of Peter Parker himself, because that was the only way to stop the universe from unravelling in the mess of a multiverse apocalypse that Peter had unwittingly created.
The physics of it all are a little murky now, half a decade on, but the point is this: Peter Parker had to save the world and in order to do so, he had to wipe himself from the memories of everyone, friend or foe alike. Not quite like dying to save the world. At least when you die, your memory lives on. Or you get recast as Doctor Doom.
Now, four years later in the story, Peter remains a solitary hero, working closely with the friendly neighborhood NYPD Detective Jean DeWolff (Liza Colón-Zayas). He’s famous and successful and lonely. He misses Ned (Jacob Batalon), MJ, the friends he made in the Avengers and his old life, but he carries on as the martyr, helping bring bad guys like Scorpion (Michael Mando) to justice.
He doesn’t seem interested in making new friends or dating or doing singles stuff like random trivia or karaoke nights. His life is a little depressing, to be honest, but he’s pushing all that down until he finds himself following Ned to a party (he follows him on social media, so he’s always up-to-date on his and MJ’s lives), but this time he actually follows him to their place where he mingles and discovers that MJ has a boyfriend.
This sends him into a mental spiral, a decline that has some very real consequences involving his powers that I won’t get into here. Suffice to say, we all hit puberty at different times.
On top of all of this, there’s a new threat in town, a threat that the Department of Damage Control wants stopped. This rather obviously shady government department is led by Bill Metzger, played by Tramell Tillman who we all know from Severance. So we know immediately that something is up with this guy, though I just kept waiting for some defiant jazz.
One thing leads to another and Spider-Man finds himself hunting and being hunted by this new threat, often bumping shoulders with the Punisher. They make a great odd couple. Peter so sweet and sincere; Frank so grouchy and vulgar (that at one point, just as he utters the word “Mother–” he’s cut off from finishing the curse by a well-placed web).
And Peter keeps bumping into his old pals, too. He visits Bruce Banner who’s retired from Hulking and is teaching physics to college kids who only really take his class because he’s the Hulk. But through it all, Peter is trying to come to grips with this new life mostly by denying his own feelings and clamping down the changes that are happening in his life. It’s just that age old story. You can’t really run away from your problems. You can’t ever really hide from yourself.
The movie works because it’s a good story that moves along at a great clip and throws in plenty of action and humor to balance out its more somber themes. Plenty of web-slinging, plenty of antics, plenty of things going boom. Holland is perfect as Peter Parker, and the various familiar faces he comes into contact with are all fun – especially Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) and her amazing office.
Yes, the plot can feel a tiny bit convoluted at times, but it’s nowhere near as confusing as Brave New World, and by the end, it all comes together nicely even if many threads are left dangling. It also avoids one of the biggest pet peeves I have with these movies: “the world is going to end, and the superhero has to save it” trope. There’s probably a better name for that. But the world-ending stakes almost always take me right out of a movie, because we know that one of two things is going to happen.
Either the world will end, and thus the franchise will be over, or the heroes will save the world. Rarely, very rarely, does this involve heroes dying in the process. Smaller, more intimate stakes are what get me invested in these stories, because more personal stakes are more relatable and create more tension and thus, despite being smaller in terms of scale, are actually much bigger in terms of narrative oomph.
I felt nothing watching The Fantastic Four. Nothing, Lebowski! No fear that the world would end. No fear that any of the characters would die trying to save it. Just nothing at all. I enjoyed Thunderbolts right up until it became this goofy plot to save the world from this new shadow power. Superman might have been fun if our hero had had to choose between saving Lois Lane or saving the city or something, anything, beyond just “the world is going to end because of space pockets going haywire.” These stories are dull because they’re all basically the same.
Brand New Day did something different. It kept wasn’t some revolutionary story, by any means, but it kept things personal from start to finish, and there’s some fun, if somewhat predictable, twists to keep it from devolving into mustache-twirling supervillain territory.
In other words, this is a fun movie that avoids most of the pitfalls the MCU has fallen into in recent years – dull stories and characters, an addiction to the multiverse, lame final confrontations, etc. – and lets us just enjoy these characters and this world for a couple hours. The audience clapped in my theater, and this was a showing that got interrupted halfway in by a power outage. Impromptu intermission.
The Wickedness of Jean Grey
So, the “bad guy” of the movie is Jean Grey, the X-Men character now played by Sadie Sink of Stranger Things. Of course, she’s not really a bad guy at all, she’s just a powerful psychic trying to find her sister who was abducted by Damage Control and Mr. Milchick – er, Bill Metzger. She’s young and angry and arrogant and powerful and uses whatever tricks she has at her disposal to get into Damage Control HQ and try to rescue her sister, and this involves manipulating Peter. She can essentially possess people within 33 feet of her and hop from person to person. (If you saw the 1998 Denzel Washington movie, Fallen, you’ll get a sense of how this works, only Jean Grey is not a demon).
So at one point, she possesses MJ and while she and a masked Peter stand on a rooftop, she pulls up his mask and says that maybe something will spark her memory. And they kiss, and she says “Peter?” He starts to cry because he’s so relieved that through the power of love, she’s remembered who he is. Only it’s not MJ at all. It’s just Jean Grey possessing her, and she mocks him for it afterward. She taunts him for thinking the power of true love’s kiss would restore MJ’s memory. It’s a sad moment, and it becomes bittersweet when they actually talk about it later; he tells her that he loves her; and she says she doesn’t even know him. She thinks he’s a great guy, but to her he’s just a stranger.
But when he takes her home, she invites him up to meet Ned (fully masked) and they all hang out. Ned is thrilled because he’s been trying (and failing) to solve the mystery of who this masked superhero is. He’s even put together a Spidey tracker app (that is featured in the post-credits scene). What MJ notices during their time spent joking around is that they do, in fact, seem like best friends. Even though Ned has no idea that he ever knew Spider-Man, they joke and laugh the way only old friends do.
And I think this, and how it ties into the very end of the movie, is really what sold me on this film. Because no, the power of true love’s kiss doesn’t work, doesn’t spark that memory for MJ, doesn’t rekindle her love for him. But at the very end of the movie, after the dust settles, Peter spots Ned sitting at a cafe and walks over and greets him. He introduces himself as Peter, the name Ned heard MJ refer to Spider-Man as.
And then Peter goes to shake his hand, and they do their special hand-shake, and they do it exactly the way they always did. There’s this dawning look of realization that comes over Ned’s face as Peter smiles back at him. “Oh, Peter!” he exclaims. And the credits roll. There were audible gasps from the audience. It was one of those perfect emotionally poignant endings to a film that made everything that came before it work better, click together just so. Honestly, I think it was one of the best single moments in the entire MCU run.
It also sort of reminded me of Hook, when the Lost Boys are all picking sides over whether Robin Williams’s character, a middle-aged all-grown-up Peter Pan who doesn’t even remember that he’s Peter Pan is, in fact, the Pan. Most of the kids go over to Rufio’s side, because Rufio is the leader now and he doesn’t for a second believe that this “Boil-dripping beef, fart-sniffing bubble butt!” could be Peter Pan. All grown-ups are pirates as far as Rufio is concerned.
And then one little boy walks across the line in the sand and walks around him, looking him up and down. And he he holds Peter’s middle-aged face in his hands, takes his spectacles from his face, feels the lines on his face and grabs his cheeks, squeezing them back into a smile. And then he says “Oh there you are Peter!”
Well I love that movie, Hook, and I always will, and that scene always gives me chills and makes me teary-eyed. And maybe it’s just Peter Parker and Peter Pan sharing a name, but it was that same moment in Brand New Day in a lot of ways. Ned realizing, as they finished that elaborate secret handshake, and not just realizing in the way you know something is a fact, but recognizing that a thing is true, and in so doing, breaking the spell.
It’s not the girl, not the kiss, not the thing Peter’s been mooning over all these years, it’s the friendship. That older, deeper bond; not the flighty, hot-burning passion of love and attraction, but an old stone, rooted deep, that even Strange’s sorceries can’t erase. And I could tell that the audience felt that moment as strongly as I did. It crackled in the air.
To dip our toes back into The Odyssey, it’s similar to Telemachus realizing the old beggar is his father. That loyal dog, holding out all these years for his master to return. That deep loyalty no curse, not even the gods themselves, can shake.
Verdict
Spider-Man: Brand New Day is an exciting, emotionally powerful, often hilarious action-adventure movie that breathes new life into the superhero genre. Whether it’s a flash in the pan or the start of something better for the MCU remains to be seen, but you should go see it on the biggest and best screen you can find. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Let me know your thoughts on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook or in the comments. And be sure to subscribe to Diabolical and my YouTube channel and follow me at Forbes!
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