A Deep Dive Into What X-Actly Happened Here
For the first half of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, all I could think was, ‘Holy crap, they’ve done it. Marvel has finally produced a live-action Spider-Man movie that can live up to (maybe even surpass!) the first two Sam Raimi films.’
And then Sadie Sink shows up.
The fault lies not with the extraordinarily talented Ms. Sink, who turns in another deeply felt and powerfully empathetic performance that should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with her work on Stranger Things, the Fear Street films, etc. If anything, Sink overdelivers massively on what she’s asked to do.
Unfortunately, what she’s asked to do is another instance of the MCU using the buffer of an endlessly expanding media franchise to cheat out on telling a satisfying story. Brand New Day instead once again relies on 1) the audience’s existing relationships with certain characters, and B) the promise of “They’ll address it in the next movie”, to skip out on ever having to deal with the messiest (and by default most interesting) material generated by the narrative they’ve decided to tell. And it’s this, this crutch, not occasionally slapdash VFX or a preponderance of Whedon-y witticisms, that will forever place a limited ceiling on the quality of all but a handful of Marvel creations.
So who is Sadie Sink playing, and why is it so endemic of modern Marvel’s creative plateau?
Well, in perhaps the worst kept secret this side of, ‘Will there be other Spider-Men in the Spider-Man crossover movie?’, she’s playing Jean Grey, the famous(ly doomed) mainstay of the X-Men. For the first half of Brand New Day, Jean remains unseen and unnamed as she wreaks havoc across New York City. Psychically hopping from one host to another, she launches a series of assaults against Damage Control (the MCU stand-in for any overreaching federal agency).
What sort of havoc? Well, let’s see. She puppeteers blameless bystanders to do things like drive a tank through busy traffic, shoot people, walk off rooftops, and step in front of oncoming cars to be pulverized. In each instance, Spider-Man is on hand to save the day, and the movie is very careful to always highlight that no one is actually killed throughout all this. Even so, director Destin Daniel Cretton lingers on the confusion and horror of the victims when they awaken from Jean’s control, not to mention the collateral damage wreaked by Spider-Man as he struggles to contain the fallout of Jean’s rampages.
Even the visualization of Jean’s takeover is presented in a far more unsettling and violent manner than we’ve seen in previous X-media. Jean might speak through other people’s mouths in those movies, but here the affected people flail and spasm as though suddenly shocked or stung. It’s presented as pure violation, to very unsettling effect.
In perhaps the most loaded moment in the film, Jean hijacks the body and mind of MJ, Spider-Man’s beloved and ‘as’ MJ, she tricks Peter Parker into believing that she has recovered her magically-erased memories of their shared past and romance. She and Peter passionately embrace, at which point Jean gleefully reveals the truth, mocks the devastated Spider-Man, and finally throws MJ’s body off the roof.
When Peter calls her a monster during this sequence, it’s really hard to argue the point.
Except she can’t be a monster, because she’s Jean Grey. The unseen, unnamed presence gets a face and a name and that’s right about when it all goes to hell.
We learn in due course that actually Jean is just trying to rescue her sister who was abducted (and, we eventually learn, murdered) by Damage Control. So, see? Nothing bad that Jean did was actually her fault. She was just lashing out. The last stretch of the film becomes about saving Jean, with Spider-Man having to talk her down from a genocidal fit, eventually throwing himself in front of the Punisher’s sniper round to protect her.
And Jean in turn gets a lovely pep talk from mind palace Marisa Tomei (something I think we can all agree would give us a real boost) and uses her power to keep Peter alive. Redemption unlocked, we last see her smiling softly to herself as she rides a bus to whatever cryo chamber Sink will reside in until it’s time for her to meet the Avengers and/or start a new X-team.
Spider-Man talking down a villain via his capacity for deep empathy, connecting over shared grief and loneliness, this is all great stuff. And it especially sings in this far more emotionally grounded film, with Tom Holland and Sink pouring all of their considerable abilities into drilling down to the raw human heart at the core of these superhuman beings.
But what about the random guy Jean Grey threw in front of a moving car?
WHAT ABOUT THE RANDOM GUY JEAN GREY THREW IN FRONT OF A MOVING CAR?!?!
Brand New Day tepidly attempts to address this by again drawing parallels to Peter and his own mistakes. But that’s some thin gruel, man, especially since Jean isn’t written as desperate and overwhelmed the way Peter is when he is most susceptible to destructive/self-destructive behavior. Instead, Jean is depicted as being downright gleeful as she joy-rides other people through demolition derbies of her own devising.
The movie simply does not want to engage with the flagrant horror of what Jean is doing to these people. It trusts that the name ‘Jean Grey’ generates enough intrinsic trust in viewers that Brand New Day can blithely ignore the ugly consequences of her actions and send her off into the gauzily lit great unknown.
And if, for whatever reason, a plurality of the viewing public did object, well, no worries. Five films from now, the guy playing Magneto can reference these events, Sadie Sink will look sad, and the guy playing Cyclops can give her a speech about not letting your past mistakes define you because something something being a hero means having to forgive yourself blah blah. There! Dealt with!
Except, that’s not actually the way well-told stories deal with villains, even villains with sympathetic motivations.
God, if only there was an example of like a superhero movie that did a great job telling a satisfying story about the hero confronting a villain who we the audience also have tremendous sympathy for. And it’d make my argument a lot stronger if, by random happenstance, this random example also somehow involved Spider-Man in some way.
Tragic villains with sympathetic backstories are nothing new to Spider-Man. Sam Raimi invests a great deal of the runtime of his masterpiece Spider-Man 2 endearing the viewer to that version of Otto Octavius. We get to know and like Otto before the tragic accident that kills his wife and puts him on the path to supervillainy. And Spider-Man 2 even gilds the lily by making it clear that Otto’s behavior is largely the result of the influence of the AI powering the tentacles that have become bonded to him. As with this Brand New Day, the climax revolves less around knock-out brawl than Spider-Man appealing to the wounded person beneath the monstrous behavior.
But one rather critical difference between the two films is that Sam Raimi didn’t have to worry about preserving characters for future use in other movies. Spider-Man 2 tells a complete, satisfying story with Doc Ock, and part of that story is Otto accepting the responsibility (hey, for some reason that word seems relevant to Spider-Man) of his actions and sacrificing himself in an act of atonement. I’m not saying that Jean Grey needed to die at the end for Brand New Day to be a successful film, but the movie sure needed something more than what we got. Simply opting to not care about the trail of carnage and terror she left behind speaks to a slick, even cynical, understanding of how to manipulate an audience into thinking they got a full meal while denying them the emotional/mental calories garnered via having to wrestle with complicated scenarios that don’t have an easy answer.
As presented here, Jean is absolutely a victim of a horrible system that needs to be torn down. She is also absolutely an abusive, destructive menace who uses the memories and bodies of strangers to further her own ends in a manner that borders on sociopathic. It sure seems like it’d be interesting to plop this conundrum down in front of Peter Parker and have him try to find a solve for this unsolvable problem.
Nah. That sounds hard. Skip it.
As long as Marvel opts to make films that do everything within their power to avoid doing anything that might challenge or upset an audience, they will never make a great movie again. The best MCU productions (Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther films; James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy films) turn directly into this skid and wring maximum drama out of forcing superheroes to confront dilemmas that do not have easy solutions. That you come way from Black Panther wondering if Killmonger was right, that the final Guardians movie leaves Gamora and Peter Quill permanently separated, these speak to a willingness to take risks, to tell the best story possible even if it means pissing off a portion of the audience.
Marvel doesn’t want to take risks right now. It definitely doesn’t want to piss off any single person who might be considering exchanging money for a movie ticket. Instead they’re aiming for placation coupled with a lingering feeling of unfulfillment that will keep you coming back, movie after movie, in the hopes that this time the incessant itch will be scratched to satisfaction.
Except the hollowness of this particular narrative kick-the-can has been exposed the more ‘content’ the MCU puts out. It’s long since been clear post-Endgame that there’s just no there there anymore, and people aren’t invested in watching that can get kicked a little further down the endless road. That doesn’t mean audiences won’t turn out in droves for certain characters and groups, like Spider-Man and the Avengers, but the jig is up. And that just general, almost holistic breakdown of audience trust and investment will be deadly for whatever long-term schemes Kevin Feige and his Disney overlords have to restore Marvel to the top of the cinematic universe heap.
None of this makes Brand New Day a bad movie, only a dissatisfying one. But even if there’s nothing ‘wrong’ with a bit of colorful comic book fun, I will humbly remind you that his name is the SPECTACULAR Spider-Man, not the “Sure, Pretty Alright” Spider-Man.
