Welcome to Crosstalk, wherein A.V. Club writers discuss their varied (or unvaried, as the case may be) perspectives on a pop-culture topic. This time, Jacob Oller and Monica Castillo swing back into the MCU with Spider-Man: Brand New Day to find out if Peter Parker can pique their interest.
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for Spider-Man: Brand New Day.]
Jacob Oller: I don’t know about you, Monica, but the Spider-Man movies are the only sub-franchise of the Marvel Cinematic Universe that I’ve kept up with, if only because I like the character and I’ve still held onto some fondness for the teen comedy Homecoming over the years. Now, as Jesse pointed out in his review, Tom Holland’s Spidey has stuck around for long enough to earn his own soft reboot in a world where nobody knows him outside his costume.
I found that isolated, postgrad ennui affecting, but in a vacuum—as soon as we start bringing in the Hulk, you lose me. That’s my persistent issue with the MCU: You need these human-scale films for us to care about the heroes in the first place, but it’s long been the standard that audiences should only need to care about them enough to watch them team up with other ones from other movies. But this film does seem like a step in the right direction, especially with all the uninspiring hubbub around the new Avengers movies. Where are you at with the Marvel machine?
Monica Castillo: I have similarly checked out of the MCU factory because a number of the recent movies started to become forgettable the moment I left the theater. (Was it Doctor Strange’s miracle mind wipe?) But whoever made the call to cast Holland in the role of Spider-Man must have some Spidey senses of their own, because he’s one of the few performers still bringing their A-game to their character, giving him life, and selling me on his superhero saga.
This time, he’s struggling to do what’s right for his girlfriend MJ and his friend Ned, he’s married to his job and lonely after everyone forgets he was Spider-Man, and he’s wrestling with a genetic rage mutation that I hope will continue to be explored in the next Spider-Man movie (hopefully, sooner than five years from now). There’s enough working inside his character to keep me entertained and curious to see where the filmmakers will take the story next, even if this story and other characters around him are slightly less polished in this latest edition.
JO: I’m glad you’re bringing up the genetic mutation thing early, because it’s one of the many, many threads in this movie that seem only loosely connected to each other. There’s always been a lot of puberty problems baked into the Spider-Man character—a high school boy trying to keep it a secret that he’s shooting webs—but the way this abrupt change manifests for an older Peter Parker is strange.
At first it seems like maybe we’ll actually get to see this character literally age and change beyond his perpetual boyishness, with him suffering some kind of physical ailment from burning the candle at both ends. He quips about needing to stretch before a fight scene, so it doesn’t seem too far-fetched that he’d get the webslinging version of carpal tunnel.
But then it becomes clear that, like you said, this whole deal with his increasingly overbearing spider DNA is merely something for another movie. Sure, it ties into the big spoiler of the film—with regards to superpeople of all stripes embracing or suppressing their powers, with all their positive and negative qualities—but that’s the same flavor of theme that these characters fought a whole Civil War over. At the end of the day, it still feels like the MCU is afraid of real change, and I don’t mean in an “introduce a new universe” way.
MC: Absolutely, this is like, what, the fourth or fifth cinematic remix of Spider-Man’s story? I think the character could do with some shaking up. It’s part of what I enjoy about the Spider-Verse movies, really changing things up so it doesn’t feel like you’re making the same dish over and over again. Marvel actually got quite a bit of mileage out of that idea in Spider-Man: No Way Home, bringing together Peter Parkers from other multiverses (a beaten-to-death concept I’m glad they didn’t further pursue in Brand New Day, but I’ll forgive them for this concept). In the last film, we got to see naturally older Peter Parkers from Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield, so it can be done! Tom Holland doesn’t have to play 30-going-on-17 for the rest of his Marvel run.
Now, while the idea of an arachnid hormone imbalance is clever (Is this like spider perimenopause?), the DNA inhibitor subplot is hilariously simple and clearly complicated? It got so silly—a universal inhibitor for all superpowers—that it would’ve taken me out of the movie if there weren’t some other redeeming action sequences after that.
JO: Well, the MCU needed a way to set up a classic X-Men problem, which is everybody hating mutants and being able to do something about it. So be it that a hormonally afflicted Peter was able to solder one together in The Punisher’s derelict hideout after one quick meeting with Bruce Banner; this is a Tony Stark, box of scraps situation.
The thing that really brought me into Brand New Day, though, and made me at least halfway interested in where Marvel will go from here, is that Holland’s Spider-Man, if not having a major character shift, is at least shifting roles in this sprawling ensemble. He’s not going to be the kid anymore, as The Punisher keeps calling him. He’s going to be a mentor, an established figure for a new wave of characters.
This kinda happened with Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man, who got Spidey as a surrogate son, but it’s been an all-too-rare way to connect these disparate characters together—and one that’s a lot more meaningful than just having them show up in front of the same green screen to smack the same alien. Did this have the same effect on you? Or are your feelings on the franchise’s future different?
MC: Yeah, some of these “let’s get the band together to save the world” movies have me asking, what band? At least with Avengers 1.0, it made sense that they were strangers coming together for a common cause, but then they had tension as well. Hell, they even shared an office in Midtown for a time.
But cycling through superheroes, it kind of feels like the Avengers is now like a college club that’s being kept alive out of a sense of tradition more than actual camaraderie. Now that Holland is one of the older veterans in the cast, it makes sense to give Peter Parker that mentor upgrade, and that’s certainly teased here (as is the next generation of superheroes). I just hope they give him enough runway to set up that rapport like the one he shared with Tony Stark, because it was one of the highlights of those movies, and it would solve the character’s Peter Pan problem, staying forever young, by giving him some growing up to do.
JO: Maybe it’s that Peter Pan problem writ large, of forever stunted growth, of perpetual cycles, that has made the MCU such a slog—even outside of it having felt like homework for seven years. Sure, that’s a problem taken from the comics, where you always know the next issue is coming regardless of what happens in the panels in front of you, but it’s something that makes movies like Brand New Day, movies that want to have it both ways with change and stagnation, frustrating. I imagine it’s a similar feeling to when you read a unique, character-defining run of comics, only to have it all contorted back into canon.
If Marvel can go back to that earlier feeling of strong, siloed characters breaching containment for something worth sharing, I can imagine being coaxed back on board. But the endless half measures (in terms of narrative planning) and generally poor filmmaking (in terms of everything else) have me skeptical that it’ll work out that way.
MC: It has become such a slog with this assembly line of movies and TV shows. It’s a formula Disney copied and applied over to the Star Wars franchise, and now it feels like we’ve reached a saturation point in both worlds. We went from enjoying these movies as a kind of popcorn event every few years to trying to puzzle out what superhero is in which ancillary movie now? God forbid they include details from a TV show in a movie because then many members of the audience will be left out if they didn’t stay on top of this checklist fandom.
What little we’ve heard about the “filmmaking by committee” approach to churning out a Marvel movie these days does not inspire confidence that we’ll get really interesting explorations into characters or thrilling new worlds the way that Ryan Coogler surprised us with the level of thought and design that went into Wakanda for Black Panther or how Joe Johnston channeled retro aesthetics to bring Captain America out of the ’40s and into the 2010s. Captain America: The First Avenger came out 15 years ago, and after that initial Golden Era of the first MCU phase, these recent phases have offered much of the same, but kind of worse. The decision makers at Marvel Studios will have to shake a few things up (and maybe even revisit their grueling release schedule) before the overall franchise will grow beyond its self-imposed limitations.
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