So, About Those Other Characters…

I purposefully avoided some pretty major spoilers in my Spider-man: Brand New Day review because, somehow, Marvel largely managed to avoid spoiling some key points for their film before the movie came out. I know, it’s absolutely shocking that a major studio didn’t give away all the cameos and twists in a superhero film before the movie came out (looking at you, DC Extended UniverseStarted as DC Comics' answer to the MCU, the early films in the franchise stumbled out of the gates, often mired in grim-dark storytelling and the rushed need to get this franchise started. Eventually, though, the films began to even out, becoming better as they went along. Still, this franchise has a long way to go before it's true completion for Marvel's universe.). Because of that, I felt like it was my duty to not even vaguely allude towards some pretty major stuff, so I kept that under wraps in the main review.

But now we’re in the spoilers section and I can discuss anything and everything I want. Key among them, a major character not featured in the trailers who has a very prominent role not only in this film but likely will in the next Marvel Saga to come. So let’s get into it:

Hey, It’s That One Girl

The biggest spoiler we have to get out of the way right off the bat is that Sadie Sink (of Stranger Things fame) was not only cast in this movie, and plays the main antagonist, but that her character is, in fact, Jean Grey (yes, of the X-MenLaunched in 1963 and written by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, the X-Men featured heroes distinctly different from those featured in the pages of DC Comics. Mutants who didn't ask for their powers (and very often didn't want them), these heroes, who constantly fought against humans who didn't want "muties" around, served as metaphors for oppression and racism. Their powerful stories would form this group into one of the most recognizable superhero teams in comics (and a successful series of movies as well).… although not yet). As we see in the movie, Jean is looking for her sister, Sarah, who went missing after the Department of Damage Control caught wind of the powerful psychic on the streets of New York City and snatched her up. Ever since, Jean has been searching far and wide to find her sister wherever DODC has her stashed.

This is a compelling narrative choice for the character. She’s motivated by love, and will do anything to find her sister. It’s a relatable storyline, and the movie tries its best to make sure we care about Jean and her quest as the events play out. With that said, a major complaint about the story is that, in the process of tracking down the DODC and searching for her sister, Jean kills a lot of people. She has the power (via her psychic connection) to take over people and move them around like puppet bodies. She also shows she has no regard for what happens to these people while she’s controlling them, or after she’s done.

As a prime example, Jean starts taunting Peter (after she’s figured out that he’s SpidermanSure, DC Comics has Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman, but among the most popular superheroes stands a guy from Marvel Comics, a younger hero dressed in red and blue who shoots webs and sticks to walls. Introduced in the 1960s, Spider-Man has been a constant presence in comics and more, featured in movies regularly since his big screen debut in 2002.), saying he’ll never be able to catch her. She then pushes the man she’s controlling out into traffic, letting him get absolutely wiped out by a truck. She straight up murdered that guy and no amount of the film telling us after the fact that she’s not a murderer changes the fact that, uh, yeah, she totally is. Try telling that to the dude’s family, movie, after they’re done scraping him off that truck.

And yet… I can also see Jean’s point. She’s not human, not in the conventional sense anymore. If we buy into the fact that she’s one of many mutants that are now softly getting launched into the Marvel Cinematic UniverseWhen it first began in 2008 with a little film called Iron Man no one suspected the empire that would follow. Superhero movies in the past, especially those not featuring either Batman or Superman, were usually terrible. And yet, Iron Man would lead to a long series of successful films, launching the most successful cinema brand in history: the Marvel Cinematic Universe. for the upcoming Mutant Saga (which is pitched as the theme for Phases VII, VIII, and IX) they would all be considered Homo superior and, at least as far as the humans they have to deal with are generally concerned, they aren’t humans. Jean views herself differently, saying to Peter that she and him aren’t like, “the rest of them.” She considers herself apart from, and, if we paraphrase Apocalypse here, “you don’t feel bad stepping on ants.”

I actually think this leaves Jean in an interesting place going forward. She’s murdered a few people and while this film tries to handwave it away once she finally makes a connection with Peter and gets talked down, I have no doubt this is the kind of character plotting we’ll hear about again later when Jean shows up again in, say, a potential X-Men film. She did bad things and she’ll need to atone for it, likely under the care and guidance of Charles Xavier at his school. And, of course, knowing that she has times where she’s gone bad again in the comics (such as when she’s part of the Hellfire Club for a stint), we now see the bad in her as well as the good.

A Future for Mutants

Let’s also acknowledge that the insertion of Jean Grey into this film, whether it calls her a mutant or not, means we’re going to get more mutants going forward. The first couple of Sagas were dominated by the AvengersMarvel's answer to DC's Justice League, this team features many of Marvel's biggest superheroes working together to protect the world and avenge its evils., but with most of the cast aging out of their roles and/or retiring from the MCU entirely, Marvel is going to need to rethink (and likely soft reboot) the universe going forward. Even if we get a new cast of Avengers to replace the old guard, this is also the perfect time for Marvel to introduce a different team of heroes to the fold: the X-Men.

I think that’s a big reason why Marvel has made sure we know that the original cast of X-Men (from 2000 onwards) are showing up in Avengers: Doomsday. They want to give that cast one last hurrah (even if they already got their goodbye films in X-Men: Days of Future Past, and Logan, and Deadpool & Wolverine). We can now bid them farewell before all those roles are recast as well. We already have a new Jean Grey, so presumably we’ll get a whole new “first class” of mutants at Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters including a new Cyclops, Beast, Iceman, Colossus, and more.

More to the point even, we’re going to have to get a new Wolverine. Hugh Jackman has said that Avengers: Doomsday will be his last performance as (any version of) the angriest Canadian ever, and while he’s said that before (when he played the character in Logan), it does seem like this is the right time to retire his character. Think about it this way: Sadie Sink is currently 24 while Jackman is 57. Whenever Jean Grey meets a version of Wolverine, you want them to at least look like they’re close in age (even if Wolverine is traditionally a hundred or so years older than her in the comics). If they’re going to have the Jean-Wolvie-Cyclops love triangle, audiences aren’t going to want to see it with a 57 year old man in the middle. That would be kind of creepy.

And then, of course, we’ll likely get a bunch of X-Men films and spin-offs as the Mutant Saga takes off. I’d be surprised if we don’t get at least two per Phase, with one mainline X-Men film and one side story (a solo film for one of the mutants, or an X-Factor or X-Force movie eventually). Once Marvel gets them into the MCU it would criminal for them to not get used. And all of that comes from Jean showing up in Spider-man: Brand New Day. Considering they handle Jean pretty well in this film, without info dumping all about mutants in the process, I would say they did a pretty solid job showing us the future for the universe while still making the film mostly about Peter.

The Universal Inhibitor

A key plot point of the film is that Peter suddenly starts going through changes. Due to his isolation his body starts to suppress his human DNA and starts elevating his spider hormones. It’s a defense mechanism, we’re told, and it’s only happening because Peter has cut himself off from basically everyone. Because of this, Peter has to figure out how to stop his body from changing so that he doesn’t lose who he is (because the spider side of him, left unchecked, is a violent monster).

To solve this problem Peter does the obvious thing: he builds an inhibitor chip. You thought I was going to say he reconnects with humanity? No. That would violate everything Peter had been doing up to that point, trying not to make connections so he could keep the rest of humanity safe. But if he could build an inhibitor for his spider DNA (not unlike the inhibitor we’re shown Bruce Banner wearing to suppress the The HulkOnce the brilliant Dr. Bruce Banner had dreams of making the world a better place by building super soldiers to act as a shield for all mankind. Then an accident at his lab bathed him in gamma radiation. Now he has a living nightmare, as a big green guy lives within, just waiting for the rage to take over so he can be free.), then he wouldn’t have to worry about his own spider condition.

As it turns out, though, Peter is more interested in building a universal inhibitor, one that could work on anyone with special powers, not just his own spider DNA. And what he eventually comes up with is eerily similar to the inhibitors that the X-Men frequently had to deal with in their comic adventures. It suppresses all “non human” (i.e., mutant) DNA, leaving mutants without their powers. It works not just on Peter but also on Jean Grey eventually, and it’s pretty clear that this tech, if it falls into the wrong hands (which it almost immediately does since the DODC take it) could lead to very bad ends for mutants… once we get there.

Some fans have pointed out that some kind of inhibitors have been seen in previous MCU projects, such as the inhibitor collar the Scarlet Witch wore at the end of Captain America: Civil War, and the one Banner uses as well. The key difference here is that Peter was naive enough to make a universal one without really thinking through all the consequences. This will absolutely be a key plot point down the road, I’m sure.

And What About His Friends…

Finally, let’s focus just a little bit more on Peter for a bit and discuss the other major thing that happens: Peter maybe, sort of reconnects with his old friends MJ and Ned. Naturally Peter wants MJ back because she’s the love of his life and he spends a lot of time pining for her. MJ, though, doesn’t remember him at all, even after she reads the letter he wrote for her (and then failed to deliver for four years). The spell Doctor StrangeSometimes thought of as the magical version of Tony Stark, Doctor Strange is the "Sorcerer Supreme", a mystic who was once a brilliant neurosurgeon until an accident robbed him of the use of his hands. But he found a way, in Tibet, to gain back not only his hands, but so much more... cast did too good of a job. Peter was wiped from everyone’s memories too effectively, it would seem.

Except, at the end of the movie, Peter sees Ned, his former best friend, in a bodega and goes up to him. After introducing himself, as Peter, to Ned, he shakes hands, which then leads to their special handshake they used to do. Caught up in it, Ned does the whole handshake, seemingly through muscle memory. After he shakes his head, looks up, and says, “Peter?” Generally fans think this means that Ned got his memories back, their special handshake breaking the spell blocking his remembering.

Now, not everyone online seems to accept this theory, but I think it’s valid, especially because the film sets it up earlier. At one point Peter has to try and save MJ from the powerful force of Jean Grey, which is chasing him down. He thinks he succeeded, and MJ then says that she remembers him, that it all came back… except she didn’t. That was Jean just messing with Peter. And then she says (paraphrasing here), “you actually thought true love’s kiss could break the curse.”

It didn’t work there but, if you think about it, the handshake is kind of like the platonic, best friend version of “true love’s kiss”. It seemingly broke the curse for Ned, and the look on his face at the end really does make it seem like Ned remembers the real Peter, and not just some stranger standing in front of him that performed a wacky handshake. It’s a nice twist, and I actually hope the future films commit to this since walking it back would feel like cheating after all that setup.

Some fans have also wondered if maybe, somehow, Jean was the cause of the curse lifting. At the end of the film her powers get a massive upgrade (due to meddling from the DODC) and she takes over a one kilometer block of NYC, freezing everyone and locking into their minds. It’s at this moment that some fans assume Jean broke the curse, at least for Ned and MJ. We do see MJ afterwards hanging out at a rooftop spot she used to go to with Peter, and she is wearing the black dahlia necklace he got her, as if hinting she remembers the truth.

Maybe she does, but I’ll be honest that I don’t think this is as necessary for the story, or for Peter. He finally told her the truth (even if she had to pry it out of him), and she said she’s not that girl, not now. It’s like in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 where Peter Quill (huh, another Peter) confesses his love to the version of Gamora before him and while she acknowledges that the bond he had with the other Gamora was special, she’s not that girl. I think it’s healthy for Peter and MJ to move on from each other now that they both know the truth and have some kind of closure.

Plus, if MJ isn’t his love interest after this it opens up possibilities for new characters to wander in, like Gwen Stacy or Felicia Hardy. A version of Gwen that could go off on her own adventures as Spider-woman would be cool, and I know a lot of fans are clamoring to finally get some kind of Black Cat adventure in a Spider-man film. While I like MJ as a character I think it’s fine if she also moves on, whether she has some of her memories back or not.

Final Thoughts

Anyway, that’s a lot about the key moments I couldn’t discuss before. All of it adds to the fact that I think Spider-man: Brand New Day is an excellent film that really works all its twists and turns well. And the fact that it can set up a lot of future ideas without feeling like it’s overstuffed or just checking boxes is a testament to the creative team that worked on the film. There was a lot going on in the movie, and Spider-man: Brand New Day holds it all together so very well.