Spider-Man: Brand New Day New Trailer Analysis - The Real Villain Isn’t on the Posters
Near the end of this week’s new trailer for Spider-Man: Brand New Day, we hear Spider-Man’s deceased Aunt May tell him:
“The people who love you love you because you’re you. Never forget that no matter how powerful you’ve become.”
Everything else in this trailer – the Hulk, the mysterious metamorphosis, ominous warnings from Department of Damage Control Director Bill Metzger (Tramell Tillman), Sadie Sink’s character leaping between bodies like a malevolent ghost – is spectacle in service of that single idea. And it is worth pausing on what that memory reveals, because it suggests that director Destin Daniel Cretton and returning screenwriters Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers understand something essential about where this character needs to go after the sacrifice he made at the end of Spider-Man: No Way Home.
Peter Parker gave up everyone who loved him to protect them. Four years later, this trailer asks: what does a person become after that kind of choice, sustained not for a moment of crisis but as a permanent condition of daily life?
The visual grammar of the trailer answers before the dialogue does. The backgrounds are gray, washed out, dreary – a New York rendered in the palette of exhaustion. Spider-Man’s suit, by contrast, is vivid and bright, practically vibrating with color against its drab surroundings. This is not a stylistic accident. It is a thesis statement rendered in cinematography: Spider-Man is thriving. Peter Parker is disappearing. The mask has become the only place where this character still gets to be fully alive, and the trailer wants us to feel the wrongness of that arrangement before a single line of exposition explains it.
The physical ‘evolution’ teased throughout – Peter’s increasingly desperate plea to Dr. Bruce Banner, of all people, to help him suppress whatever is happening to his mutating DNA – functions as a literalized metaphor for a kind of self-erasure taken to its logical extreme. Banner’s response is a sharp piece of dialogue:
”How would you decide what parts of nature are good or bad?”
It is a question Spider-Man cannot actually answer, because the entire premise of his current existence has been deciding, unilaterally, which parts of himself the world is allowed to know.
The previous three Spider-Man films have fundamentally been about adolescence – about a kid given enormous power before he had the judgment or the support structure to wield it safely, learning incrementally the kind of great responsibility that comes with great power. This film appears to be reframing the character’s ever-present central theme by way of a more adult question: what happens when responsibility becomes total, permanent, and isolating? When there is no longer a Peter Parker separate from Spider-Man to retreat into, because Peter Parker gave away every person who made that identity meaningful?
Ned’s mention in a video of his final semester at MIT lands with real cruelty in this context – a glimpse of the ordinary life trajectory Spider-Man sacrificed as he watches from the outside of a world he chose to exit. The villains suggested by the footage – Metzger’s Department of Damage Control invoking increasingly fascistic control over superpowered individuals as we’ve already seen in Ms. Marvel and Wonder Man, Sink’s character possibly serving as a desperate antiheroic response to exactly that kind of persecution – matters less, ultimately, than the interior threat the trailer keeps circling back to.
The real antagonist of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, if this trailer is to be believed, was never going to fit on a poster.
It is loneliness – the specific, compounding loneliness of a young man who made the most selfless choice imaginable and has been quietly disappearing into the consequences of it ever since.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day opens July 31st, and arrives positioned to set the stage for Spider-Man’s role in the two-part culmination of Marvel’s Multiverse Saga, particularly in Avengers: Secret Wars.
But before any of that, this trailer suggests, he’ll have to answer one complicated question first:
Who is left underneath the mask if you give everything of yourself away?