The loudest moment in Spider-Man: Brand New Day isn’t explosions or dialogue or a grandiose score steering the audience’s emotions. It is simply a girl, sitting outside of the hospital, breathing.
Four days after the start of its theatrical run, the fourth movie of the new Tom Holland Spider-Man franchise has, like its predecessors, gotten analyzed for many well-known points. These include the mutants tease, the post-credits scene, and whether Ned’s handshake meant that the Doctor Strange spell is broken. Fair enough. But the best concept of the film is much less mechanical than all that, and hardly any critics are willing to name it. So, here it is.
Peter Parker dies in this movie. He doesn’t stay dead because Jean Grey refuses to let him.
As for how the situation is presented, it is pretty self-explanatory: Frank Castle, once again portrayed by Jon Bernthal in his characteristic way and thus impossible to disagree with, takes a shot at Jean to remove her psychic influence on a city filled with civilians. Spider-Man detects the situation with his now recovered spider-sense. He moves to shield Jean, and the shot hits him in the back. This is how Peter Parker should have died in the movie. No way for him to heal now, considering that the inhibitor is gone, and he does not have access to any superpowers that might prevent this situation.
But someone else saved him: a teenage telepath, outside of the hospital for hours, breathing for him when his body is unable to do so on its own.
Released on July 31, directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, Spider-Man: Brand New Day features Peter Parker, who is unreachable. The man spent four years alone, away from the world and from the people he cared about. His best friend barely knows him anymore, while the woman he loves does not remember their former life together. The core of this picture is a man who has chosen isolation as the right path, and it takes a bullet in the back for Peter to prove himself wrong.
It is only natural that the rescue is one of the least noticeable events in this film.
Sadie Sink’s Jean does not give a speech; there is no confession; she does not even enter the hospital. She does what a living being cannot stop doing without conscious will: she breathes for someone who has died, not because she has seen his soul and has decided to save it, but simply because a human death does not look acceptable to her.
Then there is the moment, which makes all the rest of the movie worth existing.
Jean takes the final deep breath, and Peter opens his eyes for the first time.
Edit calculates the viewer: every breath before Jean did this one. Not a heroic act with a specific start and an ending. Hours of it. An unglamorous, repetitive routine which happens unnoticed and not even glorified in songs.
There is a lot of chatter online, analyzing the event as the beginning of some romance between Peter Parker and Jean Grey. The chemistry is definitely there, and Marvel Studios clearly knows exactly what it is doing.
It is a wrong perspective, making the whole scene less powerful than it actually is.
The scene itself has nothing to do with the attraction to someone. The decision to take responsibility for yourself: someone’s death is an unacceptable outcome, and then you are staying until the universe agrees with you. You may call it love, but this is the sort which has nothing to do with wanting to get something from it. Jean leaves the moment he can breathe on his own. There is no intention for a thank you, and she does not even wait until he wakes up in the hospital room.
Marvel Studios’ problem for the last decade has been the scale: bigger portals, more cameos, and a multiverse that makes everything weightless. Spider-Man: Brand New Day is a rather rare entry among all the others, which understands the opposite concept: the movie starts with a man who believes that he needs to do everything by himself, and saves it with the most private act, done by probably the loneliest character of this picture.
Two people who have decided that they are not needed in this world, keeping each other alive.
Mutants are on their way. The X-Men are getting prepared. Internet discussions about this movie for the next couple of years will include attempts to find out which universe it belongs to and who will be in the cast for future installments.
Nothing beats a girl sitting on the pavement, breathing.
