Glad he/many enjoyed it, i’ll try it eventually- however.
Just from a distance, even before seeing the movie, I wish Peter moved on from Michelle.
In retrospect; I get she was a rider (she was 100%), they been through it together, but a soft regress is a cop-out.
Having Sadie play someone else who helps him heal just as a friend most of the entire movie: Planting the seeds of a new bond for him but not moving too quickly but ultimately building upon the “Brand New Day” namesake of actually moving on without regressing.
Have the new character be in the background first 30 minutes, show her doing her own thing, coming and going, they say hi, have witty banter, cheeky stuff in between the dark storyline. Smallville’s Clois level energy.
A confident dork.
📌Namely, importantly: Give her destinations, passing him by, curate a sense of purpose for her, so she doesn’t just exist to be the replacement for MJ; she’s got shit going on too. To cook that payoff just right, that is paramount for me, she needs to be almost fleeting but present, simultaneously.
- Peter can get help, but still has to process the trauma, he has to do the work. This way he’s not hopping on a new train via romantic platitudes and smoochy.
- But it’s a painstaking transition, it’s been 4 years but you don’t just get over something like that situation especially when it happened like that.
- Ultimately, she is patient. Even before she figures out the secret, she sees his integrity and character.
Otherwise, establish she & Peter know each other prior in-between NWH & BND, skip the meet-cutes. The neighbor to lovers trope.
edit: they actually teased the neighbor thing as a gag in the movie where the woman tried to make small talk about them being on the same floor and Peter brushes her off awkwardly. I made this pitch originally before seeing the film by a few hours but i’m glad the movie inadvertently illustrated my point. Even though they sped-walked passed it, kinda feel bad for her tbh.
Pitch continued: He’s resisting her hints, help, counsel for most of the movie (a good 55% of it to focus on his personal baggage, just so the blue-balling doesn’t piss off the audience too much through peter rejecting a good thing): Just to reinforce his dysfunctional avoidant and isolationist martyrdom.
She’s not hunting him down, they simply meet at the laundry mat, on the street, Empire State: have her even point out how they can’t seem to avoid each other.
And part of the arc is him moving on first in a similar fashion to the movie but the friendship is a vehicle to that outcome; accepting who this woman is, not who MJ was. Because reasonably moving on isn’t going to be easy like a light-switch.
And to side track, let’s highlight his trauma track record:
- Aunt May’s death & her dying right in front of him
- Goblin’s terror on his life in less than 3 days
- having fought at the Avengers Compound in a deadass war
- losing Tony & watching him… die right in front of him.
- The trauma of being dusted to death.
- the trauma of coming back & the world is in another server entirely.
- the trauma Mysterio put him through/ getting hit by that train.
- the anxiety of the whole world knowing who he is, yes, that still happened btw; I will admit I had remind myself that that happened.
- ofc the trauma of being forgotten by his bestfriend and girlfriend, the world. (how does that effect gov. records, dental, school forms? pictures, physical pictures? *shrug)
- fighting a Warlord (Thanos) on Titan, etc. etc. etc.
Peter’s rejection of Ursula-like wouldn’t be justified in how he does it, brushing her off; but his blockheadedness would be thoroughly rationalized & made clear that he’s got more going on in his head than just Ned & Mj not being there. He’s been through it, and far too young.
Illustrating the scale of his headspace keeps the audience from trivializing the true weight of his burden just because he’s rejecting her best efforts, & some may/ most will likely sympathize with her and through that may becomes frustrated with Peter; Audience Psychology is real.
Because at the end of the day, she doesn’t truly know him yet, or the full scale of what he’s been through even when she figures out he’s Spider-Man.
TL;DR Committing to the consequences of the spell vs tailing MJ & Ned here and there; then MJ gets involved anyway through plot, and while I appreciate the maturity to have MJ state the obvious that she is not who he knew & they don’t just resume activities after his confession: Good scene, good acting. Regardless, it still regresses the NWH sendoff, especially the ending.
His soft following/ stalking; even the trailers didn’t sell me on, that was a red flag. But I get it, still not on board.🚩
My charge is, even before watching the movie: What’s the destination? If they’re showing him shadowing Ned & MJ in just the trailers, that’s regression. We can’t keep him stuck.
Even actual spiders eventually move their web-domains to different locations. Moving on.
Again, this theoretical Sadie switch, make her a blatant variant of Ursula Ditkovitch or something (she deserved better). Homemade chocolate cake & “a glass of milk” meme and everything.
- No kissing, not in this movie. Just chemistry, warmth, and connection; everything he needs but doesn’t want, not from her. Not initially.
- The audience would know undoubtably what their trajectory is as a couple/team, but they themselves don’t & that’s ok. They don’t need to rush it.
The point is not fixing all his issues in one movie or replacing anyone, but him finding some meaning beyond his memory of a past life, beyond the Spider. Processing his problems, vs a “fix”, letting go his illusion of control, which inadvertently can be the key to mastering the Arachnimode.
- The secret is kept, MJ & Ned don’t find out, no contrivances there, no MJ being meat puppeteered to kiss peter. (good on him for telling her. That spoke volumes, a very good scene. One of many good scenes)
Just a little bit more progress in that respect but with something more tangible & evident that he actually gains a life of his own by the end of the movie; 📌but only after he moves on. Again, he can still have a brief interaction with Ned & MJ, but only brief.
I get/ & got what BND was going for. It’s in the title of the movie. But it’s self-defeating.
- NWH was already such a good threshold for a fresh start to soft regress without a tangible storytelling takeaway would be a waste. Its interesting.
Brand New Day — The Jean Grey problem:
Cause what they did with Sadie’s Jean character instead was: Bizarre, a little bit concerning, and at times- disgusting.
That she not only got away with it, but got validated by aunt May in peter’s memory: Wait what?
So we didn’t even get to see aunt may showing peter that love.
She instead expresses it to this character that had a chunk of the city hostage simultaneously as she got glazed, lmfao.😂She’s a terrorist.
📌Jean is still a person. Jean has a reason, yet a reason is not an excuse.
And her claim that “her (sara) only crime was being special/different” (paraphrasing) — is immediately/pre-emptively contradicted by the fact that they were playing with peoples minds in the park then having ice cream afterwards.
This is Wanda levels of avoidance, or thinking having emotional pains (sympathetic) justifies being a scumbag or a straight up menace or a violator to serve an endgame.
Even if they did that invasive telepathy on rats or something instead of people in the park, it’d still be concerning; so the fact that the movie shows them blatantly doing that to people; NO ONE in the park finds it weird, that people a few meters off are bustin’ a move and the girls just move on?
But Sara’s “only” crime was being a special snowflake.
IMAGINE if Andrew from Chronicle pulled this shit, or the script specifically just let him fly off to Tibet to start over after all that. He got close with the “Apex Predator” schtick; and yet, being a kid at the bottom of the food chain. His attachment to that concept made sense & no, the movie doesn’t destigmatize what he did just because he started out a victim.
- A victim of circumstance is not justified to be a demon. (Wanda, Jean, Andrew, Superboy-Prime etc.)
- We knew he was a victim by both his school peers & father, the situation of his mother and no one was making excuses for what he chose to do. What makes the movie so hard to watch is just how much anti-glazing Andrew gets no matter what he does.
Wanda gets excuses, Jean gets excuses, even Walters deflected accountability etc.
The film thinks we’re that stupid, or for the benefit of the doubt, doesn’t catch it’s own condescension.
That’s what kept this from being the best Spider-Man film of all time (most of it is still a fire film tho): Jean Grey telepathically hijacking the narrative.
Tom Holland worked his ass off here, this is one of my favorite Spider-Man performances in a live-action movie: his charisma & confidence with the people, the police; his immediate panic & empathy when he hurt that Policewoman etc. It’s beautiful, reminds me of Reeve Superman.
📌The Arachnid hormone mutation was not leaned hard enough into.
Not to the point of Man-Spider tho, as some comment-nomads seem to want. No thanks, I’m good on that.
But TL;DR that should’ve been the main antagonist of the film, his own evolution, something he can’t talk to, reason with, appeal with a memory or punch into submission.
Have him actually train with his new abilities for a while vs just suffering it.
- Otherwise: what happened to Sara wasn’t right, no question.
- But let’s not forget the fact that they were playing with people’s minds like they were new toys to experiment with, violating absolute strangers in a park, making them all do the damn wiggle.
📌Violating Banner, let’s address that: Which wasn’t brought up in significance after the fight scene. Not enough, if at all: her being the cause of reawaking his demon, his trauma, and putting him through the anxiety of hurting people. Jean never answers for that.
- We know Banner, not her. What makes her so special that she can violate someone who has earned peace, served the country & the world despite his mistakes; he’s a veteran. Then she gets to get off scott-free?
And then everything she did to all those people throughout, including that guy that got hit by that cab because she was playing with his mind — -
she made a hand ninja impale himself just to get Peter, apparently they’re just misguided talent, what did he do to deserve a blade in his guts?
The tank plowing through the city, the possible brain damage implications of jerking through people’s minds like that & they have no memories afterward.
It’s just so much that didn’t need to be in the movie.
Sadie could’ve been a way better engineered entity towards that more productive alternative of an Ursula-like. No powers, just a normal, witty, dorky neighbor; way more significant presence. Could save some money on CGI too.
And the antagonist, again, should be his creeping primality- his built-in instant kill.
His guilt, trauma, and maybe a Morlun mystic that’s gravitating to Peters climbing spider essence.
Or (for those that aren’t a fan of the totem take) a Morlun-like that escaped DODC & has been living in the sewers this entire time for maybe we’ll say: 4–6 years under the radar stifling his appetite — to explain how no one ever found him.
Killing addicts & criminals to satiate his hunger with his own bizarre/disgusting justification of who the world won’t miss.
But it escalates to anyone he chooses or gets too close because he can’t contain it anymore. Maybe even say children go missing & all that that implies is what really gets the city in a panic (because Spiders do not discriminate via morality). To amp up the stakes, the crisis, mortality.
To give Peter a physical match, not a MCU villain mirror: that almost tempts him to give in to his impulses too. But the temptation for Parker (to avoid mischaracterizing him) being when he’s under Arachnid mode, it’s not the power that tempts him, he knows better.
But in his vulnerable, brittle mental state, It’s main his cold/machine spider-instinct mode that dampens the emotional pain & the memories, his need for connection. So it’s like a high, his senses expand, but his human cognizance shrivels. Until he masters it, it’s a tragic trade.
The power, not needing to hold back, his moral inhibitions are de-prioritized. Another excuse not to be vulnerable, avoidant; which ties into Peter’s mindset in the film as is. His own loneliness epidemic.
Save for Aunt Mays memory, Tony, memory of Mj, Ned, his career — basically everything he accomplished brings him back. And ultimately Ursula-like.
Make it more about Peter, than him having to share the script with a seldom-sympathetic terrorist in the 2nd to 3rd act.
Keep Frank, keep DeWolfe (I enjoyed her presence way more than I expected); keep Ned & Mj’s cameos but scarcely. Using their presence as a visual for Peter to see, seek after, briefly interact as temp fix, then eventually move on from committing to the consequence.
Grey wasn’t it, how she used her powers was interesting, namely her limit & how she worked around it.
Her motivation was understandable, & yet what ruins it is this accountability avoidance fetish the MCU possesses with these toxic female characters, the narrative confusing sympathetic reasons for excuses. That needs to evolve, it’s not cute.
