Spider-Man: Brand New Day Recycles Two Plot Points From Star Trek And The Dark Knight
Contains spoilers for "Spider-Man: Brand New Day"
The excellent "Spider-Man: Brand New Day" does many things well, including paying sneaky homage to the works that came before. Apart from giving Sadie Sink's key antagonist (but not really a villain) Jean Grey plenty of "WandaVision" and "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness"-esque flavor, the film also uses a pair of important plot points to reference two genre greats: "The Dark Knight" and "Star Trek: The Motion Picture."
In "The Dark Knight," Batman (Christian Bale) famously and extremely immorally hacks into every cell phone in the city to find the Joker (Heath Ledger). He's promptly called out by Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), who designed the tech and isn't happy with the way his billionaire vigilante boss is using it. "Brand New Day" gives us an updated spin on the theme, where the tech-savvy Spider-Man (Tom Holland) casually informs Detective DeWolff (Liza Colón-Zayas) that he's hacked every security camera in the city to run facial scans, in order to find the escaped Scorpion (Michael Mando). Though she's considerably more relaxed about the revelation than Fox, DeWolff nevertheless goes through the same motions, pointing out how illegal the move sounds.
The V-Max plot twist is a heartbreaking riff on an old Star Trek mystery
A far bigger plot beat also features a nod to an existing work. Central to the plot of "Spider-Man: Brand New Day" is the mystery of "V-Max," a MacGuffin that Jean is after. In one of the movie's biggest twists, we discover that V-Max is effectively a sad spin on the "V'Ger" twist from the first Star Trek movie, "Star Trek: The Motion Picture." In the film, the hostile V'Ger turns out to be the heavily modified Voyager 6 probe, with parts of its name plate obscured.
In much the same way, Jean realizes that the ominous V-Max is something far more familiar than she could have guessed. It's merely a Ventmax brand vent grill cover located directly above the chair she's restrained to while the Department of Damage Control experiments on her. Its partially obscured logo was the last thing Jean's sister Sara (Olivia Booth-Ford) saw before dying in that same spot, and that sight was the last telepathic message Sara sent to her little sister.
Deliberate or not, the similarity between the V-Max and V'Ger storylines seems too obvious to ignore. It's also a comparatively rare Star Trek reference from the MCU Spider-Man movies, which are more known for their Star Wars callbacks. It will be interesting to see whether the Marvel movies happening after "Spider-Man: Brand New Day" will feature similar references.
"Spider-Man: Brand New Day" is now in theaters.