Spider-Man: Brand New Day
/The new trailer for Spider-Man: Brand New Day features music that fittingly blends the martial type of orchestral scoring blueprinted by Alan Silvestri for the Avengers film franchise, with a taste of the fluid synthesizer aesthetic of Metro Boomin’s music production in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.
The trailer opens mid-fight: Spider-Man (Tom Holland) is face-to-face with villain Scorpion (Michael Mando). There’s no music for the first 10 seconds of the trailer (rare these days), but then as Spider-Man thrashes his opponent, destroying a cop car in the process, at 0:10 we hear a brief melody on synth.
Over the production companies’ title cards (Sony, Columbia) at 0:17, we hear the string section of the orchestra enter with a repeating ostinato in B minor. It’s melancholic. Since the events of the previous film, thanks to Doctor Strange, the world has forgotten that Peter Parker exists.
At 0:25 there is some simple but strong synching of music with visuals as a melody on synth (or possibly electric guitar) aligns with the impacts of Spider-Man slapping devices on his arms and then shooting spiderwebs across the room.
The string orchestra ostinato continues into the next scene as Peter visits Bruce Banner/Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) who is lecturing at Empire State University. Accents on large drums lead up to a cut to musical silence at 0:36, leaving space for Banner to give a comical Hulk impression.
The synthesizer melody comes to the foreground at 0:50, accompanied by percussion and strings, as Spider-Man hears from Bill Metzger (Tramell Tillman) about the threats they’re facing, which we see through an explosive montage on screen. The melody here isn’t exactly the original Spider-Man tv series theme song’s melody, but it does have some elements in common with it–opening with a jump from the root to the fifth, then finding its way back down the minor scale. We might call it a sound-alike, which reminds audiences of the theme without costing the studio the licensing fees for using the original.
The music fades away in a wash of reverb at 1:07 as we see Peter attending a college party and talking with Ned and MJ (his long-time best friends who have lost all memory of him). The synthesizer swells at 1:18 as we see, from Peter’s point of view, MJ with her new boyfriend.
Over musical silence, at 1:35 we see Banner transform into The Hulk, and at 1:37 the same melody from earlier returns on synth and strings as we cut to a montage of Spider-Man and MJ swinging through the metropolis. The same melody continues as we see our protagonists team up with Frank Castle/The Punisher (Jon Bernthal, recently reprised for The Punisher: One Last Kill), and then confront a room full of red-robed villains from The Hand.
At 2:09, as Spider-Man and The Hulk explode out the side of a skyscraper we hear a barrage of trailer triplets. A common musical device used near the climax of action film trailers for the past few years, “trailer triplets” juxtapose groups of three notes into trailer scores which are otherwise using rhythms in groups of two or four. The sudden arrival of these accented triplets gives a feeling of rushing instability, as though two different rhythms are battling for control of the music.
We see the film’s title card at 2:13 but the trailer isn’t over yet. This is Spider-Man after all, wizard of wisecracks, so the trailer appropriately finishes with some witty banter about stretching before our hero has his last fight of the trailer, while in the background synths whistle and a subtle groove plays on hi-hat.
It’s a lengthy trailer, and the music follows the action well, supporting the story without overpowering it. Through the instrumentation and melody choices, this trailer’s music pays homage to the many elements from the decades of music that have accompanied the preceding chapters of this ongoing Spider-Man saga. The silences for punch lines remind us that this superhero has a lighter side.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day slams into theatres July 31.
— Jack Hui Litster
