Watching Spider-Man: Brand New Day in a packed theatre, amid the excitement surrounding the latest chapter in the Marvel franchise, my mind unexpectedly wandered to a Hindi film that released nearly two decades ago and disappeared without leaving much of a cultural footprint. That film was Alag (2006).
Made on a reported budget of around Rs 8 crore, Alag was a massive box-office failure—and for reasons that are not hard to fathom. The film was uneven, its writing often simplistic, its execution far less sophisticated than its ambitious premise demanded, and its visual effects did not always support the scale of the story it wanted to tell. It was not a well-made film, and its failure cannot simply be blamed on audiences being unwilling to accept experimentation.
Yet, watching Spider-Man: Brand New Day, I found myself thinking about the core idea behind Alag: a young person born with extraordinary mental abilities, isolated from the world because of those powers, and eventually treated as an object of scientific experimentation.
Tejas possesses both telepathic and telekinetic abilities, while Jean and Sara from Spider Man: A Brand New Day share extraordinary telepathic powers. The similarities are not exact, and the two films are very different in tone, scale and storytelling. But the thematic overlap is difficult to ignore.
Tejas: A life spent hidden from the world
In Alag, Tejas, played by Akshay Kapoor, is born with extraordinary telepathic and telekinetic abilities. Fearing how the world may react to his son, Tejas’s father keeps him hidden in a basement for 18 years. His isolation is presented as protection, but it also leaves him completely unfamiliar with the world beyond the walls of his home.
After his father’s death, Tejas is forced to step outside and experience life on his own. His innocence and curiosity make him vulnerable, and his powers soon bring him to Dr Richard Dyer, a scientist who wants to study him.
Dyer claims that understanding Tejas’s abilities could lead to breakthroughs in treating conditions such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. But behind the language of scientific progress lies a far more troubling ambition. The doctor has already experimented on human beings, causing several deaths, and Tejas is meant to become his next subject.
Story continues below this ad
ALSO READ | Spider-Man Brand New Day movie review: Less Brand New Day, more New Branding Day
Jean: Searching for the sister she lost
In Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Jean’s journey begins from a very different emotional place. She is searching for her sister, Sara, who, like her, possesses extraordinary telepathic powers. Both Jean and Sara were abandoned by their mother because they were different (alag). Sara was later taken by Dr Metzger for experimentation and lost her life as a result. When Jean comes looking for her, she too becomes a target.
Jean’s telepathic abilities allow her to read and enter other people’s minds. She is trapped and studied under the familiar justification of the “greater good,” with her powers treated as something that must be understood, controlled and potentially used for the benefit of others. But the experiments meant to contain her instead awaken a new level of strength.
When telepathy becomes a means of saving lives
The similarities between Tejas and Jean are not limited to the fact that both can read and enter other people’s minds. Before their powers become a source of fear and exploitation, both characters use their telepathic abilities to help save lives.
Story continues below this ad
In Alag, Tejas uses his powers to enter the mind of the wife of his rehabilitation centre’s owner, who has been in a coma for years. By understanding what is holding her consciousness back and communicating with her through telepathy, Tejas helps bring her out of coma.
Jean, too, uses her telepathic abilities to keep Spider-Man alive while he is undergoing treatment. By entering and staying connected to his mind, she helps him hold on during a critical moment.
The circumstances are different, but both scenes present telepathy as an act of empathy rather than simply a superpower. Tejas and Jean do not merely read minds; they use their abilities to reach people when conventional medicine and communication seem to have failed. In both films, their powers first become a means of healing before they are turned into something to be studied, controlled and exploited.
Different journeys, the same fear of being exploited
This is where the journeys of Jean and Tejas begin to converge. Jean’s rage is rooted in the loss of her sister and the cruelty inflicted upon her. Tejas’s anger comes from witnessing the suffering caused by Dr Dyer’s experiments. While Jean is driven by personal grief, Tejas is transformed by the pain of strangers who became victims of scientific ambition.
Story continues below this ad
Both characters are treated less like human beings and more like extraordinary subjects whose minds and bodies can be studied in the name of progress. Both are placed under observation. Both are tested to understand the limits of their abilities. And in both stories, the very experiments meant to control them become the trigger for their evolution.
There is even a visual similarity that stayed with me. As Jean’s powers expand, she is able to reach beyond the limits she once faced, affecting multiple people and objects at once. Tejas, too, reaches a new level of strength after being subjected to electric shocks. Overwhelmed by rage and the pain of the people who died because of Dyer’s experiments, he unleashes his telepathic and telekinetic abilities, shattering the glass around him and affecting everyone within his range. Jean too shatters the glass wall built around her.
The comparison does not mean Alag predicted Spider-Man: Brand New Day, nor does it suggest that the two films tell the same story. Stories about extraordinary people, scientific experimentation and the fear of the unknown have existed in science fiction for decades. The resemblance is better understood as shared storytelling DNA. But it also raises an interesting question about how we view ideas in cinema.
When familiar ideas receive the scale to become spectacular
When Hollywood revisits familiar superhero and science-fiction themes, it often does so with massive budgets, advanced visual effects, carefully built franchises and years of audience investment. Even a story built around familiar ideas can feel new because of the scale and polish with which it is presented. Alag had none of those advantages.
Story continues below this ad
Made on a modest budget of around Rs 8 crore, the film attempted to tell a story about telepathy, telekinesis, isolation, scientific exploitation and the emotional cost of being different. It imagined a protagonist whose powers were not merely a spectacle but also a reason for fear, loneliness and exploitation. That was an unusually ambitious idea for a mainstream Hindi film of its time.
Ambition alone could not save Alag
The problem was that ambition alone could not save the film. Alag struggled with its execution. Its storytelling did not always match the emotional complexity of its premise, and its visual treatment often made the film feel smaller than the ideas it was trying to explore. The film also failed to create the kind of emotional connection needed for audiences to fully invest in Tejas’s journey. Its box-office failure was not an injustice waiting to be corrected; the film had genuine weaknesses.
But perhaps its failure also meant that its central idea was forgotten too quickly.
Nearly two decades later, watching a major Hollywood superhero film explore themes of extraordinary mental powers, sibling loss, scientific experimentation, institutional control and rage unlocking greater abilities made me revisit Alag with more curiosity. The Hindi film may not have executed these ideas well, but it had attempted to explore them at a time when such stories were far less common in mainstream Indian cinema.
Story continues below this ad
Maybe the difference was never the idea
Maybe the difference was never simply the idea. The difference was the writing, the resources, the visual language and the faith given to the idea. Hollywood can take familiar themes and make them feel monumental because it has the machinery to build worlds around them. Indian cinema, meanwhile, has often experimented with ambitious concepts but failed to give them the craft and scale needed to survive.
Alag was a flawed experiment that failed—and, in many ways, failed for valid reasons. But its failure should not erase the uniqueness of its premise.
Watching Spider-Man: Brand New Day reminded me that sometimes the most interesting ideas are not the ones that succeed. Sometimes they are the ones that arrive early, stumble in execution and disappear before audiences are ready to look back at them.
And perhaps that is what makes Alag worth revisiting today: not because it was better than the films that came after it, but because beneath its flaws was an idea Hindi cinema had dared to imagine long before it had the tools to fully realise it.
