REVIEW: ‘Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’ is a fearless, visually stunning triumph
Shameik Moore voices Miles Morales in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, directed by Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsay, and Rodney Rothman.
A superhero origin story is a funny thing. When they happen too close together within the same franchise, it would normally tick off a lot of fans. The thinking goes: after just finishing up with one version of a classic character, do we really need to go back over the same introductory ground again?
This is certainly true of the reaction to 2012’s The Amazing Spider-Man, which came only five years after the last film in the Sam Raimi/Tobey Maguire trilogy of Spider-movies. And it’s one of the ways 2017’s supremely fun Spider-Man: Homecoming distinguished itself: by sparing us the radioactive spider/Uncle Ben speech and getting right into the action.
By this logic, wouldn’t we be bored by meeting yet another new Spider-Man? The one portrayed by Tom Holland in Homecoming is, after all, still appearing in both the Avengers films and his own solo series. But the character at the centre of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is thoroughly different, and not just because the film is a work of dazzling CG animation.
Instead, we’re following Miles Morales (Shameik Moore), a Puerto Rican high-schooler from Brooklyn, in his first big-screen appearance. Miles’ story ends up intersecting with those of six other Spider-people, harnessing the long and wild history of the original comics, but at the end it’s Miles’ story that keeps us hooked, proving that origin stories aren’t necessarily the problem; if we get attached to the character, it can carry us through pretty much anything.
Miles teams up with Peter B. Parker (Jake Johnson) and Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld).
The structure of Spider-Verse becomes clear pretty quickly: the multiple dimensions that have previously been a device exclusive to the comics – a method of telling spin-off stories that wouldn’t make sense with the version of the character most people recognize – are now part of the film universe as well. There are an infinite number of Spider-people out there, living in dimensions that each bear some similarity to the main one, but which also differ in key ways. In Miles’ dimension, he’s a stressed-out student, attending a high-end boarding school in Brooklyn for gifted students. But Miles prefers to spend his time working on his talent for graffiti, and hanging out with his Uncle Aaron, a relationship frowned on by Miles’ father, a local police officer.
One of Miles’ excursions with Aaron (Mahershala Ali) leads him to a tunnel underneath a top-secret research facility, and Miles is bitten by the spider that will make him into his dimension’s newest Spider-Man. He then finds himself crossing paths with his dimension’s Peter Parker, who’s trying to stop the Kingpin (Liev Schreiber) from using a massive supercollider device to merge dimensions and bring back his dead wife and son. The experiment goes wrong, and Spider-people from a number of dimensions crash into Miles’ realm, forcing them to team up and stop Kingpin before Brooklyn collapses into a black hole.
This melding of dimensions compels Miles to confront what’s arguably his biggest challenge: performance anxiety. It’s a very 2018 sort of problem (though 2004’s Spider-Man 2 also dealt with it). In contrast to his multidimensional visitors, Miles has no control over his powers, and no time to master them. He turns to Peter B. Parker (Jake Johnson) to mentor him; this Peter is older, disillusioned, and in need of a reason to keep caring about the job. It’s their dynamic that really makes the movie work. Spider-Verse is clearly not a reboot for the sake of it, but a commentary on what it means to be Spider-Man and the different reasons each of these characters have for taking on the job.
The main antagonist is Kingpin, voiced by Liev Schreiber.
And what a variety we get: alongside Peter B., we meet Gwen Stacy, a.k.a. Spider-Woman (Hailee Steinfeld), Spider-Man Noir (Nicolas Cage), Peni Parker (Kimiko Glenn), and Spider-Ham (John Mulaney). Of these, Gwen Stacy and Spider-Man Noir are my favourites, but I have to hand it to the filmmakers for including Spider-Ham, a version of the character that popped up in 1983 and is perhaps no better expression of the wackiness and fearlessness of the movie’s concept.
And then there’s the visual treatment in Spider-Verse. It grabs you by the eyeballs and doesn’t let go for two hours, making me want a whole cinematic universe of Marvel movies in this style of animation. Other than maybe Zack Snyder’s panel-for-panel recreation of Watchmen, this is the rare film that gives you the true sensation of a moving comic book, down to the subtle halftone pattern that washes over all the characters and sets, and the text boxes and exaggerated movements that are pulled right from the page.
In an era when superhero movies manage to be ubiquitous but still thoroughly samey in their approach – we essentially have a two-party system, Disney/Marvel and WB/DC, with a handful of outliers – movies like Into the Spider-Verse should be encouraged. So go out and see this thing a couple of times, and convince Sony Pictures that we need more – how else will we see the theatrical debut of Throg, the frog who became Thor?
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse gets four stars out of four.
Stray thoughts
Will the Internet meme references in this movie make it feel kinda dated in ten years’ time? Probably.
I loved the character design for Kingpin; another example of the swing-for-the-fences art style in the movie.