Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

It's bizarre to me that after 12 years of passable (at best) cinematic Spider-Man experiences from Sony Pictures, we've gotten the 3 best adaptations of the mythos of all time, in the form of a Marvel Studios film, a Playstation 4 game from developer Insomniac, and now a Sony animated film with this weekend's Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse... all in the span of a year and a half.

And yes, while we're at it, that's me saying that Spider-Man 2 is passable. It was special for its time, though its value and depth were overstated even then, and it has since shown its age. Stiff, unlikable performances, flat and repetitive characters, and cool action scenes. The first Spider-Man is better for embracing its early-2000s cheese instead of pretending to be above it. There, I said it.

But I'm not here to talk about Spider-Man 2, or Spider-Man, or any other Spider-Man film. Because this film, Into the Spider-Verse, deserves your attention entirely on its own merits. Go see it. It's a great time, full of heart and humor, and one of the most beautiful movies of the year.

Bucking the trend of following Spider-Man No. 1, Peter Parker, Spider-Verse opts to tell the story of Miles Morales (voiced by Shameik Moore), a kid from Brooklyn who lives in a world where Spider-Man already exists. The character's origins are from Marvel's "Ultimate" line of comics—a collection of comic book titles set in an alternate universe, apart from the main Marvel comics. And this idea of multiple parallel universes or dimensions is borrowed as the driving concept behind the plot of Spider-Verse. Through a series of strange events, Miles is bitten by a dimensionally unstable spider and gains Spider-Man-esque powers. Then, via crimelord Wilson Fisk's (aka Kingpin's) dimensional portal technology, Miles is introduced to several other Spider-people from alternate realities. Of course, Kingpin's portal technology is imperfect, and it poses a threat to the stability of Miles' universe. Together, the Spider-gang must work to shutdown Kingpin's portal, and somehow get back to their home dimensions.

With a plot like that, it's easy to assume the film would get tangled up in the complexities of dimensional travel, too many characters, and other weird sci-fi mumbo-jumbo. But amazingly, Spider-Verse keeps it simple by focusing on fun, heart, and spectacle over technicalities.

An obvious place to start heaping on the praise is in the visual department. This film is absolutely stunning; very possibly the most beautiful animated feature film of the year. A Spider-Man movie? From SONY ANIMATION? I don't understand it either. But the team behind this film found a way to capture the essence of a comic book like no other adaptation of the medium has before. Blending two-dimensional, hand-drawn textures and patterns with three-dimensional perspective and models, Spider-Verse almost looks like a pop-up comic book at times. Mixed in are recognizable visual motifs from comics; yellow squares filled with text to indicate a character's inner monologues, bombastic word-art onomatopoeia to accentuate sudden action moments, even the exaggerated Ben-Day dots pattern often seen in old-school comics. Meanwhile, characters and objects move with a somewhat choppy rhythm, almost as if to imitate hand-drawn animation or stop-motion. Early on in the film, you might find this to be distracting or cumbersome, particularly in the dynamically choreographed fight scenes, but it's quick to get used to. I didn't see the film in 3D (I abhor the format), but I imagine it would only aggravate this problem.

Even the foundational art style is impeccable. The Spider-figures each have different builds to perfectly represent how they behave and move. Miles, a peppy 15-year-old, is stringy with sharp joints and corners. Alternate-universe Peter Parker (Jake Johnson), who reluctantly takes on the role of Miles' mentor, has let himself go in middle-age; he's still long and lanky, but his midsection is noticeably thicker, and his face is long and stretched with weary discontent. The other Spiders, each more bizarre than the last, continue this increasing trend of expressive character design, maxing out with a Looney Toons-esque cartoon pig named Spider-Ham (voiced with expected comedic fervor by John Mulaney).

But the villain, Kingpin, takes the cake. Massive, blocky, and utterly impossible, with a head that hangs down a good two feet beneath his monolithic shoulders, he fills the frame with his black business suit. There is literally a shot that is all-black except for Kingpin's head and white shirt. It's one of my favorite shots in film in 2018.

This film would be worth it just because it's pretty. But directors Bob Persichetti, Rodney Rothman, and Peter Ramsey, and writer Phil Lord (of The Lego Movie fame, and it shows here) don't stop at "pretty." Not only is every other second of the film packed to the brim with Lord's rapid-fire, off-the-wall humor, but the film also boasts a ton of heart. Miles is utterly lovable. He's funny, goofy, somehow charming and awkward at once, and ambitious. Shameik Moore lends a fantastic performance as well. Midlife-crisis Peter is likewise a magnet for empathy, though his nonchalance and disillusionment with the whole "being Spider-Man" thing makes him a perfect complement to Miles' excitable newcomer. The two generate laughs, tears, and heart-fuzzies together over the course of the film. What could have been a two-hour toy commercial ends up being a heartfelt celebration of what makes the Spider-Man character and his influence on the world so special; it's a re-examination of the mythos and its underlying theme: at the end of the day, Peter Parker is kinda just another kid trying to make it through life. And so is Miles. And so are you.

The rest of the Spider-gang gets their share of love too, though none really function as full-blown characters, aside from the fiery Gwen, who forms a maybe-platonic-maybe-more bond with Miles. The rest of the gang is mostly played for laughs, and good ones too. But it was Spider-Man Noir, the black-and-white 1940s private investigator, voiced with dry, righteous aloofness by Nicolas Cage, who ended up taking my heart with perhaps the most out-of-left-field "I love you" in modern cinema. If you thought The Lego Movie was funny, Spider-Verse might be even funnier. If you didn't think The Lego Movie was funny, reconsider your value system.

To boot, even the action here is phenomenal, thanks not only to clever choreography, but also thanks to the movement of the ostensible "camera." In my mind, the best thing an animated film can do is take advantage of its medium to create visual moments that would never work in the context of a live-action film, even one laden with CGI. The "cinematography," if that is an applicable term in animation, is breathtaking, executing shots, angles, and movements that would be possible only in animation, and useful only in a Spider-Man film. Spinning, panning, zooming, flipping, and even splitting the screen to mimic comic book panels, Spider-Verse is a masterclass of motion. If you aren't in love with the art style, the framing still ought to impress you.

If you aren't big on Spider-Man, it's understandable why a movie about half a dozen or more of them wouldn't exactly grab you. But Into the Spider-Verse reaches so far beyond its first impression as a marketing move that it's hard not to love once it starts rolling. Packed with laugh-out-loud humor, jaw-dropping animation, and wholehearted enthusiasm, this movie is another, refreshingly different reminder of why Spider-Man is such a culturally valuable and iconic character.