Tangled but tantalizing web challenges you to keep up
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
(out of 4) Animated adventure featuring the voices of Shameik Moore, Jake Johnson, Hailee Steinfeld, and Mahershala Ali. Written by Phil Lord and Rodney Rothman. Directed by Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey and Rodney Rothman. Opens Friday at theatres everywhere. 117 minutes. PG
One of the many great things about recently departed Marvel Comics guru Stan Lee (RIP) was his willingness to play around with his creations.
Smilin’ Stan liked to colour outside the comic-book lines and he urged Marvel fans to do the same. It’s a far cry from the thinking of such hidebound entities as the Star Wars franchise, where departures from the norm are often deemed acts of sacrilege. Hence we get Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, an animated freakout that simultaneously celebrates, sends up and advances the extremely diverse world of your friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man, Lee’s most cherished superhero.
The film offers so many versions of the worrywart webslinger — including an Afro-Latino one, two female ones, a monochrome “Spy vs. Spy”-style one and a porcine one called SpiderHam — that it challenges the viewer to keep up with the transformations.
Which is a pleasant task indeed, especially if you’re fed up with anodyne superhero movies and their tedious origin stories and planet-saving motivations.
Directed by Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey and Rodney Rothman, and scripted by Rothman ( 22 Jump Street) with Phil Lord ( The Lego Movie), the film begins by revisualizing the Spider-Man saga from the perspective of a Brooklyn teen named Miles Morales (voiced by Dope’s Shameik Moore), who was also bitten by a radioactive spider.
Like Peter Parker before him, this shy son of an AfricanAmerican NYPD officer (Brian Tyree Henry) and Puerto Rican nurse (Luna Laura Velez) he has to figure out what to do with the webslinging superskills suddenly conferred upon him. All this on top of starting at a new school and trying to figure out how to talk to a girl in class he’s sweet on.
At least Miles has his cool uncle Uncle Aaron (Mahershala Ali) to nurture his rebellious, graffitti-spraying side and keep him sane. He also gets help from a comic-store owner who looks and talks like Lee, to whom the film is dedicated (as well as to Steve Ditko, the ace Marvel artist and writer — Spidey’s co-creator — who also died this year).
The Spider-izing of Miles is the lad’s main preoccupation and anxiety. It’s made all the more daunting because Peter Parker’s version of Spider-Man is also roaming the streets, as are villains like Green Goblin, Doctor Octopus, Scorpion and Kingpin.
The latter baddie, voiced by Liev Schreiber and looking like the black monolith from 2001: ASpace Odyssey but with a face, is the main plot driver.
Kingpin fires up a nuclear supercollider that causes rifts in the universe (or something like that) and causes several other versions of Spideys to enter the frame: a middle-aged and disillusioned Peter Parker (Jake Johnson) who becomes a reluctant mentor to Miles; a schoolgirl heroine named SpiderGwen (Hailee Steinfeld); a Sailor Moon version named Peni Parker (Kamiko Glenn); the monochromatic throwback Spider-Noir (Nicolas Cage); and the weirdest Spidey of all, Spider-Ham (John Mulaney), who will of course cry, “That’s all, folks!” at an appropriate moment.
These wild riffs on the Spidey myth are presented in a pastiche of animated styles, from analog pen-and-ink to digital psychedelia, and backed with a hip-hop infused soundtrack that make Spider-Verse seem at times like a long-form music video.
It can be a bit daunting for anybody not fully into Marvel Comics and its multimedia universes of spinoffs and takeoffs, but complete newcomers are obviously not the target audience of the film. Spider-Verse assumes you already know the main backstory of Spider-Man, as a weary narrator notes from the get-go.
The film’s take-home message, if you want to call it that, is that we all have a little Spidey in us: “What makes you different is what makes you SpiderMan.” Reminds me of Tim Curry’s mantra from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, voiced by his character Dr. Frank-N-Furter: “Don’t dream it, be it.”
The only thing standard about Spider-Verse is that it all comes down to saving the planet (yawn) yet again. Couldn’t we let it blow up once, just for kicks?