‘Into the Spider-Verse’ a ‘super’ hero movie
“The Dark Knight” is widely considered the pinnacle of superhero movies. In the decade since “TDK” came out, there have been dozens of superhero movies, but “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” tops all of them. This is the best superhero movie of the decade.
Rather than follow Peter Parker, like all the other “Spider-Man” movies have, this one follows a young African-American named Miles Morales. Like Peter, who is in the movie, Miles gets bit by a (radioactive?) spider and gains multiple superpowers.
Morales retraces his steps to where he encountered the spider, and finds Spider-Man fighting several bad guys at a particle accelerator. When Spider-Man is thrown into the accelerator, portals to parallel universes open, dragging those universe’s equivalents of Spider-Man into this one. A race to get the other superheroes back to their universes and to stop the Kingpin from accidentally killing everybody with the accelerator ensue.
I have long felt that animation is the best medium of filmmaking. Animation allows for complete control over a movie. Roger Ebert explained this in his review of “Beauty and the Beast.” Describing the musical sections of that film, Ebert said that they work because “animation sets their choreography free from the laws of gravity.” This is what makes animation the perfect medium for a superhero movie.
The animation is gorgeous in “Spider-Verse.” It is CGI animation, but it is done in a way that makes it look like it is handdrawn. The animation also looks like pop art at times. It blends together many visual styles in a unique way that major studio animated movies rarely do.
There are six major Spider-characters in this movie. Joining Miles and Peter are Gwen Stacey/Spider-Woman, Spider-Noir, Spider-Ham and Peni Parker. Miles, Peter and Gwen are all animated similar to each other, but the other three all look dramatically different. Spider-Noir is animated in dramatic black and white. Peni is animated like a Japanese animé movie. Spider-Ham is animated like a Saturday morning cartoon.
Mixing this stuff together was a great idea and it works wonderfully.
While I loved the movie, I did have some small problems with it. The biggest is that some of the supporting characters aren’t fleshed out enough.
Miles and Peter, and for the most part Gwen, are fully fleshed out characters who have story arcs. The other three do not. By the end of the movie, you don’t know any more about the other three other than they have some of the same powers of Spider-Man.
Spider-Ham and Peni don’t really contribute a lot to the movie in terms of pushing the movie forward. Neither does Spider-Noir, but I am more forgiving with that due to Nicolas Cage’s hilarious performance as the dark character.
This is a small complaint, though, because this is Mile’s story, but the overall movie really wouldn’t have changed much if it had just been Peter and Gwen joining Miles on this adventure.
It is an origin story — as Spider-Noir hilariously points out — but it feels fresh. At this point, origin stories are tiresome, but this one is cleaver and fun.
The main cast of the movie is Shameik Moore as Miles, Jake Johnson as Peter, and Hailee Steinfeld as Gwen. All of them do good jobs with the movie.
A sequel and a Spider-Gwen spinoff are both in development. I am more excited about these two movies than anything coming up in the Marvel Cinematic Universe or the DC Extended Universe.