Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse
Boy, do I have a lot to say about this one. And for good reason.
Please note, though, that the opening section is some background to the character of Miles Morales and my current and initial reactions to him in his comic book form. The review of the film proper only begins with the second heading but if you're looking for more information about this new Spider-Man, I have hopefully filled in some of the blanks.
This isn't available on Channel 24 but it is *spoiler* included in my top 3 films of the year that will be available there soon. I'll post the link when it's up but, yes, this is that good...
Ultimate Comics Spider-Man: A Look Back
When Brian Michael Bendis killed off the Ultimate Universe version of Peter Parker in 2011 to make way for a new, half-black, half-Hispanic Ultimate Spider-Man with artist Sara Pichelli, he received no small amount of often fairly ugly criticism. A lot of the pushback came from those who decried the change as a cynical move by a “social justice warrior” intent on pushing his agenda of having a popular non-white character replaced with a “hero of colour”. I’m no fan of the out of control political correctness that has overtaken liberalism in recent years but these claims were horribly unfair – and turned out to be only the beginning of a truly noxious movement called “Comicsgate”.
Ultimate Peter Parker was created by Bendis in the early 2000s as an antidote to the overly convoluted Spider-man titles of the time by returning Peter to his roots but in a more modern setting. After having written over 150 issues of this alternate-universe Peter Parker, Bendis correctly noted that the main Spidey titles had themselves gone back to a much more stripped down and modern take on Spider-Man so he felt that his Ultimate version was becoming increasingly redundant.
Taking the opportunity to shake things up, he wanted to create a new kind of Spider-man that would replace the blatant Jewishness of his Peter Parker (Parker was never formally declared to be Jewish but, c’mon, Spidey has always been pretty Jewish and Bendis’ Spider-man made his “Marvel 616” counterpart look positively WASPy in comparison) with another kind of New Yorker; one who would be of a different race and ethnicity altogether but would show that the intrinsic values of Spider-man work on just about any outsider with a penchant to do good. That the notably Jewish Bendis has a mixed-race family (two of his kids are adopted and of African and African-American heritage) only added to his desire to explore this new but familiar dynamic.
In the interest of full disclosure, while I understood Bendis’ decision and I certainly had no time for the racist reaction to the new Spider-Man, I was quite strongly against this change at the time. So much so, in fact, that I saw the death of Ultimate Spider-man to be the perfect jumping off point for me from what had been consistently one of my favourite comic books for over a decade. Quite aside for the fact that I felt that the Ultimate version of Peter Parker was my Peter Parker, I absolutely hated the idea of his being killed off at such a young age (150+ issues later, this Peter was still in high school) and that so many of the new story beats that Bendis had introduced over the past couple of years would fall by the wayside.
As it turns out, though I stand by my wish of having had even more stories with this version of Peter Parker written by Brian Michael Bendis, all of us naysayers were proven, really, quite incredibly wrong indeed. First, Ultimate Peter Parker, like just about every superhero ever, didn’t stay dead and was given a happy ending by Bendis a couple of years later, but his replacement turned out to be an incredible character in his own right with real staying power.
Miles Morales, the new Ultimate Spider-Man, turned out to be one of the greatest and most beloved modern Marvel superheroes; sustaining his own title even after the Ultimate Universe was destroyed (well, destroyed for a little while at least – in comics, whole universes have a habit of staying dead even less than individual characters) and Miles was integrated as a second Spider-Man in the mainstream Marvel Universe. Personally, I’ve only read about a dozen Miles Morales comics – something I hope to change in the not too distant future – but it’s not at all hard to see why Miles caught on in the way he has: he’s simply a terrific, incredibly likeable character that offers an intriguingly different cut complementary view of the Spider-Man mythos.
He has been such a hit, in fact, that he is now the main star of what may just be the best Spider-man movie to date.
Jumping Head-First Into the Spider-Verse.
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is an animated film by Sony Animation, in collaboration with Marvel, that is both a brilliantly fresh take on a character that has already had three cinematic reboots this century and an animated film like nothing you have ever seen before. And I don’t say that lightly.
The premise, of course, isn’t all that new to anyone familiar with superhero comics or the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles animated feature, Turtles Forever, but it’s mostly a point of departure for the film’s various creators (including directors: Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman, and writers: Phil Lord and Rodney Rothman) to create something breathtakingly innovative in form and utterly absorbing in content.
With the cinematic equivalent of the Ultimate Universe as the epicentre and Miles Morales as our point-of-view character, Into the Spider-Verse finds Spider-Men from across the Multiverse being brought together by an accident involving a Hadron Super-Collider and super-criminal Wilson Fisk aka the Kingpin. With little time to spare, these radically different versions of the same superhero need to find a way to work together to take down the Kingpin before he obliterates all of reality.
The plot is actually fairly straightforward, despite the cross-dimensional shenanigans and more Spider-People than you can shake a can of can of bug repellent at, and the film is all the better for it. It’s a big, crazy and more than slightly manic comic book adventure but the creators of Into the Spider-Verse understand that the reason why Spider-Man comics have been such an enduring favourite among fans (Spidey is easily my favourite Marvel character and no doubt I’m not alone on this): all the web-slinging and colourful villains in the world mean nothing without their being grounded in the reality of an extremely intelligent and socially awkward but fairly ordinary guy doing his best to get through life. “Heart” has always been the key ingredient in any successful Spider-man story – which, interestingly, Marvel’s biggest character shares with DC’s definitive superhero, Superman – and Into the Spider-Verse is, in no uncertain terms, an exceptionally successful Spider-Man story.
There’s a lot of style and flash in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse but none of this ever gets in the way of its heart. That our point-of-view character in the film is Miles Morales, rather than any version of Peter Parker (and we get a few) makes little difference to the themes and emotions driving any good Spider-Man tale – albeit now with the added theme of Spider-Man being an aspirational symbol for nerds, geeks and social outcasts everywhere. Spider-Man may have the obvious benefit of superpowers but it’s his smarts, his refusal to be bowed by a bad turn and his embrace of the tenant of “with great power comes great responsibility” that make him a hero.
Miles Morales (voiced with perfection by Dope's Shameik Moore) is a somewhat different character to Peter Parker – his parents are still alive and still together; he prefers graffiti art to applying himself at his new private school, despite being more than adept at both; and he comes from a working-class Hispanic/ African American background rather than a (barely concealed) working-class Jewish American background – but the similarities between the two are impossible to miss. Like Peter, Miles is a good kid with his head in the clouds and an inability to entirely fit into the world in which finds himself and his hero’s journey is not all too dissimilar to Peter’s in the way he learns that his Spidey powers are, in fact, not the cure to all the world’s ills but they do give him the ability to at least try to improve the world around him.
While the comics gave Miles his own supporting cast, Into the Spider-Verse really only concentrates on his father and his uncle (a crucial player in Miles’ story but miles different from Uncle Ben) as space needs to be made for the other Spider-People (and Spider-Pig, voiced, not so incidentally, by my favourite stand up comedian on the planet right now, John Mulaney) and, because you can’t really have a Spider-Man movie without her, Aunt May (voiced by Lily Tomlin; perfect, obviously). Again, in a long list of smart decisions, this is yet another one as it keeps the focus squarely on Miles himself and gives the film ample space to introduce us to the other Spider-People.
They’re in the trailer and almost all of them are very familiar to most comics fans (well, the manga version aside, at least) but I would rather leave their particular peculiarities and often hilariously mad origin stories a surprise. Suffice to say, though, that, though only Spider-Gwen/ Spider-Woman/ Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld, lovely even just in-voice) and an older Peter B. Parker (New Girls’ very on-point Jake Johnson) are explored in any detail, the various Spider-characters are a richly comic delight and are as inventive as just about anything else in the film.
And however much the film gets right in substance as it balances a widely diverse cast of characters as seamlessly as it balances comedy, pathos and high adventure, it’s impossible not to stand in awe at the level of innovative artistry on display in both the design of every aspect of the film and its gorgeous animation. It’s such a feast for the eyes, in fact, that I won’t go into too much details as it really should be experienced rather than described. This is, however, a film that blends, in no particular order: hand-drawn animation, unrendered-3D effects, “Kirby dots”, CG animation, cartoon art, cutesy anime designs, stop-motion-esque CGI, photorealism, and on-screen sound effects, into something that is both steeped in its comic book origins and is breathtakingly cinematic. It should be a total mess but it's a thing of mad, psychedelic beauty. More even than Scott Pilgrim vs the World, this is a comic book come to life and it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen before in an animated feature.
I could not be more emphatic about this: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is one of the year’s (hell, the century’s) greatest films that absolutely should be seen in a proper cinema. It’s the best Spider-Man movie to date, one of the very best superhero movies ever and far and away the best mainstream) animated film of the year by some distance. It’s the rare film about which I have almost nothing to criticize and easily earns every last one of these ten stars. It’s just... spectacular.
Please note, though, that the opening section is some background to the character of Miles Morales and my current and initial reactions to him in his comic book form. The review of the film proper only begins with the second heading but if you're looking for more information about this new Spider-Man, I have hopefully filled in some of the blanks.
This isn't available on Channel 24 but it is *spoiler* included in my top 3 films of the year that will be available there soon. I'll post the link when it's up but, yes, this is that good...
When Brian Michael Bendis killed off the Ultimate Universe version of Peter Parker in 2011 to make way for a new, half-black, half-Hispanic Ultimate Spider-Man with artist Sara Pichelli, he received no small amount of often fairly ugly criticism. A lot of the pushback came from those who decried the change as a cynical move by a “social justice warrior” intent on pushing his agenda of having a popular non-white character replaced with a “hero of colour”. I’m no fan of the out of control political correctness that has overtaken liberalism in recent years but these claims were horribly unfair – and turned out to be only the beginning of a truly noxious movement called “Comicsgate”.
Ultimate Peter Parker was created by Bendis in the early 2000s as an antidote to the overly convoluted Spider-man titles of the time by returning Peter to his roots but in a more modern setting. After having written over 150 issues of this alternate-universe Peter Parker, Bendis correctly noted that the main Spidey titles had themselves gone back to a much more stripped down and modern take on Spider-Man so he felt that his Ultimate version was becoming increasingly redundant.
Taking the opportunity to shake things up, he wanted to create a new kind of Spider-man that would replace the blatant Jewishness of his Peter Parker (Parker was never formally declared to be Jewish but, c’mon, Spidey has always been pretty Jewish and Bendis’ Spider-man made his “Marvel 616” counterpart look positively WASPy in comparison) with another kind of New Yorker; one who would be of a different race and ethnicity altogether but would show that the intrinsic values of Spider-man work on just about any outsider with a penchant to do good. That the notably Jewish Bendis has a mixed-race family (two of his kids are adopted and of African and African-American heritage) only added to his desire to explore this new but familiar dynamic.
In the interest of full disclosure, while I understood Bendis’ decision and I certainly had no time for the racist reaction to the new Spider-Man, I was quite strongly against this change at the time. So much so, in fact, that I saw the death of Ultimate Spider-man to be the perfect jumping off point for me from what had been consistently one of my favourite comic books for over a decade. Quite aside for the fact that I felt that the Ultimate version of Peter Parker was my Peter Parker, I absolutely hated the idea of his being killed off at such a young age (150+ issues later, this Peter was still in high school) and that so many of the new story beats that Bendis had introduced over the past couple of years would fall by the wayside.
As it turns out, though I stand by my wish of having had even more stories with this version of Peter Parker written by Brian Michael Bendis, all of us naysayers were proven, really, quite incredibly wrong indeed. First, Ultimate Peter Parker, like just about every superhero ever, didn’t stay dead and was given a happy ending by Bendis a couple of years later, but his replacement turned out to be an incredible character in his own right with real staying power.
Miles Morales, the new Ultimate Spider-Man, turned out to be one of the greatest and most beloved modern Marvel superheroes; sustaining his own title even after the Ultimate Universe was destroyed (well, destroyed for a little while at least – in comics, whole universes have a habit of staying dead even less than individual characters) and Miles was integrated as a second Spider-Man in the mainstream Marvel Universe. Personally, I’ve only read about a dozen Miles Morales comics – something I hope to change in the not too distant future – but it’s not at all hard to see why Miles caught on in the way he has: he’s simply a terrific, incredibly likeable character that offers an intriguingly different cut complementary view of the Spider-Man mythos.
He has been such a hit, in fact, that he is now the main star of what may just be the best Spider-man movie to date.
Jumping Head-First Into the Spider-Verse.
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is an animated film by Sony Animation, in collaboration with Marvel, that is both a brilliantly fresh take on a character that has already had three cinematic reboots this century and an animated film like nothing you have ever seen before. And I don’t say that lightly.
The premise, of course, isn’t all that new to anyone familiar with superhero comics or the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles animated feature, Turtles Forever, but it’s mostly a point of departure for the film’s various creators (including directors: Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman, and writers: Phil Lord and Rodney Rothman) to create something breathtakingly innovative in form and utterly absorbing in content.
With the cinematic equivalent of the Ultimate Universe as the epicentre and Miles Morales as our point-of-view character, Into the Spider-Verse finds Spider-Men from across the Multiverse being brought together by an accident involving a Hadron Super-Collider and super-criminal Wilson Fisk aka the Kingpin. With little time to spare, these radically different versions of the same superhero need to find a way to work together to take down the Kingpin before he obliterates all of reality.
The plot is actually fairly straightforward, despite the cross-dimensional shenanigans and more Spider-People than you can shake a can of can of bug repellent at, and the film is all the better for it. It’s a big, crazy and more than slightly manic comic book adventure but the creators of Into the Spider-Verse understand that the reason why Spider-Man comics have been such an enduring favourite among fans (Spidey is easily my favourite Marvel character and no doubt I’m not alone on this): all the web-slinging and colourful villains in the world mean nothing without their being grounded in the reality of an extremely intelligent and socially awkward but fairly ordinary guy doing his best to get through life. “Heart” has always been the key ingredient in any successful Spider-man story – which, interestingly, Marvel’s biggest character shares with DC’s definitive superhero, Superman – and Into the Spider-Verse is, in no uncertain terms, an exceptionally successful Spider-Man story.
There’s a lot of style and flash in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse but none of this ever gets in the way of its heart. That our point-of-view character in the film is Miles Morales, rather than any version of Peter Parker (and we get a few) makes little difference to the themes and emotions driving any good Spider-Man tale – albeit now with the added theme of Spider-Man being an aspirational symbol for nerds, geeks and social outcasts everywhere. Spider-Man may have the obvious benefit of superpowers but it’s his smarts, his refusal to be bowed by a bad turn and his embrace of the tenant of “with great power comes great responsibility” that make him a hero.
Miles Morales (voiced with perfection by Dope's Shameik Moore) is a somewhat different character to Peter Parker – his parents are still alive and still together; he prefers graffiti art to applying himself at his new private school, despite being more than adept at both; and he comes from a working-class Hispanic/ African American background rather than a (barely concealed) working-class Jewish American background – but the similarities between the two are impossible to miss. Like Peter, Miles is a good kid with his head in the clouds and an inability to entirely fit into the world in which finds himself and his hero’s journey is not all too dissimilar to Peter’s in the way he learns that his Spidey powers are, in fact, not the cure to all the world’s ills but they do give him the ability to at least try to improve the world around him.
While the comics gave Miles his own supporting cast, Into the Spider-Verse really only concentrates on his father and his uncle (a crucial player in Miles’ story but miles different from Uncle Ben) as space needs to be made for the other Spider-People (and Spider-Pig, voiced, not so incidentally, by my favourite stand up comedian on the planet right now, John Mulaney) and, because you can’t really have a Spider-Man movie without her, Aunt May (voiced by Lily Tomlin; perfect, obviously). Again, in a long list of smart decisions, this is yet another one as it keeps the focus squarely on Miles himself and gives the film ample space to introduce us to the other Spider-People.
They’re in the trailer and almost all of them are very familiar to most comics fans (well, the manga version aside, at least) but I would rather leave their particular peculiarities and often hilariously mad origin stories a surprise. Suffice to say, though, that, though only Spider-Gwen/ Spider-Woman/ Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld, lovely even just in-voice) and an older Peter B. Parker (New Girls’ very on-point Jake Johnson) are explored in any detail, the various Spider-characters are a richly comic delight and are as inventive as just about anything else in the film.
And however much the film gets right in substance as it balances a widely diverse cast of characters as seamlessly as it balances comedy, pathos and high adventure, it’s impossible not to stand in awe at the level of innovative artistry on display in both the design of every aspect of the film and its gorgeous animation. It’s such a feast for the eyes, in fact, that I won’t go into too much details as it really should be experienced rather than described. This is, however, a film that blends, in no particular order: hand-drawn animation, unrendered-3D effects, “Kirby dots”, CG animation, cartoon art, cutesy anime designs, stop-motion-esque CGI, photorealism, and on-screen sound effects, into something that is both steeped in its comic book origins and is breathtakingly cinematic. It should be a total mess but it's a thing of mad, psychedelic beauty. More even than Scott Pilgrim vs the World, this is a comic book come to life and it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen before in an animated feature.
I could not be more emphatic about this: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is one of the year’s (hell, the century’s) greatest films that absolutely should be seen in a proper cinema. It’s the best Spider-Man movie to date, one of the very best superhero movies ever and far and away the best mainstream) animated film of the year by some distance. It’s the rare film about which I have almost nothing to criticize and easily earns every last one of these ten stars. It’s just... spectacular.
Absolutely, totally and genuinely love your BRILLIANT review and the movie (my head is still buzzing!) A deserved 10-star indeed
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