Spi­der-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

Since Miles Morales first burst onto the pages of Mar­vel Comics, the pub­lish­er has been ramp­ing up the num­ber of ​“lega­cy char­ac­ters”, with Jane Fos­ter tak­ing the man­tle of Thor, Fal­con becom­ing Cap­tain Amer­i­ca, and the intro­duc­tion of Kamala Khan as Ms Mar­vel. As with Miles replac­ing Peter Park­er, each of these exam­ples received sig­nif­i­cant push­back from fans who protest­ed that no one can replace the orig­i­nal character.

Spi­der-Man: Into the Spi­der-Verse direct­ly address­es this line of think­ing in its open­ing mono­logue, as Peter claims con­fi­dent­ly that, ​“there’s only one Spi­der-Man”. The film doesn’t only reject that idea, but rev­els in the pos­si­bil­i­ties that come with hav­ing more than one, the bound­less imag­i­na­tion of its cre­ators all used in ser­vice of the idea that it’s far more fun to share.

Direct­ed by Bob Per­sichet­ti, Peter Ram­sey and Rod­ney Roth­man and co-writ­ten by Roth­man and Phil Lord, Into The Spi­der-Verse is an amal­ga­ma­tion of Bri­an Michael Bendis and Sara Pichelli’s Ulti­mate Spi­der-Man and Dan Slott’s wacky Spi­der-Verse event com­ic, and a num­ber of oth­ers. The film fol­lows Miles (voiced by Shameik Moore), an Afro-Lati­no teenag­er and soon-to-be Spi­der-Per­son liv­ing in Brook­lyn with his cop father (Bryan Tyree Hen­ry) and nurse moth­er (Lau­ren Vélez). When Miles is bit­ten by a spi­der, his world gets a lot big­ger. He learns not only that there can be more than one Spi­der-Man, but more than one dimen­sion, as a plot put in place by the King­pin (Liev Schrieber) caus­es a bunch of them to collide.

The film takes great plea­sure in adapt­ing the com­ic book aes­thet­ic to the screen in a way that hasn’t real­ly been attempt­ed since Ang Lee’s Hulk 15 years ago. It’s full of artis­tic flour­ish­es that pay homage to the form, with tran­si­tions that look like pages flip­ping, lib­er­al use of pan­els, writ­ten sound effects and ono­matopoeia (look out for the ​“bagel!” sound effect), yel­low cap­tion box­es, and freeze frames that echo splash pages – all of which burst into the film fol­low­ing Mile’s spider-bite.

Ear­ly skep­tics of the low­ered frame rate can rest easy: the ani­ma­tion is slick and eye-pop­ping­ly gor­geous, hit­ting a strik­ing halfway point between stop motion, roto­scop­ing and com­ic book art itself, repli­cat­ing the colour schemes and tex­ture of four colour Ben-Day dots print­ing. It gives the impres­sion of flip­ping through the pages of old comics while on psy­che­delics, the film wink­ing at us from the get-go with the mes­sage that it was ​“approved by the comics code authority”.

At its core, this is essen­tial­ly an ori­gin sto­ry for Miles, but one with sur­prise twists on famous Spi­der-Man char­ac­ters and a refresh­ing self-aware­ness about its place as the sev­enth Spi­der-Man movie (the fourth in the last decade alone). It con­stant­ly sub­verts our expec­ta­tions while stay­ing true to the essence of the Spi­der-Man mythos. There are still what Peter refers to as ​“the usu­al Spi­der-stakes”, but this is ulti­mate­ly a char­ac­ter-dri­ven film.

While Miles, Peter and Gwen Sta­cy (Hailee Ste­in­feld) get most of the spot­light, the oth­er Spi­der-peo­ple – includ­ing Peni Park­er (Kimiko Glenn) and her giant robot ​‘Sp/​/​Dr’, the Bugs Bun­ny-esque car­toon Spi­der-Ham (John Mulaney), and Spi­der-Noir (Nicholas Cage, out-ham­ming the actu­al pig) – most­ly serve as com­ic relief. Jake John­son is par­tic­u­lar­ly note-per­fect as a ​“janky, broke,” lone­ly and cyn­i­cal thir­tysome­thing Peter Park­er with a dad bod. John­son and Moore bounce off each oth­er well; Peter and Miles’ men­tor-mentee rela­tion­ship is con­sis­tent­ly delight­ful and some­times mov­ing, as each teach­es the oth­er how to be hero.

Moore’s charm­ing and vul­ner­a­ble vocal per­for­mance helps make the char­ac­ter feel more authen­tic than ever, and when it comes to his Afro-Lati­no iden­ti­ty, there’s a speci­fici­ty here that isn’t often found in main­stream super­hero films. An ear­ly stand­out scene sim­ply involves him walk­ing down the street, con­stant­ly code-switch­ing while talk­ing with the dif­fer­ent peo­ple in his neigh­bour­hood. The sound­track is also used to great effect in giv­ing Miles some def­i­n­i­tion. Each nee­dle drop or cue on the sound­track feels tied to the char­ac­ters, mix­ing in record scratch­es, var­i­ous nee­dle drops of funk, soul, boom-bap and Latin hip-hop and more with the the more tra­di­tion­al super­hero sounds.

Spi­der-Man: Into The Spi­der-Verse is out­ra­geous fun, with an end­less­ly imag­i­na­tive script and ani­ma­tion to match. It’s the first super­hero film in ages to tru­ly feel with­out lim­its and full of sur­pris­es – and yet, the (large) team of writ­ers and direc­tors bring things back to the cen­tral idea of the char­ac­ter that Stan Lee and Steve Ditko envi­sioned all those years ago. The film uses its mul­ti­verse con­cept to tap into the orig­i­nal appeal of Peter Park­er and the poten­tial of Miles Morales as a char­ac­ter. They’re reg­u­lar peo­ple, and so any­one could be Spider-Man.