Movie #21 of 2018:
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
Believe the hype. I’ll freely admit I was reluctant to watch this movie, both because I shy away from animated superhero content in general and because what I knew of its premise — a crossover team-up of different versions of Spider-Man — seemed aimed at comic book buffs rather than more casual fans like myself. I also don’t feel like Sony has the best track record for how they’ve handled their Spider-Man film license in the past, and I’ve been much happier with the character’s recent live-action adventures as Tom Holland over in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Luckily, though, I trusted everyone who recommended this film despite my misgivings, and it ended up being one of my favorite movies of the year. The plot is twisty enough to continually surprise the audience, but never so complicated to take us out of the action. A lot of that is thanks to the writing, which somehow juggles a superhero origin story and six different parallel dimensions with apparent ease and still manages to be both hilarious and heartfelt throughout. The gorgeous animation styles are also incredibly inventive, capitalizing fully on the comic book nature of the project and delivering visual puns and other graphic punctuation as no other medium could. And the human story at the movie’s core, tightly focused on newly-powered Black Hispanic teen Miles Morales, is a fantastic distillation of why we celebrate people who step up and choose to become heroes.
The movie is not without some minor flaws. Although the madcap pace helps disguise a few rough patches, the writers occasionally lose track of what the audience and the characters know at particular points in the narrative. (Gwen Stacy has no reason in the film’s continuity to initially lie about her name, Miles mentions ‘the Prowler’ before anyone else has identified that villain as such, and so on.) It’s also a shame that half of our eventual Spideys are essentially just used as punchlines, rather than getting the rich inner life of every other character. The jokes are funny enough to mostly excuse that, and the weakness likely only feels so glaring because Miles and the rest of the cast are so well-realized, but that flat characterization is a rare false note in what’s otherwise a masterful composition.
(I also would have liked to see more representation of Peter Parker’s Jewishness than just that one quick flashback of him stomping a glass at his wedding, but I’ll celebrate what I can for positive Jewish depictions in media this year.)
If you only see one superhero movie from 2018… Well, it should honestly be Black Panther, a basically perfect piece of cinema with a far more compelling antagonist than the Spider-Verse’s Kingpin can offer, especially if you’re used to Vincent D’Onofrio’s nuanced portrayal of that role on the Netflix Daredevil show. But if you want a fresh take that pushes the genre forward and opens up brand-new storytelling vistas beyond the now-familiar Avengers and their ilk, you should definitely carve out time to see this surprise gem as well.
★★★★★
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