Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse
Directed by: Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman
Produced by: Avi Arad, Amy Pascal, Phil Lord, Christopher Miller, Christina Steinberg
Screenplay by: Phil Lord & Rodney Rothman
Story by: Phil Lord
Starring: Shameik Moore, Jake Johnson, Hailee Steinfeld, Mahershala Ali, Brian Tyree Henry, Lily Tomlin, Luna Lauren Velez, John Mulaney, Kimiko Glenn, Nicolas Cage, Liev Schreiber
Music by: Daniel Pemberton
Production companies: Columbia Pictures, Sony Pictures Animation, Marvel Entertainment
Distributed by Sony Pictures Releasing
After a long sort of day, I didn’t want to take on anything more intellectually demanding than a Trump speech, but I also wanted something amusing, even entertaining. While there is a wonderful irony to the act of watching a hilarious blowhard who doesn’t know he is hilarious, I wanted something a bit lighter. Grave of the Fireflies maybe, or Schindler’s List.
So I rummaged through Netflix, and after a couple of false starts, spotted Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse.
OK, I’m not much into comic-book movies, and what’s more, as a kid I gravitated to the DC line of comics. But I always liked Spidey, and enjoyed some of the various movies made over the past few years. He was the one Marvel character I knew reasonably well. And he was snarky, something pretty alien to the supes of my era. So I liked the comic, even knew some of the characters, like Aunt May and Doc Ock.
So I settled in for a couple of hours of mindless entertainment.
Twenty minutes in, I had realized I was going to have to write about what I was seeing. By the end of the show, I realized I had watched something quite remarkable.
It was animated, which is OK. Some of the best superhero films I’ve seen were animated. But the animation in Spiderman was clearly a notch above that in most such movies; it was on the level of Avatar, or Trollhunters. The characters were fully realized and the background settings sublime. The action sequences were genuinely exciting. (I’ve been known to fall asleep during protracted ‘action sequences’ in some movies—that was not the case here).
The writing was excellent. The interactions amongst the main characters stayed very real and was disarming. The Spids all had interesting and amusing variations on the character and personality of the original, which led to some hilarious interactions amongst them.
“Spids”? Yes, Spiderpeople. About a half dozen of them. You have the local version, a kid who gets bitten by a radioactive spider. This happens just as Kingpin manages to kill the city hero, Spiderman, whose identity is revealed to the world as Peter Parker. The kid’s name is Miles Morales (Shameik Moore), and he is a black/Puerto Rican kid, bright but troubled. He’s just learning that he can stick to buildings and turn invisible when Kingpin, looking for access to an alternate universe where his family is still alive, does a test run and scrambles the multiverse.
Other Spidermen start turning up around Miles. There’s Peter Parker (“our” Peter Parker, voiced by Jake Johnson), older and somewhat disillusioned, bitter over his divorce from Mary Jane. There’s Spiderwoman (Hailee Steinfeld), representing grrrrl power. From the anime realm, there is Peni Parker, a Sailor Moon-sort who pilots a biomechanical suit assisted by her pet radioactive spider. There’s Spiderman Noir, who comes from a monochromatic universe. They do something really mean to him and give him a Rubik’s cube to play with. Finally, there is Peter Porker/Spiderham, a spider who was bitten by a radioactive pig. If this sounds goofy, and even childish, then yes, yes, it is. But ohmigawd, is it a splendid goofy childishness! There’s similar interesting variations amongst the film’s heavies, of course. I prefer the Doc Ock in this universe to the original. Stan Lee even comes back to life for a cameo.
The dialogue and sheer humanity of the characters prevents this from being a scrambled catastrophe. It takes pitch-perfect writing and direction to make something like that work, and that’s exactly what this extraordinary production got.
It’s a fine story with a solid plot and a grand resolution. One of the best animated superhero movies I’ve seen, and significantly better than nearly all of the live-action ones.
Now on Netflix.
Image courtesy of https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=59740919