Well. . . wow.
Given my reaction to this film, I can only imagine the new part it's going to leave in the hair of viewers who are much more in need of inspirational representation than a 30-something cis/straight/white man.
Because, even to me, this feels like a wave breaking.
One of the tenets of Spider-Man as a character - that differentiated him from the other "-mans" of the superhero world, on either side of the publishing aisle - is that he could more or less be anyone. There was no genetic predisposition or space exploration or mutli-million robot suit or super-soldier program or alien DNA that made Peter Parker a superhero - just an accident and a choice. Of course, when he was created in the 1960s, the assumed audience comprising "anyone" was as monochromatic and male as his creators.
Enter Miles Morales, an Afro-latinx Brooklyn-born teenager on an Earth similar to ours who finds himself bitten by a radioactive spider and left with a daunting promise to juggle along with his responsibilities to family and academia as well as his passion for street art. As if that weren't enough on the kid's plate, dimensional ruptures caused by Wilson "Kingpin" Fisk have thrown various other Spider-persons in to disrupt his reality, including an over-the-hill Peter B. Parker, Gwen Stacy as Spider-Woman, and a talking Looney Tunes-esque pig called "Peter Porker, the Spider-Ham."
Yes, you read that right. And that's not even all the weird stuff.
In the broadest sense, Into the Spider-Verse is an origin story for a young person of color trying to find his own way in the world while also paying respect to a legacy that's larger than life because of the name he's chosen. If that reminds you of Creed or Black Panther, rest assured that writers Phil Lord & Rodney Rothman and directors Rothman, Peter Ramsay, and Bob Persichetti weave these themes into their symphony just as skillfully as Ryan Coogler's modern classics. Where Spider-Verse goes the extra mile is in its presentation and the sheer number of elements that it crams into a story that could have easily felt overstuffed but - even at nearly 2 hours - still leaves the viewer thirsty for more. Any of the supporting or side characters are amusing enough to carry a comedic scene on their own, but most are also given a real balance of dramatic weight that could support an entire of their own in addition to being outstanding foils/supports for Miles' journey.
The other superpower this movie displays is its animation. As much as I enjoyed Incredibles 2 and Ralph Breaks the Internet this year, there's an inescapable level of homogeneity to the bulk of modern computer-animated films. You'd be hard-pressed to find casual viewers who could pick out which of the big animated family films over the last several years were Disney Animation Studios vs. which were Pixar vs. which were Dreamworks. Spider-Verse arrives like a kick to the face of the medium, with not only obvious nods to its comic book roots like split-panel frames and thought bubble text, but small details like impact lines and dot shading. Variable animation styles are mixed together, with certain characters having more frames of movement per second depending on their design/the character's dimension of origin, and there are action beats that straight-up turn into splash-style images for a split-second to add extra impact during fight or chase sequences.
Anchoring all this visual flair and crazy multi-verse shenanigans is a brilliantly-penned central arc for Shameik Moore's Miles that is so weighty that it damn near pulls every other character into its gravitational well, offering up small character beats or opportunities for extra depth at unexpected moments that make these rendered computer images feel more like living, breathing people than many live-action superhero casts. The film deals plainly in death and consequences, even in the midst of dimension-hopping madness, resulting in every choice having real, inescapable meaning to the story, and to everyone in it. Not only in major plot points, but even in the constant smaller touches - like how Kingpin gets a complete backstory in a matter of moments that is beautifully tragic, or how Jake Johnson as Peter B. Parker is able to turn from comedic sad-sack to a genuinely grieving, broken man on the head of a pin.
And where some films trading in spandex tend to spin out in the finale, or devolve into empty spectacle, Into the Spider-Verse sticks the landing with a jaw-dropping one-two punch of kaleidoscopic ensemble action and deeply personal character catharsis. Everything from the sequence where Miles fully accepts the mantle of Spider-Man to the closing credits is not just some of the best work in feature film animation in the past two decades, it's all-cylinders film-making, full-stop, with moments that are going to be informing audiences and filmmakers for years to come. You can feel a dam bursting and the full weight of the promise that "anyone can be Spider-Man" wash over you.
Because if anyone can be Spider-Man, if we're all Spider-Man, then - well, you know what goes with that kind of power. We all have the responsibility to act like the heroes we could be.
No comments:
Post a Comment