Mark Reviews Movies: SPIDER-MAN: INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 13, 2018

Within the past two decades, we've seen three different incarnations of Spider-Man in the movies. With just one film, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse gives us another six—seven, if you count the version that's essentially an animated rehash of the character as seen in Spider-Man, Spider-Man 2, and Spider-Man 3. If we're well past feeling that the movies are in superhero-overload mode, here's a film that kind of agrees, laughs off that feeling, and gives us a pretty good superhero film anyway.

The story's gimmick is one that's pretty common within the world of comic books. There are multiple universes, across which different variations of the same hero exist. It's an easy way for comic writers to play with the vision of a character, while not causing massive hissy fits from fans. It's why it wasn't too big of a deal that the Spider-Man we liked in that first trilogy of films turned into a completely different Spider-Man (with results that weren't nearly as successful), only for a third web-slinger to show up in that sprawling universe of interconnected superheroes and stories.

In the movies, we call such enterprises reboots. In the comics, that's just the way things are. One Peter Parker can exist on the pages of one comic, while a different Peter Parker is having adventures in the other pages of a different book. If that's true, why shouldn't a cartoon pig named Peter Porker, the secret identity of the superhero Spider-Ham, exist, too? In a world or universe or series of co-existing universes such as the one in this film, pretty much anything is possible.

Phil Lord and co-director Rodney Rothman's screenplay takes the idea of limitless possibilities and runs with it. We get the heroic Spider-Man (voice of Chris Pine), who has saved New York City more times than he can count during a lengthy montage of familiar and new setpieces—all the while keeping up his day job as a freelance photographer and marrying his high-school sweetheart Mary Jane (voice of Zoë Kravitz).

We also get a middle-aged Peter B. Parker (voice of Jake Johnson), who was once as heroic as that other universe's Spider-Man but let the fame get to his head—and a steady diet of greasy food get to his gut. He's divorced, lonely, and pretty confident that, one day, he might just think about getting into shape again.

As the story progresses, we meet another Spider-Man (a black-and-white, Nazi-fighting film-noir type voiced by Nicolas Cage), a Spider-Woman (Gwen Stacy, the girlfriend of one of the many Peter Parkers, voiced by Hailee Steinfeld), a Spider-Girl (an anime-style character, voiced by Kimiko Glenn, who has a friendly spider-like robot as a helper), and that oddity Spider-Ham (voice of John Mulaney). All of them exist in different universes, where each of them has become a sturdy hero.

The film's central gag exists within and among them. It's all about that feeling of superhero-overload, with each one getting an introductory montage and each one always prefacing that montage with the promise that we're only going to go over this "One last time." The joke of having so many of the same type of superhero here is consistently funny, because the sentiment of the gag is true.

It's more than a running bit or a lazy gimmick, though, because Lord and co-directors Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rothman are genuinely invested in the possibilities of having multiple versions of the same superhero together. There's a real sense of visual energy, as each version of the superhero has a certain look and style that either complements or goes against the dot-print look of the film's world, which is itself quite a fount of visual inspiration. Only in animation could filmmakers get away with a film that looks like comic book come to life, from the fine detail of the printing to the sound-effect bubbles that pop up on occasion. Only in a film as inventive as this one could the filmmakers get away with such flair without it seeming like a cheap gimmick.

More to the point, all of these heroes and their respective origin stories have one thing in common: Anyone can be a hero generally or a Spider-Man variant specifically (as long as that person is bitten by a radioactive spider, of course). For all of the jokes about origin stories here, the filmmakers also give us a solid one. It belongs to Miles Morales (voice Shameik Moore), who has to take up the mantle of Spider-Man in his universe—with a little help from his new spider-like friends, naturally.

Miles is a fairly ordinary kid from a mixed-race family in Brooklyn, where he loves street art and is going through the usual pubescent annoyance with his parents (voices of Brian Tyree Henry and Luna Lauren Velez). His uncle Aaron (voice of Mahershala Ali) understands the kid a bit better, and while the two are in the sewer to spray-paint Miles' latest creation, the kid is bitten by a radioactive spider.

The plot has the diabolical Wilson Fisk (voice of Liev Schreiber) trying to open a portal to another universe in order to save his recently deceased wife and son. Miles witnesses Spider-Man's battle against Fisk and his supervillain goons, and after a tragedy that rocks the city, the teenager finds himself being trained by the other Peter Parker and that assortment of similar superheroes.

In terms of a plot, it's mostly the usual stuff, but Lord and Rothman are smart enough to know that the typical origin tale has run its course in movies like this one. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse laughs at the routine and gives us superhero film that is anything but routine.

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