Chapter and Verse

We got to see Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018), the best Spider-man movie yet. But that’s a low bar - Homecoming is the only one I liked at all. But this one is even better.

First, it isn’t so much about the Peter Parker Spider-man. It’s about Miles Morales (voiced by Shameik Moore), a high-school kind in Brooklyn under a bit of pressure to excel at school from black police officer father Brian Tyree Henry and Puerto Rican nurse mother Luna Lauren Velez. He sometimes sneaks out to see his cool uncle Mahershala Ali who takes him to a closed off part of the subway so that he can bomb the wall with a “Great Expectations” piece - based on his homework. There, he is bitten by a radioactive spider.

At school, he is trying to be suave with a blonde new girl, but when he touches her hair, his hand sticks and won’t release. He starts to think something is going on, and heads back to the subway. There, he sees the Green Goblin killing Spider-man under the instruction of Kingpin by throwing him into a Super Collider. Although he doesn’t realize it, this creates an interdimensional rift. Soon, he will meet up with another universe’s Peter Parker, an older, divorced sad sack with a beer belly. Also, the blonde from school is Spider-Gwen. Then there’s Peni Parker, an anime girl with a spider robot, Spider-Man Noir (Nic Cage), a black-and-white trench coat wearing spider detective, and of course, Spider-Ham, a cartoon spider who was bit by a radioactive pig.

One nice thing about this movie is that it takes its time, but it’s full of stuff. The story is just getting started. I haven’t mentioned some other super-villains, or Aunt May (Lily Tomlinson), or Doc Ock, who is a woman in this dimension. Then there’s the animation style, which has a comic book style, with halftone dot shading and misregistered colors in some scenes. That didn’t work so great, I thought. Kind of looked like it was in 3D.

There’s some fun meta-stuff, like the repeated telling of a Spider-Man’s origin story, starting “Let’s do this one last time”  - they know how tired we’re getting of the origin story. The Peter Parker from our universe tells his story and includes the infamous disco-Venom Spidey from Spider-Man III. He keeps it low-key, though.

So, this is funny, serious, meta, straight, thrilling, emotional, and full of your favorite bits. The only part that I don't think was 100% successful was the death of Peter Parker, the one and only Spider-man. That was just a bit rushed and maybe didn't have the punch it should have. But there was a lot packed into this movie, and it would have taken away from Miles, the emotional center of it all.