This year, I’ve set aside $100 every month for my wife and I to go and do something fun. That’s not a lot in the general scheme of things, but I find unless I have a bit of money explicitly allocated to fun, I feel a bit guilty spending on it. This evening, we spent $10 on a taxi from the school parent teacher evening, and $25 on tickets to see Into The Spiderverse, so there’s still 65% of the fun left for January.
For reasons nobody cares about, Sony has the cinematic rights to Spiderman whereas other Marvel properties are handled by Disney, and so it’s rare and complicated for Spiderman and the Marvel Cinematic Universe to interact. I was a bit surprised at the starting credits, therefore, when there were both Sony and Marvel logos. And then the film went into warp drive, and I didn’t even care any more.
Into The Spiderverse is an animated film that delights in using a multiplicity of different styles, as well as freely snatching from different Spiderman time lines. This allows them to include Spider-Gwen, manga Spider Girl, an alternate noir Spiderman voiced by Nicholas Cage, and so on.
As well as dipping into different dimensions, there’s just such an insane amount of visual candy in every frame, that by the mid point, even as the plot slows a little, you don’t care. It’s two hours of technicolor trauma for your eyeballs, and I loved it.
The villains aren’t so great. Well, there is a great Dr Octopus, but the chief bad guy, Kingpin, is a bit of a cipher and his henchmen feel very undeveloped. Why is the Scorpion Spanish? Who is the Problem? Should I know these things?
What also makes it fresh is that the main Spider protagonist is not just another Peter Parker, but the newer Spiderman, Miles Morales. I had no idea about him before watching this film, but it’s nice to not have the Daily Bugle blah and concentrate on teenage high-school hijinks for a while.
And the ending credits were something I’d happily watch again and again. So much everything, so much so much… [category Films, Reviews] [tags cartoon, Spiderman]