The Best Spiderman Movie Ever

Rating: 9/10 (18 December 2018)

Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse is Sony's latest attempt to cash in on their license to Marvel's Spider-man franchise (like Venom), is one of the best non-MCU affiliated endeavors Sony has ever produced. While Venom was a refreshing update to the character's origin story, after the disastrous outing in Spider-man 3, it still lacked the presence of his most crucial adversary-Spider-man. With the infectiously fun Tom Holland's take on the web crawler side-lined till 2019, Sony needed to keep their only superhero franchise in the public sphere. However, this time, they took the bold step of animating the Spider-man franchise with a story centered around his multiverse doppelganger-Miles Morales.
For those who are unfamiliar with Miles, he's an Afro-Latino character introduced in the comics world in 2011 as Marvel experimented with shedding their homogenous base and reached out to attract readers of all cultures. In Spiderman-Homecoming, he's briefly mentioned by Donald Glover's modest take on The Prowler. He even appears in Sony's newest PS4 Spider-man game, so the ground was tilled in advance of his arrival. Moreover, his appearance is nothing short of spectacular.
Miles is a charming teenager with loving parents who are willing to send him away to ensure he receives a world-class education and the best chance at success in a dangerous world. He is the by-product of Gen-X age parents who were reared the same way. When he discovers his powers after the all-to-familiar radioactive spider bite, he has a chance encounter with the real Spider-man and soon has his entire world torn apart (literally) when an experiment by King Pin sucks multiple versions of Spider-man, into Miles reality. These multiverse Spider-people include two female versions of the acclaimed hero, two additional male versions, and a Looney Toons inspired pig version. It sounds like a recipe for disaster narratively. Surprisingly, the story works amazingly well. Moreover, that's not the only thing that works well in this film.
Spider-man: Into the Spiderverse blends the beauty of 3-D animation with the stylized look of ink to paper art. The union creates a fascinating phantasmagoria of lucid animation that will leave you in awe of its quality for the first half of the movie. When you're done being mesmerized by that, there's still room on your plate for a heartfelt story about friendship, discovering one's purpose and the love of family - all the things you've come to expect from this franchise. There's enough heart in this movie to make you care about the stakes in this film-which are felt early on and repeated later in the movie to remind you that this isn't a rated-G film.
Now, it would be irresponsible to ignore Stan Lee's overriding message that the diversity of the Spiderverse (or Marvel in general) is a good thing in an era of diversity resistance. Miles parrots this, and so do all the other versions of Spider-man. Moreover, it's true. There's enough room in this world for multiple versions of this superhuman and we should all welcome updated take on the character when they're done this well.
This film is a dazzling display of style and story. The tongue in cheek narration finds a way to celebrate the ups and downs of the Toby McGuire & Andrew Garfield Spiderman eras. Also, it's as much of a nod to the past as it is a celebration of the future of this franchise. Now, if Sony can find a way to make its villains as intense as they were in this movie-in their live-action films-they will be able to milk the franchise for all it's worth.