EVERYONE GETS A SPIDER-MAN

Rating: 10/10 (11 January 2019)

I'm embarrassed to say I like superheroes. It's not ok. I'm a 33 year-old man living with his parents. I just need to join some brony incel forums to complete the cliché. I know #notallnerds are pepe-loving 4chaners, but it doesn't feel that way. Quality be damned, it's not ok to like Star Wars, Rick and Morty, video games, superhero comics, anime, etc. I'm not moaning. I really feel like it's not ok to like these things in the Trump fandom era.
Fandoms seem, in general, for angry, pedantic, sexless ghouls, for nihilistic, alt-right trolls, for "sjw" bashing gamergaters too far gone down the fantasy hole. I don't want to be associated with these angry white man-boys (even if I am white and sometimes angry and technically a man). I want to be one of the Good Guys, struggling, stretching, limping towards the Good, Stan Lee's True Believer. I want to be Spider-Man.
Or I did at a younger point in life. I think about Spider-Man nowadays the way one thinks about an old childhood friend. Time has passed. I've grown into a person that can't lean on superheroes the way I used to. But gone is not the love; it need only be remembered.
Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse, a bold, flamboyant, joyful, energetic movie helped me remember my old spidey love, my love for superheroes in general. Watching it is a shock to the senses, to my programmed expectations of its lurching live-action cousins. Spider-Verse is fun. The comedy is loose and nimble instead of canned and obligatory. The dialogue is present, expressive, distinctly American, instead of glib, monotone, or manufactured for an overseas translation. The story treatment walks the difficult line of levity and intelligence, never taking itself too seriously, but not afraid to evoke pathos partial to the Spider-Man story.
Spider-Verse practically invents a new animation style using comic book visual keys in a way that finally makes sense. From Dick Tracy to Scott Pilgrim Vs The World, live actions movies have attempted this gimmick with varying (often dubious) success. Spider-Verse, being a cartoon, doesn't have to figure out the tricky visual contract between the real and hyper-real. The comic book aesthetic is baked in from the start with a dotted texture ala Lichtenstein. In a clever sequence, the screen abounds with text boxes and splashy onomatopoeias after Miles Morales gets his spidey powers. But the comic gimmick is just a starting point before sampling street art, anime, Looney Tunes, and psychedelic styles with spectacular wit.
The story is a trippy, multiverse-spanning hopscotch of Spider-Persons converging on the universe of one Miles Morales, a teenage African/Latino American from Brooklyn, and the next Spider-Man. But first, Miles must prove himself under the mentorship of an alternate Peter B. Parker, a thirty-something dad bod who's been around the spider-block a few times. Miles and Peter B. soon team up with Spider-Men and Women from stranger shores of the multiverse, including the original refrigerated girlfriend, Gwen Stacy, and a Looney Tunes-esque pig, Spider-Ham. In case none of this makes sense, the movie gently glides through the basic Spider-Man lore before exploding it.
Encyclopedic Spider-Man nerds will be rewarded but not strictly pandered to. The Spider-Verse is for everyone, a message (and tacit slogan) of the movie. Anyone can wear the mask. Anyone can play the hero in their own story. Having seen Spider-Verse twice now in theaters, it's a touching scene sitting with such a diverse audience, young and old, all different colors, all rooting for Spider-Man, but not a fandom bound by a hierarchy of obsessive, pedantic trolls. Just people sitting together, cheering on their inner hero, feeling the joy of their multiversed possibilities, and the hope that one of them makes sense in reality. To quote Mary Jane Watson, "Go get 'em, tiger."