The best Spider-Man movie.

Rating: 8/10 (27 December 2018)

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is an excellent movie, debatably the best Spider-Man movie (although I haven't re-watched Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 2 in a while) and so far the best movie I've seen all year.
The story is fairly standard for a Spider-Man movie, social outcast teenager (except this time Miles Morales instead of Peter Parker) has a bad relationship with his father, struggles to fit in at school, through a sequence of events becomes bitten by a radioactive spider, and uses his new-found powers to fight crime. However what this movie does to stay fresh is introduce the idea of multi-verses, which leads to all these different versions of Spider-Man (most notably aging Peter Parker and Spider-Woman) working together, and what that amounts to is a really great tribute to Spider-Man and all of his different comic book interpretations. I don't even read comics and I was really impressed with what was on screen, they even pay tribute/make fun of scenes in previous Spider-Man movies, like the notorious dancing segment in Spider-Man 3 (reminds me of The LEGO Batman Movie, another animated superhero film I really enjoyed).
This movie also has some of, if not the best 3D animation I have ever seen, putting even the most recent Pixar movies to shame. It's not surprising that Phil Lord and Chris Miller, (who made Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and The LEGO Movie) worked on this movie, considering those are some of the most creative CG animated movies in recent memory. The movie is literally like watching a comic book read in front of you, there's text that appears in the corners of the screen exactly like a comic, lines that characters say follow them as they're walking around and even something as little as someone throwing a bagel at someone else have these cute sight gags which I honestly don't even want to spoil. I could talk about how great the stylization is in this movie for hours so I'll just leave it at that it's worth seeing the movie for this aspect alone.
The story didn't exactly reinvent the superhero movie formula but for this movie it worked and there were tons of things about the script that played out in a really interesting way. Some of which I've already mentioned (like the tribute to the different versions of Spider-Man) but also the character of Miles Morales and the chemistry between him and Peter Parker. Miles needs a teacher to help him hone his powers, but Peter Parker is lazy and doesn't want to teach him, so that creates this interesting conflict where you wonder if he's even going to understand his powers by the end of the film. The movie also focused on the morality of Spider-Man, and whether or not vigilantes have a place in society, which felt like an idea that was left pretty much untapped in the prior Spider-Man movies, so despite the fact that this is a family movie it raises more mature ideas and themes than even the more adult entries in the Spider-Man series.
As well as all of the above, the humour felt smart; there were tons of funny quips and character exchanges which I really appreciated, the film has a great soundtrack (a lot of hip-hop music that gives the movie a more urban vibe that the other movies didn't have) and the voice acting is really strong, my favourite performance being Nicolas Cage as Spider-Man Noir. Really the only problem I had with the movie was Kingpin, I thought his character's backstory was sympathetic but when it came to his motivation it didn't feel fully fleshed out.
Really though this is one of the best comic book movies of the past ten years. It's beautifully animated, funny, and has a really strong story that in some areas is more adult than any of the other Spider-Man films. It has a true understanding of the character of Spider-Man and after leaving the cinema I was reminded of why I love movies. I honestly wasn't even expecting that much and I can't sing its praises enough.