Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is solid, entertaining, gritty, sharp, and funny.

Rating: 9/10 (20 January 2019)

Since a few people have asked me why I don't like Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse that much, I've decided to reveal my issues with it. First of all, I do like this film. It's easily the best wide-release film that's now playing in theaters, but I think that it's not a great film or the best Spider-Man film. The main character, Miles Morales, turns out to be one of the least appealing and least interesting characters in the film, although he's given plenty of time for character development. The most appealing character, in my opinion, is the original Spider-Man (Peter Parker or Peter B. Parker). Morales seems like a poor copy of the original Spider-Man, except that, for some reason, he also has additional, unoriginal powers like invisibility and bio-electric energy. In this case, the creators of this character just couldn't come up with a new, original superhero. This isn't surprising because hardly anything that's made by people in the American entertainment industry these days is original. Therefore, they took an old, beloved character and made him black. Morales isn't a terrible character. He's appealing, but he's lacking, in my opinion. In the film, Morales is also not a science wiz. He's simply a laid back, normal teenager, who just likes to draw and who even gets bad grades in order to transfer to a less prestigious school. Apparently, the filmmakers thought that such a character would be cool for today's audience and fine for being a superhero. This doesn't work, at least for me. Can this normal, laid-back teenager really be a superhero? Is he a good example for black teens and kids? In addition, there are, perhaps, too many Spider-Man characters and too many supervillains. A few of them are just ridiculous, though they're still kind of likable, and they add little or nothing beneficial to the film. The only character with enough development and enough appeal is, yet again, the original, Peter B. Parker. Still, even with all of this baggage, the film has several good scenes that make it worthwhile to see it again. The filmmakers can be praised because of this. But these scenes aren't enough to make Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse perfect or great. So, this is my take on Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse. It's very good, it's fresh and well-animated, but it's weighed down by a few poor characterization and filmmaking choices. That's too bad. The score for this film is nine out of ten from me.
When it comes to what I've been reading lately, I've been able to get my hands on a few interesting history books. The first one is 'Russia and Europe: A Look at the Cultural and Political Relations of the Slavic World to the Romano-German World' (1869) by Nikolay Danilevsky. I don't know if this book is easily available in English now. I know that it used to be available because Carroll Quigley mentioned it in one of his books. Apparently, Danilevsky was the first man to divide the cultures that have existed in history into types, and, now that I've been able to get my hands on this book (because it's easily available in Russia now), I can see that Quigley was very much influenced by this book. It's no wonder, really, because Danilevsky's book features some brilliant writing. Another book that I've been reading is World History in 4 volumes (1887) by the German historian Oskar Jager. It's one of the books that Andrei Fursov recommends. Like Danilevsky's book, this book too is either not available in English or is difficult to find. It is readily available in Russian, however. For me, it became somewhat special because Jager's writing got me interested in the Ancient Greeks for the first time. The third rare book that I've been able to get my hands on is 'Political Equilibrium and England' (1855) by Ivan Vernadsky. It's mainly about the geopolitical struggle of the British Empire against the Russian Empire in the 19th century. Unfortunately, the copy of this book that I've been able to download is in the Russian language of the 19th century. It's not available in English and, as far as I know, it's not available in modern Russian either. I can still read the book, but this is not easy to do because there have certainly been some changes in the Russian language in the last century. Thankfully, the book isn't too thick. The one book in English that is readily available, and that I've been listening to lately on Audible, is Cosmos (1980) by Carl Sagan. I finished watching Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, which is the thirteen-part television series based on the book, several months ago, and I quite enjoyed it, actually. So, I decided to get the book too, and Audible offers a very good new recording of it. The only downside to a few of Sagan's works is that they feature American oligarchical propaganda. This is something that I've noticed about other American sci-fi writers, like Isaac Asimov. In the 1970s, and especially after the fall of the Soviet Union in the late-1980s, American and British sci-fi writers began to heavily promote the Anglo-American oligarchical agenda. This agenda is about typical oligarchical fuzz, like population control, the green movement, and their geopolitical aims. I'm not really against the preservation of nature. This obviously has to be done, but the rest of the propaganda isn't really to my taste. This is also why I don't like Frank Herbert's novel Dune that much. It's undoubted that Dune is one of the best-written science-fiction novels in the English language, but the oligarchical propaganda that it contains isn't entirely to my taste. First of all, Dune is about a future that's not really progressive. In the antiquated future of Dune, the interstellar society is ruled by noble houses in control of individual planets. So, this is certainly not some futuristic, improved society that you might see in a franchise like Star Trek. It's not even a democratic society. It's a hierarchical society of nobles and royalty that very much appeals to the modern Western capitalist oligarchy. It can also be said that Dune is in tune with the environmental agenda of the Western elite, and this is why this old novel remains so popular and why it's promoted so heavily in the West. Dune was published in 1965, and, in the decades since then, the science-fiction genre in the West has largely been turned by the Western elite into a genre that promotes the environmental agenda. This is not something that I find to be very distasteful, but it is something that should be noted.