A Movie Review #4 - Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

“Anyone can wear the mask.”

I have never been the biggest fan of legacy characters. There is only one Batman. One Superman.

One Spider-Man.

And that is Peter Parker.

So, when Miles Morales came on the scene in the Ultimate Universe, I wasn’t that bothered. It’s not the main universe, and the Spider-man there never really developed into someone worth following. I was content with my 616 universe Spider-man.

But in the real world, things started getting murky. Miles’ quick popularity meant Peter might be shunted off into the sunset, and that was something I was never going to be ok with. It’s true, Peter needed to grow up and become something different, but dead just to bring in another guy who wears the mantle – nope.

I hoped the most it meant was that the regular Peter became a mentor to Miles. And that was the wonderful development I got in Spider-Verse.

Plot wise it’s not as stellar as it could be, with too many contrived situations to bring Miles to the point where he has to become a hero (especially Peter Parker going from most capable Spider-man to dead without too much fight and then when a similar move near the end Miles survives through the power of family apparently?). 

But with the one problem out of the way, let me get into everything that works beautifully.

Spider-man tries to stop a multiverse experiment gone wrong, dies and Miles has to grow into the mantle to ensure it is stopped with the help of some multiversal counters like Spider-Woman, Spiderman noir, Spider-Ham, Spider-Man (?, seemed more like an older version of the Miles universe) and Penni Parker. I loved the selection as it looked into multiple variations of both universes and the spiders themselves

But character work is legendary. Miles goes through wonderful transitions and learns the responsibility, burden and joy of being the wallcrawler. He doesn’t come across as an usurper, and seems more like a kid trying to learn how to become a hero.

And it gave me those good moments where Aunt May proves to be a capable Alfred, Peter trying to say sorry to Mary Jane and a moment where Peter seriously rediscovers what it means to be a hero even as he takes on mentoring someone new to this.

Kingpin’s villainous motivations are also wonderfully put into the theme of family that carries over to everyone involved – while he distanced his own, Miles learnt to embrace his new one.

Overall, it’s a beautiful homage to the webhead (alongwith one of the best Stan Lee cameos I have seen, almost made me tear up) and a worthy start to Miles Morales aka the Spiderman on the big screen.

So, I give it 9.0 out of 10.

+Wonderful animation
+Beautiful character work
+Themes captured artfully

+Brilliant post credits

-Plot had a lot of contrived situations