Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is dazzling, hilarious, and unique
ack in 2013, Sony Pictures Entertainment announced plans for its own elaborate, interconnected universe based around Spider-Man. Among the planned titles: Amazing Spider-Man 3 (which never happened), Venom (which arguably shouldn’t have happened), and The Sinister Six (which hasn’t happened yet, though writer-director Drew Goddard would still love to tackle it). Instead, Sony went a different way, partnering with Marvel two years later to make Spider-Man part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, leading to Tom Holland’s portrayal of Peter Parker in Spider-Man: Homecoming and other MCU films.
It was a concession that perhaps Marvel Studios knew how to best handle the marquee version of the character. But in spite of Spider-Man’s successful MCU integration, Sony continued to work on many of its expanded universe ideas. The most intriguing of the bunch was Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, an animated film meant not only to step away from the world of live-action superheroes, but to put the spotlight on Miles Morales, the character writer Brian Michael Bendis created in 2011 to take over the mantle of Spider-Man after Peter Parker was killed. With the project being creatively shepherded by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the duo behind The Lego Movie and the 21 Jump Street films, the project had the potential to offer a fresh, radically different take on the character that would actually warrant a standalone film in a sea of interconnected franchise titles.
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
The finished film is all those things and more. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is a raucous, smart, self-referential adventure. The comics-inspired visuals are stunning, and the emotional coming-of-age story is relevant and inspiring, even as it acknowledges the many Spider-Man movies that have come before it. Sony is clearly looking for a way to launch its own distinct take on Spider-Man that can stand up to the live-action MCU version, and that franchise now has its first installment.
Unpacking the storyline in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is a bit tricky because the film is so fast-paced and filled with so many meta-references that it becomes a bit of an interconnected puzzle. It starts off with Peter Parker (Chris Pine) trying to dismantle a massive supercollider built by the Kingpin (Liev Schreiber). Spider-Man is killed in the battle, leading all of New York to mourn the loss of their hometown superhero. Then the film shifts to teenager Miles Morales (voiced by Shameik Moore), whose artistic inclinations don’t necessarily please his police officer father (Brian Tyree Henry). One night, Miles’ uncle Aaron (Mahershala Ali from Moonlight and the recent Green Book) takes him to a hidden tunnel in the subway system to spray-paint a mural, and Miles is bitten by a mysterious spider. Soon, he’s developing Spider-Man-esque powers.
That’s just the beginning of a story that pulls different iterations of Spider-Man from alternative universes into Miles’ own. A flailing, middle-aged Peter Parker (Jake Johnson), the black-and-white Spider-Man Noir (Nicolas Cage), and Spider-Gwen (Hailee Steinfeld) are just a few examples of the larger Spider-Man metaverse that Miles learns exists. Soon, they join forces to stop Kingpin so Miles can harness his emerging powers, and so the other characters can use the machine to jump back to their own dimensions before it’s too late.
For a film with such a mind-bending premise, Into the Spider-Verse is remarkably efficient in the way it sets up the various characters and the world’s stakes, largely by relying on the audience’s knowledge of comic book movies and these characters. An opening montage, for example, tells the backstory of the soon-to-be-deceased Peter Parker, which essentially establishes him as the Tobey Maguire iteration of the character from the Sam Raimi film trilogy. The upside-down kiss with Mary Jane from Raimi’s 2002 original, the train rescue from Spider-Man 2, and the regrettable Spider-Man 3 dance sequence are all referenced, and when he dies, it serves as a clean break from all other iterations of the character.