New York. Miles Morales is a teenager struggling with high school and his overbearing father, police officer Jefferson. One day, Miles is bitten by a radioactive spider and obtains superpowers. He witnesses how Spider-Man is revealed to be Peter Parker, and killed by Kingpin, a criminal who wants to open a portal to new dimensions to find an alternate reality with his wife and son alive, who died in a car crash in this world. By opening this portal, however, five different Spider-Mans appear from different alternate dimensions: a brown-haired Peter Parker / Spider-Man, Gwen Stacy / Spider-Woman, Peter Porker / Spider-Ham, Peni Parker / SP//dr and Peter Parker / Spider-Man Noir from the 30s. They all combine their forces and stop Kingpin, since his portal is unstable and endangers the world, and then they all go back to their respective Universes. Miles becomes Spider-Man in his world.
The first animated film in the Spider-Man franchize is a surprisingly lively, fresh and creative take on Spider-Man, combined with the multiverse concept, and these additional Spider-Men / Women from other dimensions just seem to multiply and give additional enjoyment value to the movie. Kudos to screenwriters Phil Lord and Christopher Miller for creating a more out-of-the-ordinary story, and squeezing more humor than expected. The jokes work on several levels, whether they are the typical family observations (Miles wants to go to school, but stops when his dad, a police officer, demands over the loudspeaker of the police car to tell that he loves him, with all the teenagers looking at them), high school dilemmas (after embarrassing himself, Miles walks pass other students on the hallway, hoping they didn’t notice it, but as everyone stares at him, a comic-book text shows up above his head, saying: “They all know!”), or just plain clever sight gags (while escaping from the laboratory, Spider-Miles throws a bagel at a villain scientist, and as it hits his head, the text panel briefly says: “Bagel”). In a neat metafilm touch, each new Spider-superhero from another dimension is introduced with the same narration as the first one (“All right, let’s do this one last time. My name is...”), and the last three of them (Spider-Ham, Peni Parker, Spider-Man Noir) are even animated differently, the classic animation or even anime-style, to emphasize how they are worlds apart, literally. Said last three Spider-superhero variations are the least developed character-wise, which comes off as a flaw, whereas the finale is kind of rushed and lacks more philosophical points, yet "Into the Spider-Verse" compensates this through a whole bunch of inspired ideas and contemplations about the randomness of opportunities in life. Rarely will you get so much fun out of modern big budget movies today: Spider-Man to the sixth power.
Grade:+++
No comments:
Post a Comment