Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
Director: Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman
Writer: Phil Lord, Rodney Rothman
Based on: Stan Lee and Steve Ditko‘s comic
Cast: Shameik Moore, Jake Johnson, Hailee Steinfeld, Mahershala Ali, Brian Tyree Henry, Lily Tomlin, Luna Lauren Velez, Zoë Kravitz, John Mulaney, Kimiko Glenn, Nicolas Cage, Kathryn Hahn, Liev Schreiber, Chris Pine, Natalie Morales, Edwin H. Bravo, Oscar Isaac, Greta Lee, Stan Lee
Seen on: 17.12.2018
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Plot:
When Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) is bitten by a radioactive spider, he finds himself facing a whole new set of problems – as if starting a new school wasn’t enough. But then he has to watch as Kingpin (Liev Schreiber) kills Spider-Man/Peter Parker (Chris Pine) who tries to keep Kingpin from using a dimension-crossing machine, and things get even worse. That’s when Miles stumbles upon yet another Peter Parker/Spider-Man (Jake Johnson) and he realizes that he might be able to find other Spider-Men in other dimensions. If they team up, they may stand a chance against Kingpin, although not all of them are of equal help.
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse got a whole lot of advance prasie and all of it was absolutely deserved. In fact, I felt that it actually surpassed my expectations. It was funny, hit all the right emotional notes and was visually really interesting. Absolutely fantastic.
I’m not the greatest Spider-Man fan, nor expert. Nothing against him, just didn’t draw me in that much. But I do have a passable knowledge of the well-known stuff, so I could see that there are a lot of in-jokes in the film, although I’m sure that I missed a few. But the film manages the wonderful balance of not relying on the “in” part of the jokes to be funny, but offering it as a bonus for people in the know.
In short, the film is really funny. But it’s also emotional and so true to its characters, it is engaging at all times and has so much more to offer than just fun (nothing to say against just having fun, but it’s nice to get more). It does give us its fair share of DADDY ISSUES which I am a little tired of, but at least they did it right.
The plot the film tells is not very innovative – it’s pretty much the standard superhero plot. They do acknowledge that themselves in the film in an instance of lampshading that is actually charming. And I generally didn’t mind that – the film has so much else going on, I don’t need a plot that surprises all the time, too.
The best thing about the film was definitely the animation style though – it was different from what we’re currently used to, and very interesting. It took me a little while to warm to it. Especially in the beginning, I wondered whether the cinema had forgotten to switch from 3D to 2D because the background became a little blurry. But once I had settled into it, I really loved it. As I loved the film in its entirety.
Summarizing: Really great.
