Loading ...
Perhaps “spider-curse” is too strong a wording for some who may have enjoyed Sony’s recent big screen Spider-Man efforts. For me, they haven’t made a decent one since Spider-Man 2, so it’s taken a little less than fifteen years, an abandoned reboot and maybe Marvel Studios taking them aside with Civil War/Homecoming/Infinity War to say “Hey guys, this is how you do it.”
But here it is, and as I write this the news is still fresh that this week it won the Golden Globe for Best Animated Feature, which should hopefully keep it in theaters a little longer should any of you feel like catching a showing as a result of this blog.
I’ll be honest, I hadn’t even really had this flick on my radar at all and on paper it sounds like a mess. Bring the “multiple Spider-folk from multiple realities get together to fight something that threatens them all” storyline from the recent Spider comics to the movie theater? I know Guardians of the Galaxy can be seen as the watershed film that convinced Hollywood that general audiences can handle and even enjoy weird shit but Mortal Engines (which I blogged briefly about before our Holiday break) sputtered and died so that’s not always the case. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse hasn’t necessarily been lighting the worldwide box office on fire but I’d say it’s doing better than expected for an animated flick I didn’t see much of a marketing push behind.
Anyhow, the movie wisely distills the huge plethora of Spider-types the comics crossover event gathered into a handful of the break-outs and ditches the notion of an immortal vampire family that feeds on Spider-people to survive (yeah, that happened) in favor of the Kingpin funding the building of an unstable reality bending machine to try to return his dead wife and son to him by contacting a universe where they are still alive.
Trust me when I say that’s rock solid realism by comparison. The circumstances are extraordinary but the characters and their motives are clear, which is danged important especially when things are getting bizarre. I won’t get too much more into the plot and appearances because part of the fun for me was for once going into a comic book movie mostly blind.
And oh boy is this a comic book movie. The people responsible were obvious lovers of all things Spider and put their hearts into this, making the most of it being fully animated to produce what might be the first and only “motion comic” I’ve ever unequivocally enjoyed, because the comic book elements are presented in full, fluid motion. But they’re unashamedly doing things like letting a character’s scream show up as visible letters trailing behind them as they fall. It’s not leaned on so heavily to outstay its welcome, but it was nice to see some experimentation and risk-taking in the name of hearkening to comic book roots.
I should perhaps warn that this sort of enthusiasm and the necessarily hyper-kinetic flow of proper Spider-action may threaten to overwhelm the senses, but if you can make it through the opening credits you’ll probably be okay, especially once you realize it’s not just being done to be edgy and noisy but is a story element. I think it helped my own middle-aged eyes and ears that the film is paced well and has a good amount of quieter moments to balance the battle chaos. And there’s certainly no danger of boredom stemming from another round of the same ol’ orange-and-teal palette.
Anyhow, go see it, or at least make a note to catch it later on when it makes its way onto streaming services. Sony finally got it right again, all on their own, in the most unexpected of places, and this time around if they want to spin off some further features starring Miles Morales, Spider-Gwen or even Peter Porker the Spectacular Spider-Ham, I’m actually looking forwards to the possibilities.