Spider-Man: Into The Spiderverse Swings Into Theaters

Throughout the years, the character of Spider-Man has made a multitude of cinematic appearances, from the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man trilogy of the early 2000’s, to Andrew Garfield’s reboot, to Tom Holland’s current iteration in the Marvel cinematic universe. However, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is a universe away from the previous film adaptations of our favorite web slinger.

For the first time, Spidey is showing up on the big screen in an animated movie. Also for the first time, Peter Parker isn’t the hero of the story. Instead, this story follows Miles Morales (voiced by Shameik Moore) as he discovers his own spider-like abilities and tries to live up to the colossal expectations of being Spider-Man.

If you’re a fan of the Spider-Man comics, you probably already know of Miles Morales. For the uninitiated, Miles lives with his parents, attends a private school, an–while very creative–lacks confidence. Miles also lives in a New York City that already has a Spider-Man (Jake Johnson). However, while Miles is trying to express his creative side with his Uncle Aaron (Mahershala Ali), he is bitten by a radioactive spider. (Shocker, I know.)

As Miles’ powers begin to manifest, however, he begins to freak out with anxiety which leads to him meeting Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld) and discovering the actual Spider-Man, who is fighting Kingpin (Liev Schreiber) over his plot to tamper with multiple dimensions. As Miles sees the official Spider-Man defeated, he is left to save not only his dimension, but many others as he struggles with his new powers around various other Spider-men (Spider-people?) who are all more accomplished than him.

There are a lot of amazing visual elements in Into the Spider-Verse. If you’re worried about this being animated, rest-assured, the animation is top-notch. The colors are vivid and fun, as is much of the film. The animation is so well-done, in fact, that the film is able to pull off using several different animation styles for the various Spider-people in a way that is distinct, yet cohesive. I particularly enjoyed the use of half-tone–the little dots that are omni-prevalent in comic books– as it aids in harkening the film back to its comic book origins.

The soundtrack is fantastic, as every song feels just right for the film and truly sounds like a playlist that Miles himself would have put together. The soundtrack is so good that I’ve found myself listening to it on Spotify.

The cast of Into the Spider-Verse is very talented and features some prominent names, including Nicolas Cage as Spider-Man Noir and John Mulaney as Spider-Ham. The cast helps bring these new characters to life. If anything, my biggest complaint of the film is that we don’t see enough of Spider-Man Noir, Spider-Ham, or Peni Parker (Kimiko Glenn). From the trailers, you might think that you’re walking into a film centered around six different versions of Spider-Man. Instead, you see a film centered around three characters, with another three as mostly comic relief.

Luckily, when the biggest criticism of a film is that you want to see more of the characters, that tends to be a good problem. For that reason, I give Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse an enthusiastic 9 out of 10 radioactive spiders.