One Thing I Love About Into the Spider-Verse

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is an Amazing movie that completely understands how origin stories work.

It’d be a lot easier for me to name One Thing I Hate about Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse — the pacing of the final act — because the movie’s a straight-up masterpiece. I knew next to nothing about it; until a couple months ago, I thought the ads were just for a new series on the Disney XD channel or something.

After Homecoming (which I really, really enjoyed but is still nowhere near as good as Into the Spider-Verse), I thought it was bizarre that Sony would be releasing another Spider-Man movie, much less a feature-length animated one. But the whole premise of the movie is how so many different versions of the character can coexist, and also it’s just such a fantastic piece of work that it’d have been criminal not to release it.

But the whole point of these “One Thing I Like” posts is to keep me focused, so I’ll choose one thing. And it’s not how the sound effects are written on-screen like in a comic, or how a guy hit in the head with a bagel has the SFX “BAGEL!” flash over his head way in the background, or how when Peter Parker starts hacking a computer the words “CLICKETY CLACKETY CLACKETY” appear over the keys as if to emphasize how unimportant the “hacking” is to the actual plot of a comic book story.

Even though those are all fantastic, just like how a 3D modeled character in front of an exquisitely painted background can be gorgeous in motion and just as gorgeous as a still shot and make you wonder whether there were a single frame of the entire two-hour-long frantic action movie that wasn’t absolutely beautiful.

And also it’s the best animated movie that I’ve seen in years, and it raises the bar for what an animated movie has to do to keep from feeling stale and irrelevant. And it’s the best super-hero movie I’ve seen in years, possibly the best since Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies or maybe even Richard Donner’s Superman.

The One Thing I’ll Choose To Write About is how the movie is packed full of origin stories, but it uses them both as quick introductions and to mock the entire genre of super-hero movies (and video games) and their over-reliance on origin stories.

Into the Spider-verse is itself the origin story of Miles Morales, but it presents itself as Peter Parker’s. And then the other Peter Parker’s, and Gwen Stacy’s, and then three more. As a result, it strips away all the garbage of “origin story as a think that super-hero movies do,” and it gets back into what makes the origin an actual story.

In other words: it rushes over all the stuff that comic book stories act like we should care about (like being bitten by a radioactive spider) and returns the focus to the story we really should care about (like a universal story of a kid finding his own path vs. living up to the expectations other people place on him).

At this point, it feels like the only reasons that these movies keep telling (and retelling, and re-re-telling) origin stories is out of arrogance and fear. Filmmakers, comic book creators, and writers want their version to become the Definitive Take on the character’s story. And I think producers are afraid that audiences are going to be completely confused by such a “fantastic” and “weird” story unless they see it all play out in front of them.

With the art style obviously but with the storytelling as well, Into the Spider-Verse seems fearless. It’s not worried that super-heroes and super-villains and multiple dimensions are going to be too bizarre and confusing for audiences who’ve been living in a dimension where comics have been around for about a century and some of the most popular and successful movies of the last decade have been based on comic book characters.

I saw a review of the movie that criticized it for not devoting more character development to Kingpin, while I thought the movie did a fantastic job of establishing his character and his motivation with as little dialogue as possible — just his visual appearance and a quick flashback tell you everything you need to know about the character.

As somebody who was never a Marvel fan until the X-Men movies, I saw a ton of stuff in Into the Spider-Verse that was briefly shown or hinted at, but never explained. And I think that’s awesome. I don’t know why Norman Osborne was an actual goblin, or who Scorpion and Tombstone are. (We had to look up “Tombstone’s” name online!) I don’t know why alternate-universe Gwen Stacy was in a band, but I think it’s rad that they showed it as part of her introduction.

It feels as if origin stories are included in comic adaptations for the same reason that panel divisions or split screens, and occasionally narration boxes and written SFX are: they just seem like they’re supposed to be there because comics have them. But Into the Spider-Verse seems to have a better, almost Scott McCloud-ian, understanding of exactly how those elements work in comics, and most importantly, why they’re cool. So the narration boxes are always moving, and they appear when they’re actually necessary (like when Scorpion speaks in Spanish) instead of just being a stylistic flourish. And the pattern of halftone dots and seemingly mismatched color separation are holdovers from an era of comic book printing that few people in the “target” audience will have ever seen, but they’re included just because they look cool. And the “Kirby Dots” appear both as an homage to Marvel’s golden age and then again in multicolor simply because it’s a neat effect.

And in the end, it is such a conventional and universal comic book story about kids and their heroes and what it takes to find their own place, but it’s told in such a breathtaking way that it never seems conventional. It’s refreshing seeing a movie so heavily steeped in nostalgia that still assumes you want to see stuff that you’ve never seen before, and assumes that you’ll be able to keep up while it takes you through every place it wants to go.