- UK release: December 2018
- Directors: Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey & Rodney Rothman · Writers: Phil Lord & Rodney Rothman
- Studio / distributor: Sony Pictures Animation; Columbia Pictures
- Genre: Animated superhero adventure / multiverse comedy · Runtime: 117 minutes (BBFC PG)
- Main cast: Shameik Moore (Dope) as Miles Morales; Jake Johnson (Safety Not Guaranteed) as Peter B. Parker; Hailee Steinfeld (True Grit) as Gwen Stacy; Mahershala Ali (Moonlight) as Aaron Davis
- Rotten Tomatoes: 97% critics / 93% audience · My rating: 8.5 / 10
There have been a lot of Spider-Men. Sam Raimi gave us three Tobey Maguire films, Marc Webb gave us two with Andrew Garfield, and Tom Holland is two films into a third run that is still warm in cinemas. By any sensible reckoning the character should be exhausted, and the safe move would have been another live-action origin we have all sat through before. Instead Sony has handed the property to its animation division and Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the pair who turned a toy advert into The Lego Movie, and what comes back is the first Spider-Man film in a long while that feels like it was made by people with something to prove.
The setup
Miles Morales is a Brooklyn teenager juggling a new scholarship school he did not ask for, a policeman father he cannot quite talk to, and a cooler uncle he would rather spend time with. A radioactive spider does the usual thing, except this time there is already a Spider-Man in town, and a vast particle collider built under the city is tearing holes between parallel universes. Through those holes fall other Spider-people, among them a worn-down, divorced, slightly paunchy Peter Parker from somewhere else, and Miles finds himself the least experienced member of a team he never asked to join. The film keeps the premise legible even as it multiplies its heroes, which is no small feat given how easily this could have collapsed into noise.
The cast
Shameik Moore makes Miles a genuine teenager rather than a plot function, all nervous energy and half-finished sentences, and the film earns its emotion by letting him be bad at this before he is good at it. Jake Johnson is the find of the piece as the deadbeat Peter B. Parker, playing the mentor as a man who has mostly given up, and getting most of the laughs without ever tipping into smugness. Hailee Steinfeld gives Gwen Stacy a guarded cool that stops her being a sidekick, and Mahershala Ali brings real warmth and weight to Uncle Aaron, the relationship the whole film quietly turns on. Even the broader voices, a hardboiled noir Spider-Man, a cartoon pig, an anime schoolgirl, are pitched so they are funny without breaking the thing.
The craft
This is where the film stops being good and starts being special. The animators have built a look that borrows the grammar of the printed page, halftone dots, off-register colour, hand-lettered sound effects and thought boxes floating in the frame, and married it to a deliberately stuttered frame rate that makes the movement feel drawn rather than rendered. Nothing else on a screen this winter looks like it. Daniel Pemberton’s score and a strong hip-hop soundtrack give the New York scenes a pulse, and the action stays readable even when the screen is full of competing Spideys. It is the rare effects-heavy film where the technique is in service of feeling rather than the other way round.
How it stacks up
Set it beside Spider-Man: Homecoming from last year and the contrast is instructive. Holland’s film is charming and well made, but it is playing within the house style of a shared live-action universe. Into the Spider-Verse answers to nobody, and the freedom shows in every frame. The closer relative is The Lego Movie, which shares the same writers and the same trick of smuggling real heart inside a film that looks like a gleeful sugar rush. Against the wider run of superhero cinema, where the visual language has settled into a sort of weightless digital sameness, this is a reminder of how much room there still is to do something the medium has barely tried.
Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have gone close to unanimous, sitting at 97%, and audiences are right behind them at 93%. That kind of agreement usually makes me suspicious, because consensus often rewards the inoffensive, but here the praise is earned and specific: the visual invention, the humour that lands, and the emotional clarity under all the multiverse machinery. My own number sits a little under the critical ceiling, not because the film puts a foot wrong but because the back half leans hard on collider-and-glitch plotting, and the sheer density of characters means a few of them get less room than they deserve.
Verdict
This is the most alive superhero film in years, and the first in a long time that made me want to watch it again the moment it finished, partly to catch the jokes I missed and partly just to look at it. It is funny, it is moving where it counts, and it has a coming-of-age story strong enough to carry the spectacle rather than the other way round. The plot mechanics in the final stretch keep it just short of the very top tier for me, but the invention, the pace and the heart put it comfortably ahead of almost everything else wearing the mask. 8.5⁄10.
Availability: On general release in UK cinemas now, well worth the big screen for the artwork alone; a DVD, Blu-ray and 4K release will follow in the new year.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: the film went on to win the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, and its standing has only grown, widely regarded now as the film that reset what comic-book animation could look like. A direct sequel, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023), expanded the multiverse and the art style further and confirmed this was no fluke, with a third part to follow. It is available on disc and 4K, and streams on Netflix in the UK depending on the window.
BBFC content advice
Rated PG by the BBFC for moderate fantasy violence, mild threat, injury detail, innuendo. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Violence: There are scenes in which heroes and villains headbutt and punch one another; however these are infrequent, undetailed and within a fantasy context.
Threat and horror: An intimidating masked villain with a metal fist pursues the hero; however, these scenes of mild threat are well balanced with more comic moments.
Sex: There are references to a teenager hitting puberty, and a scene in which his uncle tries to advise him how to speak to girls.
Language: There is mild bad language (‘piss’).
Injury detail: A man has a black eye, and a villain has a bloody nose which is shown briefly.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
