From the excellent Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (my review is here), this opening song quite well encapsulates the feel of Miles Morales and his transformation into the titular hero. Spoiler warning, though: the video includes footage from pretty much all parts of the movie and gives quite a bit of the plot away. Partake and be pleased:
Directed by Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, & Rodney Rothman
There hasn’t been a Spider-Man Movie (that I’ve seen) that quite so successfully encapsulates the sheer exuberance of swinging through a city as Spider-Man.
Much of that must be credited to the wondrous visual style of SMItSV. Most animated movies nowadays have one visual style, and the whole movie looks like it. But SMItSV has a very idiosyncratic and expressive range of styles; individual scenes are animated with different effects depending on the need of the scene. And indeed, later in the movie when a handful of characters are introduced, they’re all animated in their own individual style in addition to the style of the movie. It’s simply amazing to look at, and extreme care was taken to make sure each shot in the movie looks as gorgeous as possible. More… »
It’s difficult to argue that this is not an objectively better film than Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies, but it lacks the weird, quirky charm of those movies. This one’s sensibilities are firmly modern, whereas Raimi’s films still incorporated the innocence and optimism of the 1960s. This Spider-Man seems much more rooted in reality rather than being a filmed comic book, which is an interesting feat.
Andrew Garfield makes an excellent Parker/Spider-Man, though he is WAY too old to convincingly play a high-schooler. He is much more convincing delivering Spider-Man’s witty banter than Tobey Maguire was. And I really liked the fact that he is actually really bad at being Spider-Man for pretty much the length of the movie. He just started out; of course he’s gonna make mistakes and do things the wrong way. I also liked the speed-skater origin of the spandex costume, though I missed the professional-wrestling aspect of his origin (it is given a token nod as to the origin of the Spider-Man mask).
The romance between Parker and Gwen Stacy is endearingly geeky and awkward. The Lizard is perhaps not the most engaging of villains, but his scheme is large in scope and he’s a sufficient physical threat to get some rather good fight scenes in. But why doesn’t Captain Stacy bring a whole fleet of cops up to the roof with him at the end of the movie?
Conclusion: I was very skeptical, but I liked it a lot.
