Chapter and Spider-Verse

I try to bookend most years with a movie -- I like to watch one on New Year's Eve and New Year's Day. This year, my New Year's Eve entry was a trip to the theater to see the much-praised Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. I think the well had been tainted for me a bit by all the "it's the best Spider-Man movie ever!" rhetoric that's been going around. But while I may not have thought that highly of it, I still certainly enjoyed it.

There's plenty of heart and humor in Spider-Verse. Even though we've seen the origin story of Spider-Man tons of times now (a fact the movie acknowledges), the emotional beats of the story are given effective space and weight. (They're different in any case, as our hero this time out is young Miles Morales rather than Peter Parker.) At the same time, even though this movie has a serious emotional throughline, it doesn't shy away from making laughs, poking fun at the franchise, itself, and more.

The idea of multiple Spider-characters from multiple parallel universes is perfect for animation, and there's a lot to love about how they realized it visually. The deeper we get into the movie, the more the Spideys each bring in their own wholly different animation style, disrupting what's been meticulously set up so far.

What had been set up so far, though? A decidedly mixed bag for me. I will say this: the makers of this movie made a strong choice and followed it through. This movie is designed to evoke a comic book in every way imaginable. At times, it's a choice that really works, like when they're doing panel layouts, putting text on screen (with or without bubbles), and staging the action from deliberately exaggerated angles.

But, for me at least, other realizations of this style crossed the line into distraction. The animation is often deliberately jerky. It's always presented as if it had been created by classic mass-produced four-color printing, complete with strong cross-hatching and visible dots in any wide patch of color. Most authentic to this approach, and most distracting, is the occasional deliberate "misalignment" of the color, moments when characters are given deliberate magenta or cyan halos to evoke moments in older comics where the four colors were misaligned for a page. I see what you did there. It looks like I walked into a 3D movie without the glasses, and I don't like the way it snapped me out of the fantasy every time.

Fortunately, strong voice casting was always there to pull me back in. Shameik Moore is a likeable and relatable Miles from beginning to end. Jake Johnson and Chris Pine are great as two different incarnations of Peter Parker. But it gets better from there. Hailee Steinfeld makes a great Gwen Stacy, and Mahershala Ali a great Uncle Aaron. Then there are the players who get to "cut loose" more: Liev Schrieber as a menacing Kingpin, Kathryn Hahn as a gleeful Doc Ock, Lily Tomlin in a wild take on Aunt May, and John Mulaney stealing the show as "Spider-Ham." And damn you, movie, for making me enjoy a Nicolas Cage performance -- Spider-Man Noir is hilarious.

The great mix of credible drama and fantastic comedy runs out of gas a bit when the movie reaches its visual climax. The final showdown is 10 minutes of whizbang nonsense. It's great use of the animation medium, I suppose, something you could never do in a live-action Spider-Man movie. But it's also just an assault of color and visuals and noise that barely makes any sense. At least the movie gets a solid emotional climax right before this kaleidoscopic frenzy.

And above all, there's way more to like here than not. Overall, I suppose I can see why some might declare it "the best Spider-Man movie," even if I think that a bit overstated. I give it a B+. I'm definitely glad I saw it new on a big screen.