Into the Spider-Verse is an amazing experience

Although the comic book movie is undoubtedly the most popular contemporary movie genre it has never quite captured the sheer thrill of a well-written comic book. All the CGI in the world cannot replicate the smell, the feel, and the immersive delight of these four-colour fables.

The best of the MCU or the DCU never actually feel like comic books; for all their delights they exist somewhat at arm’s length. With their intergalactic armadas and levitating cities they provide spectacle but it is fundamentally empty. There is no movie equivalent of the well-crafted single panel in a nine-panel page that provides key character detail.  The only recent comic book movie that has come close, for me, is Spider-Man 2 (2004) which Sam Raimi cleverly imbued with a sense of freewheeling fun and a classic comic-book villain.

All of that changes with Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse which is, by a distance, the best Marvel Comics movie made so far. It really feels like running your eye over the pages of a comic book, or indeed more than sixty years of comic books since it encompasses all of the styles and visual hallmarks of just about every Spider-Man iteration since 1962.

It is, to all intents and purposes, not so much a comic book movie as a moving comic book. Co-director Bob Persichetti says they were trying to recapture the feeling of flipping through a comic so it’s no surprise that physical comic books feature so prominently in the narrative. He and his fellow directors, Peter Ramsey and Rodney Rothman, had to come up with a brand-new technique which marries hand-drawn animation with the latest in computer-generated technology. The results are startling.

Into the Spider-Verse is a fusion of comic, video game and movie formats featuring multi-panel storytelling, thought bubbles, text boxes, and neon bright colours. It is a sensory onslaught and it works superbly.

To begin with we have a ‘new’ Spider-Man.  Miles Morales was introduced in 2011, by writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Sarah Pichelli, to provide more diversity in the Marvel Universe. He is a young black kid who gets bitten by a genetically modified spider and starts to develop powers he’s not quite sure of. Miles lives in a world where Peter Parker is Spider-Man, but in trying to come to terms with his new powers he not only witnesses the death of Spider-Man but also discovers something else he shouldn’t.

There is more than one dimension out there and each one has its own version of Spider-Man. These include ‘our’ Spider-Man who also appears with a noir version, a teenage Spider-Gwen Stacy, an anime Spider-robot, and the magnificent Peter Porker, Spider-Ham – a talking cartoon pig.

They have all been transported to Miles’s world by the machinations of The Kingpin and it falls to Miles to counter the threat to his world and return the heroes to their own worlds before they die.

The story leaps off the screen. The writing-producing team of Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the men behind The Lego Movie are the driving force here with exactly the right balance of humour and pathos.  It’s not so much about great power begetting great responsibility, instead this is Spidey as a metaphor for adolescence. Spider-Man gets knocked down but always gets back up; a recurring theme in the life of ‘our’ Spider-Man who is seen here, out of shape, separated from the love of his life, and on the brink of an existential crisis.

Into the Spider-Verse is very funny, whip-smart but also very dark. Apart from Peter Parker’s mid-life crisis, there are several deaths which are fundamental to the story. Perhaps not for the kids, unless they’re genned up on quantum physics and the theory of multiple realities.

The script is extremely well acted with a great voice cast which includes Shameik Moore, Jake Johnson, Mahershala Ali, Hailee Steinfeld, Live Schreiber, Lily Tomlin and Nicolas Cage amongst others.

That said, it’s the visuals that are most important – it’s a completely immersive experience. It will make your head spin but at the same time it’s the only thing that captures the sheer exhilaration of reading those magnificent Stan Lee and Steve Ditko stories in the Sixties. Given that we have lost both men in the past few months the timing of the release is quite poignant but the tributes to Lee and Ditko here are entirely appropriate and genuinely heartfelt.

The only downside for me was that I could have done with seeing more of Peter Porker, Spider-Ham but even so this is such a rich visual experience, jam-packed with Easter eggs, I’m going to have to watch it several times to get the full benefit.