Miles Morales is a nerdy kid, sent off to a high powered school,
but who prefers producing graffiti art with his shady uncle.
One time, he gets bitten by a spider, and starts manifesting strange abilities.
On returning to the place, he finds Spider-Man (Peter Parker) fighting KingPin
over a huge accelerator; Parker hands Morales a data stick that can close down the accelerator.
The accelerator has opened a rift in the space-time continuum,
and several alternate parallel universe versions of Spider-Man fall through.
Morales must gain control of his spider powers, and work with the other spiders
to close down the accelerator before the universe is destroyed.
 |
| the gang’s all here |
I confess when I started watching this, I didn’t know it is an origin story,
and that there is a new Spider-Kid on the block.
That means I probably missed some in-references.
But even coming to this relatively cold, I still found it hugely enjoyable.
It takes a while to get going, as Morales’ pre-bitten character is established.
But the film is clever, and knowing, and funny, and moving, and self-referential:
every Spider-character gets an increasingly funny origin-narration;
Peni Parker and her robot are drawn subtly differently in anime style;
there’s a Stan Lee cameo;
Spider-Noir’s monochrome character is drawn using different sized black dots to make shades of grey;
the tingling spider-sense seems to be of use only to detect the various other Spider-characters;
Aunt May’s response to the various alternate Spider-beings is priceless.
I’m not sure about the message on studying:
Morales has to work hard at his new school, where all the kids are bright,
but to learn how to use his new powers, he seems to only need to
want hard enough,
and
spung, he gets perfect control.
No
10,000 hours of practice needed for super-hero skillz, it seems.
I did some surfing after watching the film, and discovered all these Spider-characters pre-exist in the literature.
So I hope there are more films in this multi-verse:
having a larger cast of the “same” super-hero riffing off each other gives very rich possibilities.
Highly recommended.
For all my film reviews, see
my main website.
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