Receiving a Rotten Tomatoes score of 97%, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is perhaps the best movie to hit theatres in 2018.
Its most appealing characteristic is its complex imagery, which comes with a light-sensory warning. Large parts of the movie made the audience feel as though we were inside a lava lamp. Fight scenes left our eyes watering as we struggled to keep up with the fast-moving characters and the detailed animation.
Besides the most obvious appeal of the movie, the characters are just really well written. With under two hours to introduce seven individual Spider-men (and women) along with other minor characters, the Spider-Verse team did not only take on the challenge but also nailed their pacing. Just enough screen time was awarded to each character for the audience to relate and feel for that character’s successes and failures. And let’s just talk about Miles Morales.
Miles is the movie’s protagonist, a teenager growing up in Brooklyn, New York. He struggles to fit in at a new school when he starts to develop powers that mirror those in his Spider-Man comic. Miles has just replaced Iron Man as my all-time favorite superhero mostly because he struggles to be good at it. This seems most important in a time when the millennial generation is starting to become adults. If you ask many of us what we want to do for a career, you will hear over and over again, “I just want to help people.”
The main theme of Into the Spider-Verse says that no matter who you are, you can help people; there is no need for a radioactive spider bite. As the movie progresses, the audience is left understanding that anyone can change his or her life and anyone can do good. Anyone can wear the mask.