Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

The Ink and the Ache

By 2018, I’d mostly convinced myself the superhero movie had run out of surprises. The genre had settled into the same old beat: sky beams, anonymous CGI chaos, everybody quipping on cue. Then *Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse* came crashing in and made that certainty look embarrassingly premature. Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman direct it, with Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s unruly energy all over the thing, and it doesn’t simply adapt a comic book. It tears animation apart and rebuilds it into something that feels handmade, electric, and in love with ink on paper. I honestly hadn’t seen anything like it.



What makes it work is that the visual chaos isn’t decoration. It’s the storytelling. The filmmakers ditch the polished realism studios spent years chasing and lean into Ben-Day dots, offset color layers that look like cheap print gone slightly wrong, and motion that deliberately skips and jerks. When Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) first starts dealing with his powers, he’s animated “on the twos” — moving at 12 frames per second while everything around him moves at 24. He is literally out of sync with his own world. It’s one of those brilliant little choices you don’t consciously clock at first, but you feel it immediately in your nerves.

There’s one scene near the end that I keep replaying in my head. Miles stands on the edge of a skyscraper, finally ready to step into the role. He jumps, and the camera turns upside down so it looks like he’s falling upward through the glowing canyon of Brooklyn. Glass hangs around him in the air. The sound almost disappears. It feels like total release. You’re not just watching a kid figure out how to swing. You’re watching a new visual language snap into place.



Still, none of the style would matter if there weren’t actual people underneath it. Jake Johnson’s voice work as the older, frayed Peter B. Parker is quietly perfect. He spent years playing the charming burnout on *New Girl*, and he brings that same worn-out, sweatpants energy here. His voice sounds rough and heavy, like a man who has been flattened by life a few too many times and never fully got back up. He gives Peter this sense of physical drag, like regret has actual weight. When he talks to Miles, there’s warmth in there, sure, but mostly there’s the sense that he badly needs a nap. I’m still fairly sure he sighs halfway through entire conversations.

If I have one real gripe, it’s that the movie occasionally gets snagged on the scale of its own ambition. The climax inside Kingpin’s spinning, kaleidoscopic super collider falls back on the same world-ending light show that drags down so many Marvel finales. It is loud. Very loud. And for stretches, the more fragile emotional thread between Miles and his father gets buried under all that noise. I’m not convinced the giant laser-beam machinery had to be there, but maybe that’s the toll for making a studio blockbuster.



Even so, those problems register as little more than smears on an otherwise astonishing canvas. The film’s central idea, that anyone can wear the mask, lands without a trace of cynicism. *The New York Times* critic A.O. Scott wrote that the film "accomplishes this without awkwardness, preening or preaching," and that nails it. The movie never stops to insist that Miles belongs. It simply gives him the space to prove it. In a genre crowded with gods, geniuses, and billionaires, *Into the Spider-Verse* makes a stronger case for something simpler: the most extraordinary thing a person can do is become themselves.