When I first started to see advertising for Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse I assumed it was like one of those animated made for DVD superhero movies only they pored a little more money into it and decided to throw in theaters as a cash grab. This Spider-Man movie is something more, in fact it won the Utah Film Critics Association Awards for Best Picture, Best Animated Picture, and Best Screenplay. Spider-Verse is a liberated film, fond of what came before but not beholden to it, both freer and more self aware then an MCU offering, truer to the spirit and aesthetics of comic books, smartly written for adults, visually inventive for children, a good fit for Utah. The plot concerns multiple universe iterations of Spider-Man converging on one universe as a result of inter-dimensional experiments conducted by Kingpin and Doc Ock,
Young Miles Morales (Shameik Moore), an Afro-Latino teenager recently bitten by a radioactive spider is our principle Spider-Man, while alternates include Gwen Stacey (Hailee Steinfeld), a middle aged Spider-Man (Jake Johnson), a black and white film noir Spider-Man (Nicolas Cage), and a couple of others including a cartoon pig. It's a bizarre premise, but its fun and it works. Good voice cast also includes Mahershala Ali, Zoë Kravitz, Chris Pine and Lily Tomlin as Aunt May. This Spider-Man movie at first seems like it shouldn't be much of anything but really succeeds on all fronts, and brings a freshness to one of the most overused properties of contemporary Hollywood, this is the 9th theatrical film to feature Spider-Man this century. Stay for the post credit sequence its as weird and unexpected as what came before. ****
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