Spider
Man: Into the Spider-Verse war
written in part by Phil Lord. This man has been instrumental in
bringing to prominence a very 2010s subgenre of movies. Previous
examples of his work are 21 Jump Street
and the Lego Movie.
What these movies have in common is a consciousness of previous
source material that goes
beyond being meta and continues into a weird quirking of the
"suspension of disbelief". These movies are insisting that
a fake universe is real to its characters and that the fake reality
rules should apply instead of real reality rules. A
good example is Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle,
whereby the characters are sucked into a video game and realize the
world they inhabit is not governed by physics or biology but video
game rules.
You
wouldn't think that should work
in a dramatic sense because when anything is possible, there should
be no stakes or suspense. But
the rules have kind of changed in the last twenty years, in part by
gamer culture (which I will speak of later) and in part by a TV show
named Community.
(Obviously there are a million different threads that produce
culture, but I do feel this show must have been instrumental).
Community introduced a
character named Abed who was so ingrained in the workings of genre
storytelling that he could
seemingly predict what would
happen in the very
TV episode he was in. Other characters would chide Abed that reality
wasn't like a TV show, but they would generally be proven wrong
becuase they were characters
in a TV show. Over-time, Community
became less a TV show about what characters did in
certain situations, and more
about how already
established
characters would react if
they found themselves in a completely different TV genre. That is the
situations didn't change in Community.
The TV show's genre, and thus the cliche genre rules, changed.
This
type of storytelling
probably wouldn't be possible without something like gamer culture.
By that I mean, the ability for an entire audience of people to have
spent more time studying the rules of a fake universes to the point where it might make sense for
a story to be using different rules of realty. I guess you could
trace this back to J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-Earth, the enormity and
details of which were so developed that the place became real
in the imagination. Nowadays, vast landscapes of fantasy come out
every couple of months. Much of this can be crowd-sourced, with
different people contributing their own stories.
Think of the expansiveness of the Star-Wars Universe. These are not simply movies. There are dozens of novels and several 30-50 hour video games. Wookieepedia, the StarWars encyclopedia has granular descriptions of various races, planets, languages, specifications of different weapons and vehicles. There are historians of these fake universes who
curate online encyclopedias and obsess over what is canon, a
mind-boggling absurd notion that tries to differentiate the
fake-actual events from the fake-fake events of a completely fictional storyline.
But
amazingly, if the universe becomes detailed enough, its
reality can become something approaching real and
drama/pathos/humor can be derived from it. Spider-Man: Into
the Spiderverse is such an
example. Now you know this story as this movie will explain to you at
least six separate times. Peter
Parker was an unassuming teenager from Queens, New York. He was
bitten by a radioactive spider and became Spider-Man, a friendly
neighborhood crime-fighter who works as a photographer for the Daily
Bugle and falls in love with his highschool sweethear Mary Jane. He
has a particularly good origin story that involves a beloved uncle
that counsels him the "with great power comes great
responsibility" and whose death occurs because of Peter's
inaction. The original Spider-Man story has been told three times
already in the last twenty years, first with Tobey Maguire, than with
Andrew Garfield, and currently with Tom Holland in the main role. (As
a NY Times critic pointed out, Spider-Man's defining characteristic
is his youth, thus he must remain forever young, and thus the many
reboots). Over the last sixty years, there have apparently been many
spinoffs and satires of this story. In this movie, all of those
universes merge.
The
science is hazy but goes something like this: Every version of
Spider-Man that has been created in any comic book or movie lives
concurrently but in different universes. A bad guy named KingPin is
creating a big machine underneath Brooklyn that will meld this
multiverse. Spider-Man (the original Peter Parker) tries to stop him
but gets sucked into the machine. This sucks the other versions of
him into the original universe. Now instead of one Spider-Man, there
are at least six.
I
had no idea how
out-of-hand this universe had become. Apparently, none of these characters are original to this movie. But we've got Miles Morales, teenager from
Brooklyn. Gwen Stacey, best friend of Spider-Man who becomes
Spider-Girl after Spider-Man's death, Peter B. Parker the middle-aged
version of Spider-Man recently divorced and out of shape (voiced by
Jake Johnson), Spider-Man Noir a black-and-white private detective
Spider-Man from the 1930s (voiced by Nicholas Cage), Penni Parker, an
anime japanese school-girl from the year 3100 who utilizes a
Spider-Man robot, and finally, the one and only Peter Porker,
Spider-Ham, a cartoon spider who was bitten by a radioactive pig, works for the Daily Beagle, and can float through the air
while smelling a delicious pie (voiced by John Mulaney).
Visually,
the movie is very impressive as it utlizes all of the different
animation styles from the various Spidermen in the same movie.
Animation, especially computer animation, makes for great action
sequences, and this movie is very impressive in that capacity too.
The heart of the story belongs to Miles Morales who we see gaining
his powers, going through the tribulations of high school, and losing
his beloved uncle. Certain stories are special to us. "If it was never new, and it never
gets old, it's a folk song" says Llewyn Davis in Inside
Llewyn Davis. This too applies
to Spider-Man.
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