[8.8/10] The cliche for any sequel is “more”. Take what the audience liked from the first installment and just keep piling it on. On the surface, you could mistake Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse as suffering from the same pathology.
Its predecessor, Into the Spider-Verse had seven spider-people. Across the Spider-Verse has a hundred. Into the Spider-Verse gave us a glimpse of a handful of alternate realities. Across the Spider-Verse spends meaningful time in scads of them. Into the Spider-Verse clocked in at less than two hours. Across the Spider-Verse spills twenty minutes over that benchmark and demands another outing to finish its story. To the casual observer, this surfeit of cinematic real estate and the spider-beings who occupy it could be mistaken for second-installment bloat.
Except that Across the Spider-Verse is not mere excess. It is, insead, redolent with added ambition. Its predecessor stunned with a distinctive, cel-shaded art style, occasionally pierced by denizens with more anime or Looney Tunes-inspired aesthetics. Across the Spider-Verse elevates the visual brilliance to jaw-dropping, superlative levels.
Miles Morales’ cel-shaded digs return. But so too does Spider-Gwen’s watercolor world. The futuristic metropolis and impossible geometry of Spider-Man 2099’s headquarters. The parchment-styled weathering of a da Vinci-inspired Vulture. The bustling, South Asian-inspired environs of Spider-Man India. The Zine Queen cut out look of Spider-Punk. The transfixing and occasionally disturbing visage of The Spot as his form grows more and more frazzled and medium-defying the more interdimensional energy he absorbs. 2-D. 3-D. Stop Motion. Live action. Digital designs. Ink and paint creations. Comic panels. Old polygons. New pixels. The new Spider-Verse entry is a triumph of medium-blending glory where the milieu is part of the text and subtext and themes at the heart of the piece.
The same goes for the action. Into the Spider-Verse featured all manner of memorable sequences. Avatar: The Last Airbender veteran Joaquim Dos Santos is among the film’s co-directors, and it’s hard not to feel his influence as this follow-up feature ups the ante. Miles has a comical but brilliant “Now that’s thinking with portals” skirmish with The Spot. The omnibus all-comers spidey-fight is the pinnacle of arachnid spectacle it should be. The kinetic and frenetic energy, rife with medium-mixing action, remains a staple of the movie’s cinematic grammar.
But it’s just as winsome in quieter moments. The way the light brightens amid a hug between Gwen and her father. The way she and Miles share a peculiar perspective as they gaze upon the skyline of the city together. The look of pain in her and Peter B. Parker’s eyes when Miles learns the truth. There is an expressiveness, a commitment to using every last inch of every last frame to make you marvel and gasp and feel the meaning behind each moment through imagery alone that would be worth the price of admission even if Across had nothing else to offer.
Thankfully, it also has a plot that is remarkably ambitious and untroubled by traditional forms. Despite its multiversal bent, Into the Spider-Verse is a remarkably tight and focused film. That’s to its credit, taking a wild-eyed story, anchoring it in both the universal and the specific, and making it feel deceptively simple.
As a follow-up, Across the Spider-Verse is epic, multi-faceted, even messy. There are scores of moving parts. Two reintroductions and brief “While you were gone” recaps to orient the audience. All of space-time is at stake once again, but the solution is not as straightforward as stopping the big bad machine. It’s to resew the fabric of the universe as tears emerge in the wake of the last solution. The villain is an overlooked consequence of the first movie’s adventures swollen to eldritch horror proportions; and the villain is one of your own, sacrificing the noble principles that your kind are founded upon in the name of preserving the status quo; and the villain is...well...you, denied the good fortune and cosmic protection you inadvertently stole. Oh yeah, and it’s only part one.
Despite the scope, the movie never feels like too much or anything less than self-assured. There’s a lot going on here, narratively, personally, and thematically. But it all feels built to fit together, designed to build toward a greater whole, while embracing a complexity and ambition that few films are willing to entrust general audiences with.
Part of what keeps that kaleidoscopic plotting accessible and comprehensible is that it’s always grounded in the emotions and psychology of the characters. This is, on the surface, a story about myriad reflections of the Web-Head crashing down on one another. But it is, at heart, about two adolescents struggling with their relationships with their parents as they try to “find their tribe” and their place in the world as budding adults.
The great claim-to-fame of the original Spider-Man comics was that Peter Parker was a hero who fought colorful bad guys on rooftops, but who also had real problems like family and rent, just like you. Across the Spider-Verse carries on that spirit. Amid the reality-shifting dramatics, the film is spurred by Gwen suffering when her loving father learns her true identity and recoils. And it’s spurred by Miles wanting to grow up and grow away from his loving but enveloping parents, so he can venture off and find a community that he thinks will understand him and help him to follow his dreams.
The circumstances are extreme. But the conversations between parents and children are real. There’s an almost shocking verisimilitude -- borne by writing, performance, and animation in concert -- to the back and forths between Gwen and Captain Stacy, and between Miles, Jeff, and Rio. The tone of being reluctant to accept the love of someone you worry won’t fully accept you. The frustration of failing to live up to your parents’ standards while still trying to define your own. That definitively Spider-Man quality of feeling as though you’re trying so hard and still letting everybody down. Peer down into the bottom of this film, and you will find truth, gushing out of each frame as much as the aesthetic glory.
You can feel it in the way Gwen and Miles relate to one another, two kids on unique journeys who feel like the world doesn’t understand them. You can feel it in the words of parents like Jeff, Rio, Captain Stacy, and a gloriously returning Peter B. Parker, who think the world of these kids but worry about their future and how to keep them on the right path. And you can feel it in that universal, youthful sense of longing for a new adventure worthy of the new you, and in the equal and opposite chastening that can come when you realize it’s not always less complicated or as warm as the comforts of home.
This is an epic film, full of big ideas. But it never floats away or gets lost amid its own dizzying scale. Because it keeps those real feelings at the center of everything it sets out to achieve.
Those ideas give the movie ballast though. The premise of the film is that Gwen has joined an interdimensional “Spider Society” whose mission is to repair the anomalies caused by Kingpin’s collider in the first film. The twist is that Miles cannot join her there, because he is, in many ways, the original anomaly. His spider bite came from an arachnid meant for another universe. He wasn’t meant to be Spider-Man.
The reveal works on so many levels. There is great power in making the practical and emotional obstacle of the piece a statement to a mixed race child that they don’t belong. He receives nothing but rejection from a community he thought would accept him, because of what he is rather than who he is. In a film with people of color prominently in front of and behind the “camera”, that comes with a particular resonance.
To the same end, there is a meta commentary on the nature of Miles as a character and his place in the broader Spider-Man media franchise. Considering the real life racist backlash to the fancasting of Donald Glover as Spidey (which gets a nod in the form of his cameo as MCU Prowler), it’s easy to read those sentiments about him as being an aberration or a mistake in the light of fans who rejected Miles because he wasn’t Peter, because he was Black and Latino, because he didn’t fit all of the standard tropes that had been cranked out for Spidey across hundreds of projects.
I trust the rebuke of these things will come in time, but textualizing the backlash Miles’ champions have had to fight in real life, with the same sentiment Miles must combat in a fictional one, dovetails with the sharp meta commentary that has come with these films to date.
And last, but not least, it’s worth noting that at the core of the dispute between Miles, who wants to chart his own path apart from both mom and dad and the Spider Society, and Miguel O’Hara, its ostensible leader who wants to repair the foundations of the multiverse, is characterized as a dispute over “preserving canon.”
There’s a striking notion baked into that framing. The film posits that certain events that have recurred across time and mediums for Spider-Man -- things like a mentor perishing, the death of a noble captain, and other iconic Web-Head moments -- are fixed points in any Spider-Man story. They must occur, lest the bounds of reality be shattered and everything be lost in their wake.
In a less complex film, that could be taken as the bare oppression of conformity (one sure to be dismissed reflexively by Hubie Brown, the film’s infectiously entertaining anti-authority punk Web-Head). More to the point, it dovetails with themes of established gatekeepers telling a mixed race child that the status quo must be maintained, and comics purists rejecting alternate takes on the traditional (mostly white) vision of Spider-Man.
But the purveyors of these ideas are not facile straw men. They are, for one thing, Miles’ friends. The thing that spurs Miles to resist is the sense that this adherence to canon means his soon-to-be-promoted-to-captain father must die. Peter B. Parker makes the case, one made in countless Spider-Man works before, that loss is difficult, but that it helps spur Spider-people to be who they need to be, to accept the responsibility that comes with the great power and be a force for good in the world.
As much as he is the film’s antagonist, Miguel O’Hara is a poster child for someone who tried to disrupt that idea, and lost everything in the process. He lost his family, and pulled a Rick and Morty (whose influence is keenly felt here) by hopping into another universe where his alt-reality equivalent died to take his place. The rush of images we see suggest the universe rejected him like a human body rejecting a new organ, and the whole world, including the daughter he wanted so desperately to reunite with, was lost. He has walked the path of putting your own happiness and desires above “the way things must be”, and he’s seen the consequence.
More than that, the shocking tease at the end of the film is a clever depositing of Miles into the universe whose spider he inadvertently stole. He sees the consequences of a world without a Spider-Man. He sees the hardship and misery, for his family and for his community, that his own self-actualization is accidentally built on. These are not easy things to reject or ignore, but rather strong counterbalances to our natural sympathies for Miles.
And still, despite that, there remains great sympathy for the defiers of canon. Much remains to be explored and vindicated in the forthcoming third film in the series. But signs point to validating our heroes even if they stray from the usual or accepted arachnid touchpoints. If Into the Spider-Verse seemed designed to prove that anyone could be legitimate as Spider-Man so long as they take in his ideals and refuse to give up; the two follow-ups seem poised to suggest that you can, in fact, chart your own path away from what has always been, and be no less valid, no less real, no less worthy.
The other main poles of the story exemplify that. The delightful-turned-horrifying Spot is a “villain of the week” determined to flip the script and become a true nemesis and fearsome destroyer of worlds. Spider-Gwen is a version of a character who is, in the vaunted canon, meant to be one of those tragic losses that wounds the Web-Head but ultimately sharpens his resolve; and she is, instead, the hero who lost him and decides to keep going. And Miles is an accident, someone who became Spider-Man by happenstance and deviation rather than by inertia or fate, who nonetheless validates his place in the silky firmament of arachnid tales with each choice he takes to vindicate the good they fight for, and the good in himself, whether or not it fits with what came before.
To encompass all of this in one-hundred and forty minutes is remarkable. To try to accomplish it in double that time still seems like a lot. But as kinsmen like Everything Everywhere All at Once (which receives a small shout-out here) demonstrates, there is great transcendence to be had in weaving together text and metatext and character and commentary and stunning visual acumen into a greater whole.
Across the Spider-Verse is certainly that too. It is a worthy successor to the 2018 film, maintaining the same comic air, remixing energy, and emotional depth. But it also raises the bar, letting its palette, its ideas, its characters expand and grow more complex with the added mandate and leeway that comes with such a success. The creative team behind the film have arrived with something that does not simply go for more. It goes achingly deeper, jaw-droppingly wider, and poignantly further than anything we’ve seen before.
[9.2/10] There are parts of Barbie that aren’t for me. I am a guy. A “Ken” to use the film’s own lingo. I don’t know what it’s like to be a woman. I don't know what it’s like to face those challenges myself. So much of the film is about that experience, both the idealized version that Barbieland represents, and the sometimes harsh reality of it our unwitting doll protagonist crashes into in the real world. I can appreciate some of those things secondhand, and even be compelled by them, but they’re not going to resonate with me the same way they will for someone who’s been through it.
There are parts of Barbie that are very much for me as a guy. As someone whose high school Xanga page used to autoplay “Push” by Matchbox 20, some of the comedic tweaks of masculinity hit a little too close to home. I’ve waxed rhapsodic about The Godfather ad nauseam. I’ve played music “at” girls I liked. And more seriously, in my wayward youth, I treated romantic partners like a solution to my problems rather than ends unto themselves. The film’s playful jabs, and its more serious critiques, are on point, and will resonate even if you’re the target of them.
There are parts of Barbie that are for me as someone who simply appreciates when a film has a distinctive look and feel all its own. Director/co-writer/three-for-three visionary Greta Gerwig and her collaborators construct an incredible world for their title character. Translating a doll’s playspace for the big screen could easily go terribly awry. But their realization of Barbieland is stunning in how vibrant and creative it feels. Everything from the layout of Barbie’s neighborhood, to the movements of the characters, to the texture of the ground give this unique realm a tremendous sense of place. The details big and small are a brilliant example of how to blend the realism of modern film with the bizarre but endearing unreality of such a specific setting.
There are parts of Barbie that are for me as a lover of out there, postmodern camp. WIth that locale comes the wild cosmology of the film: a neat mishmash of a land of imagination crashing into the problems of modern life, of spritely cartoon characters finding unexpected cracks in their paradise, of goofy figures playing their roles to the hilt without a hint of irony, and of a wide-ranging satire that spoofs the gendered elements of society and the peculiar quirks of a toy box world at the same time. Bright colors, wild schemes, beachside battles, song-and-dance numbers, wide-eyed characters, undeniable weirdos, all wrapped in a candy-coated shell. If Barbie hadn't already dominated the box office, it would be destined to be a cult classic.
And as that box office take suggests, here are parts of Barbie that are for anyone. I’d argue they’re the most important parts. I may not know what it’s like to be a woman. But I know what it’s like to grow up. Beyond the gender critiques that swirl around the film, this is, first and foremost, a story about steadily realizing that the world is bigger, more challenging, and more complicated than the ones we perceived and imagined as children.
Through a nigh-magical bond with the young woman who played with her, our protagonist, Stereotypical Barbie, starts to think about death. She starts to feel existential dread. She deals with stress and fear and unease and even (gasp) cellulite. The most piercing aspect of Gerwig’s third feature is how it uses the doll’s awakening conceit to analogize both the humbling, terrifying broadening of perspective we get as we grow up, and the generational motion sickness we get from looking back at what enchanted us, what inspired us, when we were younger.
In that, Barbie is insightful. It is hilarious. It is delightful. It is inventive as all hell. And it is deeply profound.
What’s doubly impressive about all this is that the call is coming from inside the house. If Gerwig, for example, made a thinly-veiled “Malibu Stacy” movie, we’d praise it as subversive. Somehow, though, this is an official branded release that deconstructs and reconstructs the gender politics that Barbie reinforced and then evolved with, that satirizes the Mattel Corporation itself (headed here by one of Will Ferrell’s trademark manchildren characters), takes square aim at the patriarchy, and uses the existence of genitalia to symbolize self-actualization. To convince the powers that be to cosign such a transgressive take on a beloved icon is an achievement beyond the art itself.
How could the suits say no to talent like that though. With her Oscar-nominated pedigree, Gerwig brings the same reimagining virtuosity and millennial vanguard she showed off in Little Women. Margot Robbie simply is Barbie, embodying the blithely joyous icon, and then nailing the subtle and shattering changes that came as she slowly feels the weight of the world beyond her shores. Ryan Gosling nearly steals the show with his committedly weird, blithely blinkered, and yet somehow pathos-ridden take on Ken. Comedy vets like Kate McKinnon and Michael Cera bring wry laughs in perfect casting as “Weird Barbie” and just plain “Alan” respectively. And the diversity of the denizens in Barbie’s world is plus that aids in the sense that damn near everyone here is perfectly cast, no matter how big or small the role.
Despite its incredible successes, the film is not perfect. In places, it feels unfocused. Barbie strives to cover a lot of thematic ground in less than two hours. As a result, even though it remains stellar on a scene-to-scene basis, sometimes it comes off disjointed as a whole. While many of its criticisms are right on target, some feel like the male equivalent of “bitches be shoppin’”-style observations. That sense of caricature in some sequences fits the heightened tone of the film, but can seem comparatively shallow to the movie’s more incisive critiques and observations. Late in the film, those critiques and observations start arriving in what amounts to a few blunt spoken essays, rather than arising organically from the situation.
And yet, this is a film of great nuance. Despite the sense of Ken as a blithe, patriarchy promoting dope, the script has genuine sympathy for him, and even uses him to explore gendered marginalization in the context of Barbieland. It plays in the space of motherhood, examining the challenges and expectations that can drive parents and children apart but also the beauty and understanding that brings them back together. It manages to encompass nearly every part of the conversation around Barbie, while also internalizing them to one person’s journey of self-discovering in a way that feels surprisingly natural.
That comes from the sheer boldness and ambition of the story. A doll “malfunctioning” from her owner’s existential quandaries, barging into the real world and coming back shaken by it, with layers of meta commentary and Charlie Kaufman-esque recursive self-reflection, is a hell of a thing to try, let alone pull off with flying (mostly pink) colors the way Gerwig does.
What holds it all together is the way this story comes down to Barbie herself as a protagonist. After psychological tugs and troubles that are a metaphor for the growing, scary understanding we all develop over time, Barbie breaks down. She’s ready to give up in the face of it. She’s lifted up by someone who gives voice to the challenges and contradictions, but in the end, after this enlightenment, isn’t sure what she wants.
The conceit of making her creator a godlike figure, there to bless her and open doors for her, is one of the film’s canniest choices. In Rhea Perlman’s pitch perfect rendition of Barbie inventor Ruth Handler, Barbie has a mother, one who symbolizes the goal not just of feminism, but for all parents -- to try to make the lives of their children a little safer, a little kinder, a little better than theirs were.
So Ruth gives her child the gift of vision, a chance to see and feel the breadth of experiences that await her if she leaves the safety of Barbieland and a safe childhood view of the world, and trades it for the world of adulthood, with all of its terrors and pitfalls, but also a waterfall of joys, fellowship, and wonders. That closing sequence, set to Billie Eilish’s “What Was I Made For?”, is the bravura crescendo of the film that surprised and moved me.
It is a cinematic showpiece to capture, well, life, and beyond that, the sublime, terrifying choice to embrace that complex array of experiences, good and bad, that await you. To accept that, to countenance the overwhelming scope of existence, knowing that it will overtake you and that it will end, is an act of profound courage, and a gobsmacking thing to successfully convey on the silver screen.
No matter who you are, you feel that plight. You feel that awe. You feel the spiritual catharsis of a doll who knowingly becomes a person, and scarier yet, a grown-up, with all that comes with both. You feel the hardship and hope of choosing to live in a messy and imperfect world and to be messy and imperfect. And that part of Barbie is for everyone.
With each passing film of his, I’m further convinced that Don Hertzfeldt holds the key to achieving world peace & prosperity.
While his sci-fi short World of Tomorrow studied the flawed nature of the mere implementation of artifically prolonged lifespans, its sequel examines the broken inner substance and processes of the clones who so listlessly prolong them. This film’s scope is comparatively broader than the first, infusing its backdrops with a more intricate, semi-naturalistic flourish and profoundly expanding its introspections of the human condition through the eyes of its ever so entranced child subject, whose abstracted reactions to the unfolding existential dread around her prove an ideally snug comic foil for her new escort’s deadpan nuance. She, Emily’s sixth generation clone, is plagued with cautionary flaws that prompt the painfully destructive consequences merely hinted at before: showing a perverse attachment to the inanimate and an inability to both recall memories experienced by generations previous as well as wholly execute their dreams and ambitions...nor can she achieve her own.
In essence, with each new clone, its character and experiences are further diluted by the confines of repetition. Only within the sole, truly living subject can a human exercise its unlimited reaches of imagination, adventure, and empathy; Hertzfeldt further validates this truth with a somber irony, presenting the child’s human experience as something toured and sightseen by the living copies who’re in need to reminisce.
Hertzfeldt also reveals a second thematic thread through Emily’s advertent actions and the inadvertent realizations it triggers in her clone: the importance of releasing the past and celebrating the opportunities of the present...and furthermore, cherishing and respecting all of those blessed to share that present with us, whether a lifelong companion, a measly spider on the wall, or a deranged radical, for just like you, they’re embracing their only chance at life. Our experiences may be separate, but the song is shared together.
And, oh, what a happy song it is!
[9.4/10] A good mystery has to do a lot to be, well, good. It has to have a satisfying answer to the “whodunnit” question. But that answer can’t be too predictable or the audience won’t have the thrill of following along. But it also can’t be too out of left field or it will feel like a cheat. So any mystery writer has to balance including enough setups and clues to where the payoff feel earned, but so many that the solution feels obvious or pre-ordained.
But there should also be something more at the heart of the mystery than just the answer to who the killer is. The answer should reveal something deeper about the story, about its major players, about the why and the who behind the mystery. In short, there should be...well...a good donut hole inside the smaller donut inside the larger donut.
Knives Out does it all with flying colors. Its mystery succeeds like clockwork. Writer-director Rian Johnson (of The Last Jedi fame) sets up every little detail to perfection. He lays out his suspects and their motives, establishes the victim and the investigators, and doles out subtle hints at just the right intervals to keep the audience guessing, but informed enough to craft their own theories and follow along.
But he also imbues all that mystery machinery with a larger theme that meshes perfectly with the ecosystem and the family he’s created. On a pure story level, that comes down to rewarding the person who works hard, who acts with kindness and altruism even when it could rip their lives apart, while the people who claim to be her betters are a hypocritical bunch who were born on third base and think they’ve hit a triple. But on a social level, it’s about the same hypocrisy in how we treat immigrants, in how people of every persuasion treat someone they think they’re above, how that treatment shifts markedly when it conflicts with their self-interest, and how that immigrant’s hard work, decency, and above all selflessness makes her more worthy than all the scratching, clawing simps she’s father above than she realizes.
But rather than devolving into didactic sequences to communicate these ideas, Johnson does it all with style and with good humor. Even for a murder mystery that mostly occurs within a single house, Johnson, cinematographer Steve Yedlin, and their superb team bring so much visual flair to the picture. Even before anyone’s said a word, the autumnal feel of the piece and the august old manor establish a sense of tone and place within the world of Knives Out.
Once the movie kicks into gear, that aesthetic virtuosity remains. Johnson and Yedlin set up any number of Wes Anderson-esque tableaus, arranging all the major players in a series of expressive group shots. The scene where the Thrombeys descend on Marta conveys the overwhelming chaos of the scene by switching to steadicam and putting us into the suddenly jostled world that the poor girl’s been thrust into. And the sequence where a faux-affable Walt all but advances on Marta, with the thump of his cane and his first tightening around its handle, communicates the intimidation at play.
Despite those moments of fear, and the tension that permeates the film almost from the jump, Knives Out is a rollicking good time. For as much as the movie is a taut mystery and broader sociopolitical commentary, it’s also an eminently fun laugh riot. Johnson knows when to puncture the tension with a big laugh, and bolstered by Daniel Craig’s performance of a colorful Hercule Poirot by way of Frank Underwood, he’s able to make his characters poignant, menacing, or hilarious on a dime.
But he also knows how to deploy them nigh-perfectly in his well-crafted whodunnit. Johnson and company structure and pace their film brilliantly. The opening act lulls you into thinking you know who the obvious suspects and likely motives for the murder of the Thrombey patriarch are. But then he turns the mystery on its ear, showing the audience exactly, and in elegant detail, how he died and who killed him. The opening police interviews turn out to just be a smart way to introduce these characters and establish their place within Harlan Thrombey’s world.
From there, we follow the tension of the knowledge that Marta is the murderer, but also enlisted to help Benoit Blanc discoverer who the murderer is. The devices that Johnson uses in that effort -- Marta’s lie-related nausea, Harlan’s mystery novel-writer expertise in fooling the authorities, the extra question of who hired Blanc -- all heighten the fun and the twisty excitement as the case progresses. This is, laudably, Marta’s story, and the way her position change, from bystander to inadvertent murderer to overwhelmed patsy to triumphant hero, is aided by the different ways the mystery bends around her.
But the most striking of all if the way that both friend and foe turn against her once it’s revealed that she stands to inherit Harlan’s entire estate. Even including the intricately-crafted mystery, it’s Knives Out best twist. Johnson spends so much of the first act accounting for the different ways the various Thrombeys treat Marta, from dismissive to patronizing to seemingly embracing and understanding. But the second that her financial interest seems to run counter to theirs, every one of them, even and especially the ones who seemed to be decent and kind to her, immediately view her as an interloper denying them of what’s rightfully theirs.
That’s powerful. Johnson and his team build a mystery that unfolds spectacularly, with twists and turns to keep the viewer on the edge of their seat, small clues that add up to big reveals, and variations on the usual form that make it both thrilling and seamless. And yet, it’s biggest strength lies in what the answers to the mystery novel questions Knives Out asks say about the answers to the societal questions it asks in kind.
Johnson’s film is populated with people who believe they are self-made, who built themselves from the ground up, but who are (with one notable exception), entirely hangers on to someone who truly rose to the top of his field through hard work. It’s that kind soul who recognizes his equal and successor not in the slew of self-siding progeny jockeying for position against one another (whom he “cuts loose” to wean them of their dependency), but in the one person they all consider themselves better-than. The Thrombey’s all think themselves superior by dint of birth and by right, but it’s the young woman who, through the good character, industriousness, and decency none of them possesses, proves herself smarter and more worthy than any of them to inherit his fortune, and his legacy. And that makes for one hell of a mystery.
[8.8/10] I’m currently watching my fifth consecutive Spider-Man animated series. From the 1990s cartoon that I grew up on, to the Ultimate Spider-Man series that ended in 2017, Marvel and its licensees gave us five versions of the web-head in different forms. Some kept Spidey in New York, others sent him off into space. Some made him an untested kid in high school, others made him an accomplished young adult in college. Some narrowed Spidey’s world to a focused ecosystem of characters and conflicts and others expanded to encompass the whole of the Marvel universe.
But all of them starred Peter Parker as Spider-Man. And in the process of repeat adaptation, they can’t help but prompt the question -- what makes Spider-Man who he is? What is the connective tissue that makes all of these adaptations of a piece and recognizable as stories about the same character? Is it just the suit, or the web-slinging, or the quips, or is it something deeper than that?
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse aims to answer that question with Miles Morales, the Afro-Latino teenager from Brooklyn who took over the Spider-Man mantle in the “Ultimate” line of Marvel comics. Miles shares some of Peter’s qualities -- he’s young, he’s bright, he’s uncertain. But he also has his unique elements: his two loving parents, his being torn between two sides of his family, and the different culture he is a part of and represents. He is familiar to anyone who’s followed the Spider-Man character for years and years in his endearing efforts to figure out both his normal life and his superheroic one, and his youthful awkwardness and uncertainty at it, but he’s also distinct from the raft of Peter Parkers who’ve graced both the big and small screen in the last two decades.
And most importantly, this is his story. Into the Spider-Verse uses its combo-breaking protagonist and its parallel universe-hopping plot to ask the broader question of what makes a Spider-Man (or -Gwen or -Ham). But it is first and foremost a story about a young man being pulled in two different directions by the father he loves and the uncle he admires, about resolving the differences between the place that can help lift him up and the place he came from, about figuring out not just who Spider-Man is, but who you are, when everything’s counting on you.
Strip away the spidey-sense and supervillains. Strip away the interuniversal mashup and the flash and fury. At heart, Into the Spider-Verse is a coming of age tale for arguably the most compelling young protagonist the superhero genre has offered in a long time. And while it is yet another cape flick origin story -- something the film itself pokes fun at -- it has the smarts to make it much less about how a budding hero gets his superpowers, and much more about how a teenage boy decides who he wants to be.
That’s aided by the style of the film, which works in concert with the substance. The term “comic book movie” is thrown around willy-nilly to describe any cape movie (including by yours truly) but this is the first one to truly earn the designation. The entire film exudes the bumpy texture and tropes of the medium to firmly cement the movie as emerging, fully-formed, from the comic pages. It’s a tack that’s particularly effective when Miles gains his spider powers, and the prominence of thought bubbles and whirly onomatopoeia take over to cement the fact that something serious has shifted here. Honestly, you could halt the movie at around the half hour mark and still have a tidy and encouraging tale about Miles discovering his abilities that would work as its own thing and leave you hungry for more.
But that would deprive us of the ensuing hour of superheroic flash and fun. Into the Spider-Verse is a joy to watch, with kinetic, color-bursting action that captures the ebb and flow of Spider-Man’s balletic grace through the skies better than any adaptation to date. The stylized approach to character design and animation gives the whole movie a distinctive flavor from the first glance to the final scene. And the way the movie blends art styles to help connote the ways in which this is a crossover between Spider Men and Women from across the multiverse is funny and fantastic.
The films boasts almost as many web-heads per capita as a Spidey-themed Where’s Waldo book, but it works in the movie’s favor. Whether it’s the black and white stylings of Spider-Man Noir, the anime-influenced presence of Peni Parker, or the Looney Tunes-aping insanity of Spider-Man, one look at the horde of Spider-people on screen tells you what’s afoot.
At the same time, the film sketches out its supporting characters with complete arcs. A spider-powered Gwen stacy has tentative but inevitable romantic chemistry with Miles, but is a capable and vital part of the action, and slowly overcomes her reluctance to build friendships after what happened in her home universe. At the same time, an older Peter Parker from another world joins the fray to give us the “after” of the traditional Spider-Man to Miles’s “before.” There’s real juice in seeing a potbellied, battle-weary, and cynical Spider-Man being forced to rediscover his ideals through the eyes of someone who looks up to him (or, at least, a version of him), and needs him as a mentor. And the way the film not only reconstructs one Spider-Man in the background while it’s building up another for the first time, while baking in a story of growing comfortable with having children, is nigh-masterful.
But in the end, apart from the eye-catching art and dimension-spanning guest stars, Into the Spider-Verse is about Miles, and that’s where it’s the most engrossing. The film constantly draws a contrast between the life Mile’s policeman father wants for him, and the rougher-edged existence his black sheep Uncle has cut out for himself, with the freedom and style that Miles envies while trapped in his midtown magnet school existence. It depicts Miles as inherently uncertain, before and after he has the ability to stick to walls. He is undeniably capable of great things, something his family members and reluctant mentors all agree on. But he doesn't know what shape that’s supposed to take, how to be what he’s expected to be or who he means to be.
Then, through heart-rending but heartening trial and tragedy, he finds out. Into the Spider-Verse signposts it a little too heavily for my tastes, but with the encouragement of his uncle, the acceptance of his father, Miles finds his own path, his own style, that’s the true-to-oneself harmonization of the best that’s been passed on to him, from man and Spider-Man alike. He has his father’s inherent goodness and sense of doing what’s right, with his uncle’s talent for improvisation and determination, and his own creative spark that drives him to put his own signature on each move and choice he makes. The best part of Into the Spider-Verse comes not only from when our hero truly becomes Spider-Man; it comes from when he fully and firmly becomes confident, caring, self-actualized Miles Morales he wants to be.
With that, Into the Spider-Verse answers its animating question. In a preemptive strike against those who would claim that someone who doesn't share Peter Parker’s name, or his skin color, cannot be Spider-Man, it posits that the things that made the character so indelible through fifty years of stories go beyond moniquers or melanin. Through Miles’s journey, and his other universe counterparts, it declares that being Spider-Man requires facing down tragedy and knowing the pain of loss but having it embolden you toward justice rather than driving you to madness and cruelty like it does for the film’s villains. It means learning to trust yourself and what you’re capable of even when that tentativeness and uncertainty hangs over you like a cloud that you just have to thwip or leap your way through.
And most of all, persevering, getting up when you’re knocked down, and deciding not to quit. Time again, Miles is pushed back, beaten down, and all-around inclined to just give up. It’s the quality that inspires the most doubt, in his father, in his wall-crawling colleagues, and in himself. But when he overcomes it, when he finds himself and learns to believe in his own potential, he also refuses to stay down.
That’s the central idea of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. The film was preceded by five decades’ worth of Spider-Man adaptations in scores of different mediums, and it will almost certainly be followed by five decades’ more. What unites these varying takes on the character, what makes them true and right and real despite their differences, is that indefatigable quality each of them shares, despite setting or style or sobriquet. And Miles Morales gives shape to that lesson, straining and striving to become Spider-Man, and becoming himself in the process.
[9.2/10] Throw away the past. The rap on The Force Awakens was that it was too derivative, too indebted to A New Hope and the blueprint that had started the franchise. There was a sense that the new trilogy needed to break new ground, that having established the new setting, the new characters, and the new conflicts and mysteries, it was time to break from what had come before.
You could be forgiven for thinking that the film’s main characters share that sentiment. Kylo Ren states it explicitly. He pushes Rey to do the same while she labors under the weight of her unknown parentage. And Luke Skywalker himself, the Jedi Master who won the day in those lodestone films that forever emblazoned Star Wars into the annals of culture, has written off his past deeds, and with them, the Jedi as a whole, as a legacy of failure that needs to simply end.
But it cannot, and should not. Where The Force Awakens featured new heroes reliving the past, The Last Jedi features them remaking it. It is a film devoted to embracing the power of that legacy, good and bad, without being beholden to it. Episode 8 a film that is of a piece with its forebears, but also so full of its own life, character, feeling, and awe.
The fear among the fandom is that, as the second installment in the new trilogy, The Last Jedi would be a mirror image of The Empire Strikes Back. (Though, as with the complaints of borrowing from A New Hope, there are worse sources to crib from!). There’s some of that here. As with Episode V, The Last Jedi splits up its heroes, leaving one of them in training with an old Jedi master on a distant planet, and the other on the run from the bad guys, until everyone is united in the end. There’s offers to rule the galaxy and reveals of who the protagonist’s true parents are and a less-than-savory character who seem like friends and then sell our heroes out.
But Episode VIII echoes the whole of the Original Trilogy in moving, thought provoking ways, not just the middle chapter of it. The film meditates (nigh-literally) on the most iconic image of the original Star Wars film -- Luke gazing off at the horizon in search of adventure. It features our light side hero being lured into the throne room of the Big Bad in the hopes of turning the black hat with the twinge of a conscience still remaining, just as Return of the Jedi did with Luke, Palpatine, and Vader. From blue milk to adorable forest-dwelling creatures to wizened masters passing into their next lives and leaving their robes behind, The Last Jedi is not so much reinterpreting The Empire Strikes Back as it is ruminating on all of Star Wars at once.
And yet what’s so striking about the film is that it’s so much more than a recapitulation of those films. It is, a celebration of them, a reflection on them, and an exploration of them, that advances and subverts those ideas and themes as much as it reintroduces them.
It takes the trigger-happy flyboy, the Han Solo-esque roguish type who, true to that lineage, shoots first and asks questions later, and tempers him with the reveal that the calm, measured leadership was a product of careful and clever planning rather than cowardice. It takes the Big Bad, the mysterious power behind the black-clad dragon who can shoot lightning and bark evil monologues, and kills him off suddenly halfway through the film rather than making him the final obstacle to be overcome.
And it takes the biggest mystery of this new trilogy, the question of who Rey’s parents are, that so many diehards and casual fans alike have been buzzing over, and delivers the most inspired subversion. Rather than Luke’s lost daughter or the Emperor’s scion or Kylo Ren’s forgotten twin, she is the product of nobodies, who sold her for drinking money. It’s a truth that deep down she always knew, but couldn’t accept, because like the audience, she assumed that for someone to have fate on their side, to be able to live a life with meaning, they must come from somewhere, from someone.
But that idea is, despite the Skywalker-mad connections of everything that followed, antithetical to the animating beginnings of Star Wars. Before it was decided that Luke was the son of Darth Vader, he was simply the son of some other guy named Anakin Skywalker. He was a nondescript moisture farmer on a backwater planet who was the last guy you’d expect to take down The Empire’s greatest weapon.
That’s what made his journey so powerful. He wasn’t The Chosen One in A New Hope. He was just a kid with unrealized potential who, with the right guidance and the right chance, could save the day. The Last Jedi returns its chosen one to those roots, to providence shining down on the common, that the savior of the galaxy can come from nothing.
It’s a reversion that’s anchored by the character dead set on rejecting his own longstanding anointment. Mark Hamill is a revelation here. Gone is the naive farm boy who whined about picking up power converters, and gone is the seasoned master who saved the world and redeemed his enemy, and in their place is haunted cynic, convinced he’s caused as many problems as he’s ever solved. There’s a caustic quality to the character here, one that makes him gruff and dismissive of Rey, fatalistic about the Jedi, and unquestionably angry at himself.
Where there was an cornbread innocence to the Luke we met on tatooine, The Last Jedi introduces his echo, a man who looks upon his accomplishments that have ascended into legend as false fables of failure, and the current blight sweeping the galaxy as a fault of his own that he cannot elide or escape. He’s done seeing the battle between the dark and the light, and instead sees the continuum between the two, the yin-yang like symbols that dot his surroundings and the film as a whole, the balance that leads light to breed darkness and darkness to breed light.
That sense of balance is at the heart of The Last Jedi. It comes between Rey and Kylo Ren, who feel a force-forged connection between the two of them that lets each see the other beyond the monolithic figures who stand in opposition to one another. It comes in Leia, who tries to find the midpoint between striking the blows necessary to stay in the fight and not losing too many of her compatriots in the process. And it comes in DJ, the Lando-like figure who rejects the good guy/bad guy dichotomy and sees the struggle between The Resistance and The First Order as the changing of the tides he’s unwilling to be swept up in.
It’s there that The Last Jedi feels the most reflective, even political, in ways deeper than the four-color civics parable told by The Prequels. It asks who benefits from these conflicts, who profits from them, and whether who’s on the right side and who’s on the wrong side can be so clear cut when Republics beget Empires, conquerors beget resistance, and slaughterers beget saviors who train yet more slaughterers. In all of the mythic good vs. evil that’s so much in the bones of Star Wars, Episode VIII steps back and dares to consider that conflict, that never ending cycle, as part of some larger, indifferent system rather than an epic journey toward salvation.
It also restores a sense of utter awe to the franchise. Johnson and cinematographer Steve Yedlin create thrilling, jaw-dropping sequences that rarely lose a sense of continuity, instead allowing even the more firework-heavy sequence to progress organically and tell a story rather than simply providing raw but empty splendor. When Leia glides through space to return to her ship, or Rey and Kylo Ren fight hand-to-hand with the Red Guards (who actually get to do something for once!), when our heroes and villains meet in crimson-dusted splendor in the final frame, Johnson and Yeldin show a virtuosity with big spectacle filmmaking to match the thematic and emotional resonance of the rest of their film.
But that spectacle never detracts from the feeling imbued into the film. Episode VIII is not merely a political tract. It’s not a heap of pretty but hollow action. It’s not even just a deconstruction and reconstruction of the films from whence it sprung. It’s a story populated by characters who love and hurt and feel.
There is power in the moment when Rey and Kylo Ren’s hands touch across light years not just as the meeting of lightness and the dark, but as a human connection between two struggling individuals on either side of the same crisis of self. There is meaning when Rose jams Finn out of the path of his suicide mission, not just for the thrill of the moment, but for Finn’s nobility in trying to live the most potent opposite of running away, and Rose’s attachment in saving him, rather than stopping him. And when Luke kisses Leia on the top of her head, it’s not just imbued with the impact of an on-screen goodbye having to stand-in for an offscreen one; it’s imbued with the poignancy of a film that builds the place in one another’s lives each occupies long before they’re face-to-face for the final time.
Because in a way, they both have to move on. Luke has to let go of his failures, cast off his guilt, to do as a delightfully, once again impish Yoda suggests and let his pupils outgrow him. Rey has to let go of her belief that her family is waiting for her, and find the new family who’s sustained her to this point. And even as he seeks the means to rule the galaxy, Ben Solo cannot let go of the masters who’ve failed him, of the feelings that rage inside him, and of the parents who cannot help needing, no matter how much he may want to.
But moving on doesn’t have to mean throwing things away. It can mean giving something back. It can mean sacrificing yourself, ending something, so that something else can be born anew in its place. It can mean preserving the tiniest spark of rebellion, the brave men and women and quirky droids who can start a conflagration to spread across the galaxy. It can mean doing great deeds, that will be bent and twisted and have consequences you never imagined five steps down the line, but also inspire the next nobody on a nothing planet to gaze up at the sky and wonder what adventure may lie there.
The Last Jedi moves on from its predecessors without discarding them, and moves forward enough to leave plenty of room for its successors, both literal and figurative. It moves on from the George Lucas originals, and even from its immediate, J.J. Abrams-helmed predecessor. But it embraces the spirit of these things, an aims to recreate that feelings, that core, that sense of wonder, for a new generation.
In that, Star Wars itself is like The Force as Luke describes it. It does not belong to Lucas or Abrams or Johnson or even our continually growing overlords at the Disney Corporation. It belongs to all of them and none of them, and to us. Like The Force, like the Rebellion, Star Wars is as much an idea as it is a franchise, and just as Lucas himself reimagined those ideas from Kurosawa films and Flash Gordon serials, Johnson posits himself as doing the same, and instilling the hope that one day, kids will look to these bits of awe and wonder and be moved to look out past the horizon and tell their own stories just as he was.
So don’t throw away the past. Remember it. Embrace it. It informs what we do and who we are and who we will one day be. But don’t be bound by it. Be inspired by it. As cheesy as that sounds, The Last Jedi makes good on all the inspiration thirty years of Star Wars has provided. And just as Luke, Leia, Rey, Ben, and the rest of the conflicted figures who populate the film do, Johnson reaches out in the hopes of not just vindicating that legacy, but extending it to whatever, and whoever comes next, no matter who they are or where they come from.
I liked it, but I felt like I missed too much in the translation of the subtitles. I will probably have to watch it in English and then revise my 7/10 rating accordingly. There were parts that did not make sense, like it jumped around, and the blue X's didn't make sense until they were explained way too late. I will revise my rating once I see it again, if applicable.
edit 2018-02-06: Watched this at the cinema, and I indeed bumped my rating up. I initially raised it to an 8/10 as I understood the events in the first quarter of the film, but as the nuances of the various friendships and how the social structure worked in 6th grade and how it shifted in 11th grade, as well as seeing more of the sisters' relationship, it's a solid 9/10. It's not as great as solid 10/10's I've heard it compared to, but it has amazing standout moments, like when she says I'm trying the best I can and he can't understand her, but we in the audience could understand her perfectly. Or pretty much anything she says, for that matter. I think what keeps this from reaching 10/10 quality is that perhaps it should have been a series. I felt like we needed more time with these characters, and more time for their relationships to develop organically on screen. What we have feels rushed. But still, for all that, it's a great movie.
