Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse arrives at an interesting moment in the long, occasionally exhausting history of superhero cinema. By 2018, the Marvel Cinematic Universe had been a going concern for a decade, and audiences had grown well-acquainted with its particular rhythm: the quippy banter, the world-ending stakes, the post-credits tease. Sony's Spider-Man licence had its own chequered past, running from Sam Raimi's warmly remembered original trilogy through the rather less fondly recalled Amazing Spider-Man reboot years. Into the Spider-Verse, then, is not just another chapter in that history; it is a fairly pointed response to it. The film centres on Miles Morales, a Brooklyn teenager already caught between his cop father and his more street-level uncle, who finds his already complicated adolescence upended by a radioactive spider bite. When a particle collider experiment goes badly wrong, Miles is thrown together with Spider-people from other dimensions, each of them a variation on the same essential myth. The concept of the multiverse was not new to comics readers (Miles himself had been swinging through Marvel's pages since 2011), but translating that kind of joyful, self-aware absurdity to the screen required a particular kind of confidence. For comparison, consider how Akira demonstrated back in 1988 that animation could carry genuinely ambitious, adult-pitched science fiction; Spider-Verse picks up something of that baton.
The production is, by any reasonable measure, a curious creature. Sony Pictures Animation had turned out polished but unremarkable family fare for years, and the film's three-director arrangement (Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey and Rodney Rothman sharing the chair) is the sort of arrangement that tends to produce films by committee. That it does not feel like one is largely down to the creative influence of producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the pair behind The LEGO Movie, who brought an appetite for formal experimentation and a genuine affection for the source material. The budget, while not publicly confirmed in precise figures, was reported to be substantially lower than the average live-action Marvel production, which makes the visual ambition on screen all the more striking. The animation style is genuinely unlike anything major studios had attempted before, drawing on Ben-Day dots, misaligned colour printing effects and variable frame rates to make the film feel less like a computer-rendered feature and more like a moving comic page. It is a trick that could easily have felt gimmicky and precious but lands, against the odds, as something genuinely fresh.
The voice cast is a well-assembled group, mixing established names with some interesting choices. Shameik Moore, who impressed considerably in the sharp coming-of-age picture Dope, brings a natural, unforced quality to Miles that keeps the film emotionally grounded even when the plot goes somewhere fairly extraordinary. Jake Johnson plays an older, more worn-down Peter Parker with exactly the right balance of comedy and melancholy, and Hailee Steinfeld (herself no stranger to carrying a film, as anyone who has seen the Coen Brothers' True Grit can confirm) gives the Spider-Gwen material real weight. Mahershala Ali and Brian Tyree Henry, in smaller but important roles, bring a warmth to the family dynamics that other superhero films rarely bother with. The ensemble, across the board, sounds like people rather than brand ambassadors, which is harder to achieve than it ought to be in this particular genre.
As you may well know by now, I am rarely one to sing the praises of the modern superhero industrial complex. Outside of the original X-Men trilogy and The Dark Knight, I’ve almost never handed out a score higher than average to a cape-and-cowl picture.
They all seem to churn out that same hollow, lifeless, predictable narrative, masking it all behind a maelstrom of weightless CGI. So, you can imagine my sheer, unadulterated shock when Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman’s 2018 animated feature Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse landed on my desk and absolutely blew me away. It is a cracking, vibrant anomaly in a genre that usually feels like it's running on autopilot.
The great paradox here is that this is an animated film, which by all logical rights should have been the most lifeless, visually over-saturated entry in the Marvel lineup. Instead, it is the exact opposite. The art style and animation are, quite literally, some of the best I have ever seen on a cinema screen. It feels incredibly tactile, bursting with a vibrant, comic-book energy that makes you forget you're watching a digital creation. Fair play to the voice cast, too; Shameik Moore, Jake Johnson, and Nicolas Cage deliver fantastic, grounded performances that inject a massive amount of heart and humour into the multiverse madness, ensuring the characters feel like real people rather than just corporate IP mouthpieces.
What really elevates the picture, however, is its sheer unpredictability and emotional resonance. It is genuinely funny in exactly the right places, and then shifts gears to become incredibly exciting and tense when the stakes actually matter. I can't help but wonder if this massive leap in quality is simply because it’s not a Disney production. The Sony banner seems to have given the creative team the freedom to take risks, resulting in a film that feels emotive, interesting, and entirely its own beast. It completely sidesteps the usual studio-mandated beats that make these movies feel so terribly samey.
For all my usual cynicism, this isn't just the best Marvel superhero movie I've ever seen; it genuinely rivals The Dark Knight in my personal rankings. Persichetti, Ramsey, and Rothman have crafted a brilliant, visually staggering piece of cinema that completely redefines what a comic book adaptation can be. It sets an impossibly high bar for any future animated feature, and I’m now genuinely excited for Beyond the Spider-Verse to see if they can pull off the same magic again. It is an absolute triumph of modern filmmaking.
A score of four and a half out of five from a reviewer with little patience for cape-and-cowl spectacle is, to put it plainly, a significant thing. Much like The Emperor's New Groove demonstrated that animation freed from certain corporate pressures can produce genuinely distinctive work, Spider-Verse suggests that the superhero film, a form many had written off as creatively exhausted, still has room to surprise. Whether Sony and the creative team behind the sequel, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, can sustain that momentum is a question worth watching. For now, though, the first film stands as proof that the right people, given the right latitude, can make something out of even the most well-worn material. Sometimes the mask fits after all.
Rating: ★★★★½ | Year: 2018 | Watched: 2026-07-27
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) on YouTube
Where to watch
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