Why ‘Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’ is the best film adaptation yet.
Spider-Man has seen a lot of reboots, from Tobey Maguire, to Andrew Garfield to the weird Japanese TV show ‘Supaidāman’. Even through all the ups and downs Spider-Man has been a fan favorite.
When the trailer for ‘Into the Spider-Verse’ dropped, I thought, “Great! another Spider-Man movie”, little had I known that the weird trailer that I had brushed off to the side considering it to be a cash-grab attempt from the studio executives on the back of a wildly popular superhero. But it’s clear from the title that I was wrong.
Just the amount of love that has gone into the film is visible from the first moment.
The amount of thought given to the studio logos is commendable in itself. Although they have not recreated the Miles from the comics, instead have created a variation in itself. To be honest for most of my life I thought that only Peter Parker was Spider-Man because I had never read the comics. Mostly because they were not available where I grew up. But now that internet is with us, and I have started reading them. And oh God! are their different Spider-Mans, and did you know there was a run of Spider-Man in which Peter is Indian and called Pavitr Prabhakar.
But let’s come back to the point, I had never imagined that they could have done such amazing work will bringing a comic book story to life. The creators have not completely followed the source material and have made changes to it accordingly. This will be the first and probably the last time I say this, I am FUCKing grateful that they did. The changes they made to Prowler(Uncle Aaron) saved the character.
I have read comic books and I hated him. The way he used to take advantage of Miles, felt disgusting but in the movie they have made him more sympathetic, the way he feels about Milles and he doesn’t want to hurt him and wants Miles to be better than himself. It made me care about him. I honestly feel that a lot of time we portray the antagonist of our stories as one-dimensional, it always easier for the reader to root for our heroes and hate the villains. But we often forget that people are not just bad. It’s not Black & White but the fact is a lot of Grey. Into the Spider-Verse has done a great job with it, not only with Prowler but also with Kingpin. He doesn’t build the collider to end the world or something generic like that, he does it to be with his family. That does not justify his actions and his disregard for the lives of the people of New York, but we understand why he is doing it. We can relate to his pain of losing his family because we all have experienced it at some point in our life.
It’s not just the story that the film has done an amazing job, the artwork has been something I have never seen before. Amazingly, no one has thought of this before, creating comic-like effects for a comic book film is just genius. The use of voice boxes on-screen to show Miles internal dialog gave more depth to the character.
It gave a direct entry into the thoughts of the character.
The use of onomatopoeia on-screen was another stroke of genius. Although some people would like to argue that that the expression, environment, and sound design should be more than enough to get the point across to the audience and there should not be the need for words on the screen to it. To those people I would like to say this, yes you are correct, expression, environment, and sound design would be more than enough but they weren’t going for more than enough, they wanted it in your face.
They even went so far as to make some frames completely look like comics.
Then came the Spider-People, some of the characters they chose for this were completely amazing and some were misses.
The way they approached their origins is mind-blowing. They knew that virtually everyone is familiar the run of the mill Spider-Man origin. So, they tried to keep it as concise as possible. In some cases, they didn’t even bother to explain the origination of their powers, for example, we all would have imagined that Spider-Ham was a pig who was bitten by a radioactive spider, but it was exactly the other way around. But I am somewhat glad they didn’t go into that much detail, or they would have overwhelmed the audience and the movie would have been nothing but exposition.
I am in no way implying that Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is a perfect movie. But it’s the best we have gotten so far. I hope they keep on doing the amazing work that they already laid the groundwork for and keep doing justice to these characters. There are certainly some shortcoming which I would like to explore further in the upcoming stories, so follow the publication because I would be posting them right here. Also, follow our social media handles to keep getting updates.
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