Spiderman Movie Review: It Gets A New Life

Spiderman  Into The Spider-Verse(animation film)

Directed  by Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman

Rating: *** ½(3 and a  half stars)

 Weirdly,  I  kept  thinking of Rajinikanth while watching teenaged African American boy swing from ennui  to exhilaration ,  a la Spiderman. Not because Rajini is, OMG, such a super-hero but because his  daughter had  made a mess of  a film that employs the same animation method  (motion-capture animated film) where the  characters are captured animation but so real they look almost-human.

Well, to cut a sad story short  Rajinikant and Deepika Padukone in  Soundarya Rajinkanth’s  Kochadaiyan  looked nothing like the originals.

In Spiderman  Into Spider-verse(the verse, I suspect, has  nothing to do with  poetry) the  characters are all so tenable  I  forgot I was watching an animation film. The magic of seeing  a subverted  version of Spiderman’s super-heroism starts in the film as a  giggle  and  builds up into grand  glorious saga of heroism, resilience and retribution.

It is hard to imagine Spiderman as  a vulnerable hero in need of help from a  fan-boy.Imagine Amitabh Bachchan in Deewaarseeking  Dev Patel’s help. But our wounded Spiderman gets just that  from Miles, a teenager  going through the usual problems of emotional distancing and  hormonal havoc.  Just the  right target for a Spidery  invasion.

Without  giving away  the  plot I can say with delightful conviction that this  film creates a  magical language  for the super-hero genre:  vulnerable  yet  vital, challenged yet  unconquerable. Spiderman’s vitality is  revamped and rebooted as  the boy-man Miles takes charge of super-heroic duties to save New York  from calamitous adversaries.The villains are  vile. The heroes are so cool they seen destined to be teeshirt logos.

The  characters are all hugely engaging without making an  effort to win us over with excessive referential  sassiness. The  collage of  action-adventure sweeps us  into its arms,never allowing  the  characters to be dwarfed by the spectacle. This is a film where  the action speaks louder than the words and  yet the  conversations are never  drowned in the din of overpoweringrazzle-dazzle.

While Miles, the surrogate Spiderman is  voiced  with sufficient  curiosity and  apprehension by  Shamiek Moore,  HaileeSteinfeld who  voices Spiderwoman  brings to  her  character  just the right ingredients  of  wonderment and wisdom.

In fact  one   of the winning factors  in this film is the young hero’s inexperience and callowness. Any entity, evil  or scheming, could take  advantage  of  our wannabe Spiderman’s  innocence. We can’t have that , can we?