This movie premiered since last Friday and I only got the chance to see it last night. It was a movie that I noticed during the end credit of another movie few months back and quite intrigued me (if you have seen that movie and waited till the end, you would know what movie I was referring to). Good thing it played in the nearest theater from our home, so my wife and I could easily go the location. OK, here we go with the movie now.
Brief Story Line
In Detroit, Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) was a normal teenager who was adjusting life in his new school where he met with a rather mysterious girl Gwanda (Hailee Steinfeld - Pitch Perfect 3, Ender's Game etc). Miles sometimes felt awkward with the way he was treated by his father, police officer Jefferson (Brian Tyree Henry - Hotel Artemis) and would look for his uncle Aaron (Mahershala Ali - Luke Cage TV series, The Hunger Games etc) for advice. Miles life would soon turned upside down when he got bitten by some kind of spider and made him have spider-like abilities.
While trying to adapt to these new abilities, Miles found out a major plan by Wilson Fisk/Kingpin (Liev Schreiber - X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Ray Donovan TV series etc) which could ruin the universe where he lived in. The experiments done by Kingpin also was the reason why another version of older washed up Spider-man/Peter B. Parker (Jake Johnson - The Mummy, New Girl TV series etc) arrived at Miles' universe. Both would soon have to work together in order to stop Kingpin's plan and return Peter to his own universe.
So could they succeed? Could young Miles lived up to the great expectations and adapting to this new found abilities? Find them all in this unique spider-man story.
End of Brief Story Line
OK, at first I thought this would be just a light animated superhero movie that we could enjoy without over thinking and had some fun. But apparently I was wrong. This movie was heavier, need to have some imagination and must be ready for quite a long duration for an animated film. It has running time of 116 minutes including post end-credit scene (which I did not notice and wrongly give this impression of a short movie to my wife). The movie was actually pretty dark for an animated superhero film which I felt quite unusual and it had few amount of violence. But it also had some light and dark humor as well to relieve from the sometimes heavy parts. Due to these reasons, I personally think the movie is more suitable for teenagers and above, rather than for all ages like categorized in Indonesia.
For an animated movie, there were parts that I felt a bit cartoonish on the appearance of few characters (especially the characterization of Kingpin) but the rest of them felt more like comic books. Especially with the classic boxes of thoughts or the screaming words written on the screen. This was one of the factors that I liked about the film. In addition, the appearances of many alternate Spider-man were awesome. It was real fun to watch them all showing up in the same universe and cooperate with one another. And it also made me realize that apparently there were many versions of Spider-man from the comic books. It was actually a great way to introduce them to us audience who do not read the comics.
Apart from the fun times we had from those many spider-man versions, we also got to see alternate version of his enemies. And the story telling of this movie was pretty good. It was not very complex and the way we were told of these alternate universe were not that difficult to grasp. There were also various scenes which made us chuckled a bit (loved the scene involving Miles' roommate or when he was bitten for the first time). The spider-man swinging motions were greatly done and there were also some surprising twist related to the characters. Fight scenes were good and the finale was amazing.
The music from this movie was quite awesome, it had some nice hip hop songs and there was also one funny song during end credit scene I think was titled Spidey Bells which was a parody of Jingle Bells. Throughout the movie we were also entertained by the background music, particularly during the rather emotional moments or the suspenseful moments. It also had some great voice cast to bring life to these characters. There were some supporting well known voice talents in here such as Chris Pine, Nicolas Cage, Lily Tomlin, Zoë Kravitz, Kathryn Hahn and many others. Oh and watch out for the appearance of the late Stan Lee who also co-created Spider-man.
Overall I think this was a great animated superhero movie. It may not have the most beautiful animation but it had the comic book sense and feel in it. The main characters were likable and we got the chance to see the many versions of Spider-man. Some versions may be a little bit weird but some others were pretty interesting. From what I understand, there was already plan to make spin-off of few of these other versions in movies or TV series which could be fun. You can definitely give this one a try if you are one of Spider-man fans, but if you do not like the idea of the many other versions and thought it would be too weird, then this movie might not be enjoyable. The choice is yours.
Mike's movie moments rating: 4 out of 5 stars
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