Miles takes on the iconic role with a few others in the mix
Over 4 years in the making and with every frame taking over a week to complete, this year’s spider-man may surely be the one.
In what amounts to yet another high-concept, heavy-meta home run from “The Lego Movie” mavens Phil Lord and Christopher Miller — serving as producers, while directing duties fall to Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman at Sony Pictures Animation — “Spider-Verse” applies the retro look of four-color process printing to its 3D computer-animated characters. The effect is fresh, like a street-art riff on a Roy Lichtenstein print, intricately textured with halftone dots and hand-drawn accents to suggest a vintage comic book come to life. Against this bold visual aesthetic, matched with a pulsing hip-hop score, Lord and co-writer Rodney Rothman (“22 Jump Street”) shift the spotlight from Peter Parker to his successor, Miles Morales.
The teenage son of an African-American cop and a Puerto Rican nurse, the character of Miles Morales first appeared in 2011 as a way to diversify the Marvel universe. Looking fly in a modified black-and-red Spidey suit, Miles boasts all the same powers — super strength, boosted speed, heightened senses, web-slinging, and wall-crawling — plus a few bonus skills, including “venom strike” (the ability to shock his adversaries) and invisibility (whereby he can camouflage himself under pressure). But unlike this year’s more overtly politicized “Black Panther,” which treated the Wakandan identity as a kind of super-empowerment, “Spider-Verse” views Miles’ background as a nonissue. Again, the takeaway here is anybody can be Spider-Man — and that’s a revolutionary idea for a generation of kids eager to identify with Marvel’s most popular superhero.
The Cinephile 