The movie “Into The Spider-Verse” is about a kid, Miles, the main protagonist, who is in the wrong place at the wrong time when he sees Kingpin, the main antagonist, kill someone. He is then chased for a short stint by Kingpin’s henchmen, so as to “tie up loose ends”, before he manages to elude his pursuers and make it home.  Later on, as he tries to figure out the problem of what he has seen, he gets bitten by a radioactive spider, whereupon his thoughts are projected as comic boxes, like the time transitions. The movie is a part of the Marvel Universe, but it is not the main universe we commonly think of, as that is live action and this is a computer-animated movie.

Miles, attempting to deal with his powers, goes to school, wherein he gets his fingers caught in someone’s hair, which the school nurse must subsequently remove with scissors.  After school, he purchases a Spider-Man onesie, goes to the Kingpin murder victim’s funeral and discovers the dystopian Spider-man, Peter B. Parker, whom he knocks out with a taser shot After Miles buys him a burger, Peter agrees to teach him. They break into ALCHEMAX, an evil business empire, to steal a virus to shut down the device that pulled the other Spider-Men to his dimension, the dimensional collider, and go to Aunt May, the original Spider-Man’s mother figure, who introduces them to the WWII Spider-Man, the cartoon pig Spider-Man, Spider-Gwen, and Sp//dr, a futuristic anime-esque 11-year old who pilots a bio-mechanical suit with the spider that bit her.

The group sneaks back into the facility that this mess started in, this time posing as waiters, manages to get to the machine whereupon the villainous group shows up, and therein begins a weird fight retreat through the dimension merger. After the first fight, Miles must battle Kingpin one on one to keep the madman from reactivating the device that pulled the other Spider-men to his dimension. The machine is damaged early on in the battle, which leads to an entertaining struggle in a vortex wherein the duo throws various objects at each other. Miles utilizes his web spinners to close the dimensional collider, after Kingpin gets torn apart from competing energy fields, the movie ending shortly thereafter with him leaping off a building to take up his Spider-Man mantle.

My problem was that there was just too much death. The first death occurs right at the beginning and it is a stunner. You automatically hate the producers and you keep watching seriously based on the Rotten Tomatoes rating (97% critic, 100% audience), but both deaths are important to the story. The second is sudden, brutal, and totally necessary, but you hate it too.

Overall, I enjoyed the movie, as the score fit this portrayal of Spider-man, and was most definitively an origins story. The characters were compelling, with the director of the movie staying true the original comic lines. The movie actually felt real as well. Miles has to work and struggle for his powers throughout the movie right up until the Kingpin fight, wherein he still has a few misfires. I would recommend the movie, as the story is compelling, the score woks, and the movie is worth its slightly overstated rating.