Shameik Moore – Memphis Flyer

All superhero movies should be animation.

It’s really not that far from where we are now. For large chunks of, say, Avengers: Infinity War, everything the viewer sees was rendered by a computer. It’s only the need to have Chris Evans and Scarlett Johansson appear as Captain America and Black Widow that keeps them from going totally CGI. This grounding in the real world is necessary in order for us to take seriously these stories of men in tights saving the world by punching each other.

The problem with “grounding” comic book stories in the real world is that you lose an essential element. Read Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, and you’ll never look at a Spider-Man comic book the same way again. Comics are not just a storytelling medium — they’re vastly inferior to the written word in that regard. There’s also visual and design elements that are unique to comics, the most obvious being combining words and design elements to evoke sound. Pow! Thwack! Bamf!

Ultimate Spider-Man — Miles Morales is the teenage superstar of the new spider-movie.

Divorced from the vibrant page layout, superhero stories can seem goofy. When Spider-Man is just lines on a page, you know how seriously to take his battles with Mysterio, the guy with the glowing fishbowl for a head. But every live action superhero movie since Tim Burton’s Batman has had to add a line or two about how funny it is that a guy dresses up like a bat to fight crime, because it’s frankly ridiculous to pretend people act like this in real life.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse uses animation to embrace the conceits and eccentricities of comics. It takes its cues more from Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World than Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises. It also takes as its jumping off point a very comic premise, the “what if?” story. Sure, everybody knows Spider-Man is Peter Parker — a white, working class college student and cub news photographer raised by his aunt in Brooklyn. But what if Spider-Man was a Brooklyn teenager named Miles Morales (voiced by Shameik Moore) raised by a Latinx nurse (Luna Lauren Velez) and a black police officer (Brian Tyree Henry). And also, there are five other spider-folk.

Now, we’re getting comic book-y! Publishers like Marvel beta testing new takes on their cash cow characters led to superhero comics being the first sci fi-adjacent genre to embrace multiverse theory, which solves some issues in quantum mechanics by positing that ours is one of an infinite expanse of parallel universes where everything that can happen, does happen. Super-mobster Kingpin (Liev Schreiber) hires super scientist Olivia Octavius (Kathryn Hahn) to build a machine to access these parallel dimensions so he can retrieve fresh versions of his deceased wife and child.

Naturally, Peter Parker (Chris Pine) tries to stop him from running an unlicensed particle accelerator in Kings County. But when he fails, it’s up to Miles, who has been freshly bitten by a radioactive spider, to save reality. Since Miles can’t figure out how to stick (and more importantly, unstick) to walls yet, he needs help, which comes in the form of alternate spider-people. Peter B. Parker (Jake Johnson), is a down-on-his-luck, freshly divorced, middle age spider-dude. Spider-Gwen (Hailee Steinfeld) is from a dimension where the radioactive spider bit Peter Parker’s crush instead instead of him. Spider-Noir (Nicolas Cage) is a hardboiled, arachnid-themed crime fighter from a black-and-white universe. Peni Parker (Kimiko Glenn) co-pilots a mecha with an intelligent radioactive spider. And Peter Porker (John Mulaney) was bitten by a radioactive pig.

Freed from the dubious need for plausibility, Into the Spider-Verse spins wild visuals. Each character is drawn in the style of their own comics. Peter Porker, who looks like a Looney Tunes character, drops anvils on people and assaults his enemies with a giant cartoon hammer. Peni has an anime-inspired, epilepsy-unfriendly transformation sequence. The animators sometimes divide the frame into panel-like spaces. “Thwip” and “Pow!” appear to punctuate the action. During the dizzying finale, in which a newly empowered Miles tries to stuff the interdimensional genie back in the bottle, gravity and reality fail, and abstract bits of Brooklyn float by.

Impossible shots coupled with a breezy screenplay make this the most fun superhero movie since Sam Raimi shot an upside down Toby Maguire kissing Kirsten Dunst. With Marvel building toward an illusory finale and DC dead in the water, this is the fresh approach the genre needs. Don’t just take inspiration from cartoons, be a cartoon.

Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse

Early in Dope, Malcolm (Shameik Moore) gets roped into shuttling messages back and forth between a drug dealer named Dom (Rakim Mayers, aka A$AP Rocky) and a beautiful girl named Nakia (Zoë Kravitz). The scene sums up the protagonist’s predicament: He’s caught between worlds. An opening narration by Forest Whitaker—who also happens to be a producer—identifies Malcolm and his friends Jib (Tony Revolori) and Diggy (Kiersey Clemons) as geeks. But being a brainy kid in the Bottoms neighborhood of Inglewood, California, ain’t easy. For one thing, the usual nerd nemesis, the bully, is much more heavily armed. In addition to the feuding cliques at school, there are also the Crips and Bloods to keep track of. And your carefully researched essay on pinpointing the date of Ice Cube’s “good day” is probably not enough to get you into Harvard.

In his senior year of high school, Malcolm is pretty much resigned to his geeky fate. With graduation coming up and his grades looking good, his Ivy League goals are tantalizingly close. His performance as a messenger with encyclopedic knowledge of 1990s hip-hop endears him to Dom, who invites Malcolm to his birthday party. Malcolm hesitates, but Jib and Diggy want to live a little before heading out for college, so they manage to navigate the doorman and gain entrance to the coolest party any of them have ever seen. Things are going great until a back-room drug deal goes bad. When the bullets stop flying and most of the partygoers have been hauled away to jail, Malcolm discovers that Dom stashed a bunch of MDMA and a gun in his backpack. And so he and his friends are dragged into an underworld of crime and corruption as they try to unload the dope without getting arrested, killed, or missing their SATs.

With Dope, writer/director Rick Famuyiwa has given the teen-movie genre a 21st-century upgrade. He’s wrapped a lot of different strands into the story’s DNA. The most obvious antecedent is Risky Business, Tom Cruise’s 1983 turn as a squeaky-clean prep-school-kid-turned-accidental-pimp. But that movie was set in the lily-white Chicago neighborhood of North Shore. Dope‘s protagonists are a black kid named after Malcolm X, a Hispanic kid who says anscestry.com told him he was 14 percent African, and a black lesbian who slaps their white hacker friend Will (Blake Anderson) every time he says “nigga”. There’s a little bit of Pulp Fiction in the occasional time-bending flashback and the script’s gleeful wordiness, and a little bit of Spike Lee in the occasional fourth-wall breaking. But there’s much about Dope that is new and fresh. Since smartphones became ubiquitous less than a decade ago, the rules storytellers have been following since Shakespeare have had to change. Lack of communication can no longer be used as plot devices. A couple of quick text messages would have saved Romeo and Juliet from suicide, for example. Dope is one of the first movies I’ve seen where the new realities of electronic communication, not to mention Darknet, Bitcoin, and pervasive surveillance, are seamlessly integrated into a non-sci-fi story.

Just as Risky Business made a star out of Cruise, Dope could easily make a star out of Moore. He’s in almost every scene, and he carries Malcolm’s journey from nervous geek to confident college kid with a confidence many more experienced actors would envy. Revolori, last seen as Zero in The Grand Budapest Hotel, and Clemons both nail their parts, as does A$AP Rocky, who could easily make the same leap from rapper to actor that Ludacris did after Hustle & Flow.

My only real criticism of Dope is that it is overstuffed. The opening voice-over seems unnecessary, and soon trails off. There are so many characters and overlapping story lines that some of them feel underdeveloped. But if the worst I can say about your movie is that you have too many ideas, that’s a good place to be. Dope premiered at Sundance alongside another high school movie, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, which scored big at the awards ceremony. Both are fine films, but I think the Sundance voters got it wrong. Dope has the makings of a cult classic that high schoolers will be watching for years to come.