**This post contains spoilers for Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.**
Sad, old Peter Parker is maybe the greatest thing that Sony and Marvel have ever given us. To be fair, he’s probably only in his later ’30s, but that doesn’t change the fact that this Peter Parker needs Miles Morales just as much as Miles needs him. The movie starts just as every origin story does—except that we’re seeing multiple origin stories at the same time, and it does an incredible job of mocking the typical format for a superhero movie while also giving us all the necessary information we need about the new spider-characters we meet.
The story is simple: Kingpin wants Vanessa and their son, Richard, back because, in Miles’s universe, Wilson Fisk was caught in the act of his darker side, so Vanessa took their son and ran, getting in a car accident in the process. Fisk wants her back at any cost, and that means ripping a hole in the universe in order to see her again.
Joining with the likes of the Green Goblin, Fisk attempts to go into other universes in order to get to Vanessa. Peter Parker (the one from Miles’s universe), of course, swoops in to intervene and shut down Fisk’s inter-dimensional tech, but he’s distracted when Miles Morales, who was recently bitten by a radioactive spider somewhere nearby, shows up.
The best part about this sequence? It proves that Marvel has officially won the war. That’s right, the Chris war is over. Miles’s Peter Parker is voiced by none other than Chris Pine. The blonde-haired, blue-eyed Peter ends up dying at the hand of Fisk, when both Peter and Miles manage to stop his plan to get Vanessa back (for the time being). In Miles Morales’s timeline, Peter Parker is now dead.
While New York mourns the loss of Peter, Miles is trying to figure out his powers and runs into maybe the greatest Peter Parker that ever lived, hailing from an alternate universe. Voiced by New Girl‘s Jake Johnson, this Peter has let himself go a bit and isn’t with Mary Jane Watson anymore because the two disagreed on the topic of kids. So what does he have to do in this new universe? Train a kid to be Spider-Man.
There isn’t a dull moment in the entire movie. Every step of the way, Miles’s journey remains intriguing, or another Spider-Man (or Gwen, or … Ham?) from another universe is being introduced, but there’s something about the relationship between Miles and Peter that really makes the movie. The two of them grow from Miles depending on Peter, and Peter hating it, to Peter being proud of everything that Miles has learned and can now do.
My favorite part of comes when Miles shows up in the final battle against Fisk and a surprise villain. Miles had been struggling to understand his powers, not really getting to the rhythm of them, and after tragic events unfold at the hands of Fisk, there’s a sense of urgency in him to help.
So, he goes to Aunt May, gets one of Peter’s old suits, and makes it his own before joining alongside his new Spider-Friends to take on Kingpin. The movie has a lot of heart, and you’ll find yourself crying more often than you’d think, but it is hands down the best Spider-Man movie ever made.
(image: Sony/Marvel Entertainment)
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