The Return of Miles Morales and the unbelievably crafted world Lord & Miller are back with a huge bang. Following the success of Into the Spider-Verse, they come back with an equally as inventive and original piece of art that seamlessly blends so many different animation and narrative styles into one cohesive film. There’s so much creativity happening in each frame, layer of sound design and comes full-circle with the Pemberton score and Metroboom soundtrack. It’s a creative team firing on all cylinders, cementing its status as the perfect antidote to Marvel’s everything’s the same comic book pallette. It’s good, maybe even great, but there’s one massive flaw – the incomplete story.
For a film running with so many ideas passing through and throwing so many different story beats at you, leaving them *all* for a sequel left me unsatisfied. They did a great job setting up a conclusion, establishing the worldbuilding, and crafting strong themes into the plot and characters but then the film ends. Network television style cliffhanger with promise for answers at a later date. The film was almost entirely setup with some dramatic payoff in the third act with the massive spider world and the small twist ending that brought in a new character. But, incomplete.
It’s the new narrative style of teasing a payoff rather than delivering. And hey, maybe I’ll come back to this review after the third installment laughing at my short-sightenedness and impatience. It’s likely, actually. But when I take this film at fave value, it feels more like a jumbled narrative mess, while Into The Spider-verse had me leaving the theater uplifted, thinking we finally turned a corner on the fifth spider-man franchise released in the span of 20 years. Even with the promise of a conclusion, they setup so many story beats that need to be addressed in the finale that it will either be a wholly satisfying or glossed over for run-time purposes.
I see the greatness in this film and can appreciate the vision. I can’t deny that I’m excited to see how they conclude Miles and Gwen’s story, as I’ve endeared myself to them far more than any other previous Spiderman adaptation. It feels as if a filmmaker finally understood how to incorporate the comic book panel medium into a movie structure and let the insanity of it run wild. I don’t need closure with every film, but the film needs some sense of purpose outside of setup.
Rating: ☆☆☆½
Conclusion: medium weird
Weird Cinema 