How A Legendary Hollywood Classic Inspired Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse
Taste is subjective, but you'd be hard-pressed to find someone (who isn't just a frothing racist) who didn't enjoy "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse." The third highest-grossing film of the year domestically, "Across the Spider-Verse," is a visual feast for the eyes and a striking follow-up to the equally adored "Into the Spider-Verse." Serving as the second installment of Miles Morales' arc as Spider-Man, the animated feature is a high-octane adventure with multiverse traveling, alternate timelines, and earth-shattering conflicts. It is, as prolific filmmaker Christopher Miller said during a press conference I recently attended, "the largest and most ambitious animated movie ever made." And he's right.
Trying to comprehend just how much went into crafting "Across the Spider-Verse" is enough to make your brain short-circuit and make the Windows shutdown noise, but it truly is an animated epic. So it's no surprise that Miller and his creative partner Phil Lord were both greatly inspired by one of the greatest cinematic epics of all time — David Lean's "Lawrence of Arabia." Nominated for 10 Academy Awards and preserved in the Library of Congress National Film Registry, "Lawrence of Arabia" has inspired creatives for over half a century, ranging from massive Hollywood blockbusters all the way to an episode of "Better Call Saul."
Phil Lord said they realized early on that making "Across the Spider-Verse" was a lot like "Lawrence of Arabia," but "instead of 1,000 extras and camels, we have 1,000 artists and we wanted the movie to have a grand scale like that." If you ask me? Mission accomplished.
The rest is still unwritten
Being inspired by "Lawrence of Arabia" while making a film of technical epic proportions makes sense, but the scope of the production wasn't the only connective tissue between the legendary Hollywood classic and the very modern animated feature. "We also thought a lot about the idea that nothing is written," said Miller. One of the constant themes running throughout "Lawrence of Arabia" has to deal with identity, and the divided allegiance protagonist T.E. Lawrence has between his native Britain and his new-found comrades in the Arabian tribes. Miles' struggle to adjust to life as a Spider-Man while still maintaining his relationship with his loving family is similarly at the core of his interior conflicts.
"This movie has a very wonderful screenplay but the idea that [your] fate is written is something that Miles is raging against," said Lord. "And it's a phrase that we repeated often when we were thinking about the movie." In superhero terms, it's all about breaking the canon. Miles defies the character development formula of all Spider-people, which to Miguel O'Hara aka Spider-Man 2099, is the ultimate Spider-crime. We'll have to wait until part 3, "Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse" to see what fate awaits Miles Morales, but if there's one thing we can count on — it's the knowledge that his hero's journey is not beholden to any specific formula. The rest is still unwritten.