Amazon Prime’s Spider-Noir Review
Better Than The Source material - Ya I said it
WARNING: THIS ARTICLE MAY CONTAIN Spoilers from the Amazon Prime series as well as the comic book line. There may be discussions of violence and murder. CONSIDER WHEN AND WHERE IT WOULD BE APPROPRIATE TO READ THIS PIECE.I don’t say this often if ever, but Amazon Prime’s new series, Spider-Noir is so good that it’s better than the source material. The vibes are immaculate and it’s a joyride the for the entire ride. You shouldn’t take that lightly coming from me as I’m a bit of a comic snob. Before I moved over to cover the consumer tech world, I spent a handful of years touring the continent as a geek culture beat writer for AXS. It was a golden era full of excitement in the mid 2010’s with comic-based shows and movies debuting left and right on what felt like every channel and movie theater. Comic books had finally arrived and crossed over to the mainstream. As an actual comic book geek who was privileged to cover the industry with my press badge that gave me behind the scenes access to writers, artists, and a whole bevy of incredible opportunities, I did write some articles that were rather opinionated. Some films and shows were such a far cry from the source material that I just had to call it out because at that point it just was something entirely different that was cashing in on a name rather than paying it the respect it deserved.
The vibes are immaculate
If you just watched the trailer for Spider-Noir, you’d think it would be a faithful adaptation of an alternative Spider-Man that was picture perfect to pen into a black-and-white television show. Set in the 1930s during prohibition America, it also sounds like the perfect scenario for a street-level vigilante show that doesn’t require world-saving superhuman activity like we’ve been accustomed to seeing in recent superhero media. Spider-Noir the show is exactly that and that’s also why it’s so good, because the comic book from Marvel that it was based on actually isn’t that at all. We’ll get to that later.
The Spider? Not Spider-Man?
Spider-Noir is an 8 episode series released on Amazon Prime Video that was co-produced by Sony and Amazon’s newly re-minted MGM studios. I love Prime original shows, but it’s also funny to think about why a Marvel superhero show of their #1 hero property was made for the Amazon platform and not a Disney platform. Then you quickly remember the complexities of the good ole license deal of 1999 that saw Sony acquire the film and television rights to most if not all of the Spider-Man properties at the time. These pesky legal terms have reared their ugly heads over and over throughout Spider-Man content in the 2000s and have at times ruined great potential for amazing stories of the Webhead to be translated on screen. This ongoing speed bump plagues Spider-Noir and Amazon again as apparently the showrunners were not allowed to use the names “Peter Parker” and “Spider-Man” which makes things kind of silly when that's the name of the character and his superhero alias.
There are plenty of Spider-Men who aren’t named Peter Parker in the comics (that also aren’t clones). Spider-Man 2099, and the second Ultimate Spider-Man Miles Morales are a couple that come to mind. Spider-Man Noir is not one of them. His name is Peter Parker in the source material. Sony tip-toes around this legal limitation and gives Nicolas Cage’s on-screen persona the Ben Reilly identity. For those of you who aren’t familiar with that infamous name, Ben Reilly is another name to hold the Spider-Man identity, but he was originally one of a few Peter Parker clones who believed he was the original. Yes, 1990s comic storylines are ridiculous like that. There aren’t any clones in the Amazon show, but there’s some interesting lore here that the show took liberties with away from the comic book.
As a private investigator who has long since retired from his superhero escapades as The Spider, the raggedly aged Ben suddenly gets entangled with a club singer named Cat Hardy as she attempts to escape her fate as a caged performer for mob boss Silvermane. They call him The Spider because Spider-Man was off-limits as the owners of this property think the brilliant viewers of superhero media wouldn’t be able to distinguish this guy with Tom Holland’s ongoing MCU Spider-Man.
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Anyway, that’s a pretty simple premise and I personally loved how grounded this show was. I love a good world-ending threat that takes a city of heroes to unite as much as the next comic nerd, but it really feels like that’s all we’ve been getting lately. For all the crossover titles like the Endgames, the Spider-Verses, the No Way Home equivalents, we’ve been deprived of character-rooted stories that are small and episodic in nature like a comic book plot would present. Spider-Noir gives us that and I’m all for it. I felt like I was watching something akin to Spider-Man: The Animated Series or reading an arc from a comic book when watching this show. I mean that in the best ways possible.
Of course you can’t have a superhero show without some superhero antics, so as predictable as it was, Ben unretires his The Spider persona when he investigates a superhuman trail of World War I veterans he has a personal connection to as he also served in the Great War. This isn’t exactly the same Spider-Man you’re accustomed to seeing in red and blue. Ben’s grizzled fight against crime has him wearing black trenchcoats, and fedoras. Not only does he shoot organic webs from his wrists like Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man, this Spidey also doesn’t mind wielding guns. Other than the outfit, there’s really nothing else that is related from the show to its source material.
Ben, Janet, and Cat have a discussion
Once again, I say that as a good thing. Spider-Man Noir the original volume of the comic introduces Peter Parker as a Spider-Man who is essentially the Peter Parker we all know from the mainline 616-universe with the exception that he exists right after World War I. It’s basically a What If Spider-Man originated in the 1930s instead of the 1960s.
In this show, Nicolas Cage plays an over-the-hill Ben Reilly who he himself actually served in the Great War. The comic book character never did that. It was his Uncle Ben who was a veteran of the war. That’s already a major dynamic change that set the tone for the show. Cage is a brilliant actor for quirky roles. His subtle mannerism like cracking his back or how he swirls the glass while playing the drunk fool, makes him the perfect actor to handle what is ironically the drunk unc role in the show.
While it’s later heavily implied that Ben Reilly is just an alias our hero began using after the war and that he really is Peter Parker, the inability to actually verify this in a scene for legal reasons definitely makes it less impactful of a reveal. In fact, I’d actually argue that by implying this as an easter egg, the story then opens a huge can of worms that makes what we see follow an unreliable narrator’s view. Ben discusses his origin story and we see the flashback where I believe soldiers clearly call him Reilly. We later learn that he changed his name to Ben Reilly after the war and that’s why a POW couldn’t find him to thank him. See the conundrum there? If they were implying he was Peter Parker during the war and changed to Ben Reilly to get away from it all after coming back home, the flashback scene should have had people addressing him as Parker. Since they couldn’t do that, it opens the door to the unreliable narrator route. Heck, maybe they’ll retcon this as he very well could have been lying about his origin story when he was telling it to Cat in the show anyway.
Like I mentioned, the comic book Spider-Man Noir was basically a Peter Parker story set in the 1930s. That includes his usual supporting cast of lovers and villains. The Mary Janes and Felicia Hardy’s of this Noir world are there. Aunt May and Uncle Ben are there. Even Ben Urich plays a pivotal role in his origin story. This Prime show ironically may have benefitted from the legal restrictions as it pivoted from these traditional characters from the comic book and instead brought Robbie Robertson into a lead supporting role. In this adaptation, Robbie is the perfect wingman to Ben’s The Spider as the time period provides ample opportunity to include realistic implications of African American struggles in the workplace. I’m used to seeing Robbie as the older mentor figure for Peter, so it's a fresh perspective to see this character in what felt like an upstart reporter role that Spider-Man usually takes in his earlier incarnations. Ben in turn becomes an equal, if not a respected civilian partner in their investigations together despite the 20 year age gap between the two actors.
Speaking of partners, I’m not familiar with a Janet Ruiz in Marvel comics, but if this is an original character for the show, then I’m quite happy with the way she was incorporated. Initially seen as Ben’s secretary, Janet ends up playing a pivotal role in supporting his recovery from depression and actually does end up being his business partner at the end of the season. She isn’t over the top eccentric, nor does she have witty comebacks, but actress Karen Rodriquez gives Janet just enough charismatic banter with Nicolas Cage to really show a genuine partnership and love between the two characters. I enjoyed seeing them at their office interacting.
Gods Don’t Exist
Ben fighting in the Great War
The biggest reason I’m glad Amazon didn’t get to use the comic book origin of Spider-Man Noir is because I always found that it was an odd contradiction to the tone and theme of a Noir character. The comic book version of this hero obtains his abilities from a god through a spider bite from a spider idol. For a character that exists in a gritty and grounded time period, it always rang bizarre to me that Marvel went with this supernatural take to Noir’s origin. Not only did he get his powers from a god, he can actually be resurrected after being killed because of this idol thing. Imagine this being the source of Ben’s powers in the Prime show. It would have felt out of place for sure.
Instead, Nicolas Cage’s Ben Reilly origin story still does come from a spider bite, but this time around its from a POW Man-Spider the Germans experimented on that Ben had rescued. This actually is the root cause for the story of this season as it turns out all of the POWs that Ben rescued are dying with the powers gained from the experiments as the cause of their deterioration. A couple of these guys are long-time members of Spider-Man’s rogue gallery: The Sandman Flint Marko, and Tombstone, being the big names to serve Silvermane. The third superpowered villain of this season is a man named Megawatt who is a lesser known Spidey supervillain that covers the same role that Electro normally does.
Love and Mystery
There’s mystery, romance, and of course action embedded into the 8-episode run of Spider-Noir. Much like the Felicia Hardy and Peter Parker flirtation we’ve grown fond of in the comics, this universe’s Cat and Ben have mutual conflicted attraction. The ole Parker luck always seems to keep our hero from finding stable romance as it just so happens that Cat Hardy and Sandman are secret lovers. It’s an intriguing love triangle for a couple of episodes, and casting an Asian actress to play the femme fatale also paid off nicely for the show. Actress Li Jun Li is enthralling utilizing her entrancing glares anytime Ben Reilly goes off on a yapping tangent.
The action scenes are grounded and aren’t over the top in choreography and post-production cutting. That’s a good thing for this specific Spider-Man. It works for him. That doesn’t mean there aren't any spectacular jumps, or sensational web-slinging in the show. There’s just much less frequent uses of them for The Spider than most people are probably used to seeing from a live action Spider-Man. As I said earlier, I’m kind of happy to see a live action Spider-Man that isn’t fighting aliens and constantly jumping around like an acrobat. This neighborhood watch style patrolling really does feel interestingly nostalgic. For example, whenever there’s a fight in the streets, crowds gather in a sort of fight circle around The Spider and comment about the action. It’s extremely campy and it just works so well for this show. It makes no sense logically that a guy shooting lightning in the streets while destroying everything in his path would not automatically trigger a flee for your lives mentality to this New York civilian populace. Yet here they are always gathering around in a fight club circle like it's a free Broadway show. I can‘t exactly reference where or why this is nostalgic to me, but if there’s a time period for this illogical insanity to happen, the period between WWI and WWII seems comedically appropriate.
My main issue with the overarching storyline for the season is that there was a lack of a finality of the war between the Mayor and Silvermane for control of the city. Throughout the season, the show was setting up this big showdown between Silvermane and the Mayor he propped up who no longer wants to be associated with the mob boss. Silvermane’s main agenda for a majority of the show was to stock up on superhuman henchmen to go to war with the Mayor. The Spider was a bit of a gray agent caught between both factions. It was all leading up to this big supposed takeover of the city to show the Mayor who was really in charge. The plot appeared to head in a direction where Silvermane’s three supervillain lackeys were going to have a confrontation with the Mayor’s force and The Spider would likely have to step back into the limelight and stop them in the finale. That sounded epic, except none of that actually took place. Instead Tombstone was removed from the picture in Episode 8, and the Mayor wasn’t even a part of the resolution in the finale against Silvermane. There was absolutely no payoff between the feud and watching it back a second time, it just feels like a big waste of time with the amount of scenes dedicated to setting this conflict up. I still did enjoy the finale overall, but I personally felt like the showrunners could have gone in a different direction with the grand finale confrontation.
An Embarrassment for Amazon Hardware
True-Hue compared to Black-And-WhiteThe final section of my review is directed at Amazon. Spider-Noir’s gimmick feature is that it was shot in black-and-white and released in both black-and-white and color. The True-Hue version imitates old Technicolor motion pictures of the time period. As a former film student who was forced to study so many films during period of the transition to color, I was thoroughly in awe by the set design used to capitalize on the super saturated cinematography through post. Obviously high definition is still retained here and it's not like you’re really watching a product from the 1930s, but I loved the integration here. The black-and-white version was also enjoyable to watch as someone who once again watched a lot of French Noir films during school.
My issue with the two versions is just how poorly Amazon released this show on their own bloody platform. I mainly watch my media content nowadays on an Amazon Fire TV Cube. I have the current and latest iteration of the streamer and I’ve actually owned every version since the original. I’ve said in previous reviews that I’m a fan of the Logitech Harmony-styled voice activation of my television at a much lower price and I still stand by that. Anyway, I kid you not, I spent an hour trying to figure out how to switch from color to black-and-white and STILL FAILED to do it. Before each episode, a disclaimer screen pops up and instructs you that compatible devices can switch between the two versions as they’re significantly different experiences. You would think Amazon’s best media product should be able to play an Amazon show’s marketed feature. Nope. Clicking into an episode gave me no such option to choose. Bringing the menu up gave no such option. Updating the Cube gave me no such option. Making a new profile gave me no such option. Every Reddit suggestion failed to give me a working solution.
The irony is that I did watch some of the episodes in black-and-white. You know how? On my Google Pixel 10 Pro’s Prime Video android app. It was as simple as clicking on an episode. A pop-up menu will ask which version you want to watch. During mid-viewing, a swipe up to the menu allows you the option to change the version. It’s an embarrassment that Amazon did not have this implemented properly on their own devices before the launch of this show. As of publication of this review, I still have not been able to get the menu to showcase the version selection.
Okay, I’m done with that as it has nothing to do with the quality of the actual show. Spider-Noir is the perfect case study of a media adaptation that successfully deviated from the source material for the betterment of the product. I enjoyed Spider-Man Noir the comic book when it was first published in 2009, but I can also admit that it had things that just didn’t work for it. This Amazon Prime show isn’t perfect, but I genuinely believe that it encapsulates the Noir period (which ironically is the 40s and 50s and not the 30s) a lot better. I don’t know what’s in store for Nicolas Cage and The Spider, as far as I know the show hasn’t been renewed for a second season, but I’d certainly welcome and would look forward to seeing a lot more from this universe. It’s quite fun seeing a quirky Spider-Man who’s over the hill.
The Entire Season of Spider-Noir is now streaming on MGM+ and Prime Video.
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Alex
With nearly a decade under his belt running his video production team, and countless hours traveling the country to report on pop culture events during his tenure as a contributor for AXS Examiner, Alex has relied on a lot of gadgets over the years. That still hasn’t satiated his need to get his hands on the newest and greatest the world has to offer!