I definitely just want to... like, vomit words about Spider-Man and Spiderverse for a bit here. I'll say up top I'm going to throw out "Spider-Man" and "he" here a lot when really I'm just talking about an archetypal Spider-person, not necessarily Peter or Miles in particular. I'm going to go light on spoilers but there will be some, and mostly I just want to throw a cut here to give people a chance to ignore this.
Spider-Man is very important to me. Formative in a very real sense; my aesthetics, my desire to draw, my tastes and kinks, my morality. You can trace so many aspects of myself back to Spider-Man and his cast. I basically learned to read on Spider-Man magazines, burning empathy and justice into my brain in the same stroke as factoids about orbweavers and northern white rhinos. The live-action Spider-Man movies have been middling, because they are trying to capture tropes and bombast and That Thing You Know and translate that onto the screen. The Spiderverse films, however, are approaching it from a different angle. The Spiderverse films are celebrations. The Spiderverse films have a simple thesis statement: "Spider-Man kicks ass", and follow that up with a complicated critical analysis of why that is.
I'll start by saying this, I great enjoyed both films. I will use the same comparison I made between Knives Out and Glass Onion: I think the first one was a better single, cohesive film, while the second made for a more entertaining experience overall. The first film drilled down into the importance of Spider-Man, not Peter Parker; more than "with great power comes great responsibility," the core of Spider-Man is no matter how hard you push them down they always get back up. They eat shit and bounce back with a quip. This will often come with a price to pay, but they always do the right thing in the end, no matter how much strength they have to shore up. Peter and Gwen and of course Miles are all wonderful and varied characters in their own right, but they are all linked in embodying this ideal.
And then the second movie inverts that so beautifully by showing how being so prescriptivist about what makes this character important can be twisted into something terrible. I was around Comics Internet when Miles Morales originally debuted. There was such a massive, disgusting outcry about replacing Peter, obviously in part fueled by racism, but also people feeling like something was too different from what they were comfortable with, despite there obviously being so many other variations of the character through the decades before it. And I saw so much of that echoed by Miguel in the movie. It's taking the wrong lessons writ cosmic; the importance in the ideal of Spider-Man isn't hitting the tropes, isn't seeing Uncle Ben die every other movie, it's getting up and doing the right thing in spite of the odds. There's a reason one of the most iconic moments in the comics is Peter lifting a piece of rubble.
Spider-Man would be nothing without his supporting cast, a subject I could write very many more words about on its own, but he is not defined by loss and pain. A Spider-Man is not the sum of their tragedies, but that of his connections. Even when if feels like the world hates you, the universe is out to spite you, the weight is pressing down, its his refusal to bend and break and do the right thing. This is what these movies are celebrating. This is why Spider-Man is important to me.