No matter what anyone tells you, you are under no obligation to write King Lear or an emotionally nuanced memoir or any sort of massive creative undertaking while you’re sheltering in place. It seems, however, that Iowa-based filmmaker Tarrell Christie didn’t get that particular memo, and decided to spend his quarantine finishing a project 10 months in the making. As far as we’re concerned, it was time well-spent, because look at this trailer:
You’ll find the 25-minute film at the bottom of this post, and if you’ve got half an hour to spare, it’s well worth a look. In addition to being time well-spent, it’s also money well-spent; in an email to The A.V. Club, Christie says that he “had a crew of only 3 people and a budget of $500, and the challenge of making small-town Iowa look like New York, which ended up taking 200+ VFX shots.”
Honestly, the dream of a live-action Miles Morales (here winningly played by Lakin Mims) alone makes this worth watching, but Christie’s decision to connect it explicitly to the Tobey Maguire-starring Sam Raimi trilogy is no small part of the fun here. It is, in a sense, a piece of dual-level fan fiction: a story about Miles Morales, and a story about a world where those movies were followed by a new franchise centered on this terrific character. And Christie makes the promise of future stories a part of the fun, because yes, there is a post-credits scene.
