Despite being marketed on difference, Prime Video’s new Spider-Man series, Spider-Noir goes a lot further than what you might expect. The Nicolas Cage-led film noir pastiche delivers one of the most unhinged Spider-Man heroes ever conceived, as Cage’s Ben Reilly wrestles with his responsibilities as a reluctant hero, and has the one of the most disturbing episodes of Marvel TV ever made. Episodes 5 and 6 – “Betrayal” and “Nightmare on a Gurney” – is far more like a classic Universal Horror movie than a superhero show, and it is the best advert for the Sony show’s black and white viewing option. It also reveals Reilly’s incredibly dark origin story.
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Typically, the Spider-Man origin story has been fairly straightforward both in the comics and in every adaptation. It’s so familiar, in fact, that the MCU confidently ignored it entirely, feeling it was unnecessary to retell such a retrodden story. The formula remains the same – and the Spider-Verse movies cleverly enshrined the familiar details into all lore by calling the spider bite a “canon event”, along with the death of Uncle Ben (or an equivalent). But in pursuit of difference, Spider-Noir introduces a new take on the origin that not only delivers on the body horror element of the hero’s traditional transformation, but also introduces a Marvel villain we’ve not seen in live-action. And the result is as brilliant as it is haunting.
Spider-Noir’s Completely Rewritten Spider-Man Origin is Marvel’s Darkest (& Introduces Man Spider!)
Up until the mid-point of Spider-Noir, we’re led to believe the Silvermane gang – Flint Marko (Jack Huston), Dirk Leydon (Andrew Lewis Caldwell), and Lonnie Lincoln (Abraham Popoola) – gained superpowers (and unfortunate mutations) thanks to something they were subjected to as prisoners of war during World War I. In “Nightmare on a Gurney”, the full nightmarish truth is revealed in a flashback that shows Ben Reilly was part of the mission that liberated the POWs from a German camp in France. Reilly and his squad discover the underground lab, where American POWs were injected with mutated plant and mineral materials spliced with animal DNA. That included scorpions, snakes, and eels (the organic electricity is what powers Leydon’s superpowered alterego Megawatt. Lonnie Lincoln appears to get his Tombstone powers from a crab given his skin mutations. Quite how Marko becomes Sandman is… unclear.
While rescuing the tragic soldiers, Ben comes across a room of veterans in hospital beds, including one who has been mutated into the half-arachnid, half-man nightmare on a gurney of the episode’s title: Man-Spider. The classic Spider-Man villain is like a Cronenberg-inspired monstrosity, barely human any more, and it bites Ben, infecting him with an unholy cocktail of tainted DNA that gives him his own superpowers. We then get a simply genius body horror transformation that might well go down as one of Nicolas Cage’s greatest ever achievements in acting, and later discover that the US army experimented on further, attempting to weaponize his powers. That prompted him to flee, and change his name to Ben Reilly (the suggestion being that he was previously known as Peter Parker).
Spider-Man: Brand New Day is apparently revealing its own take on the Man-Spider story, as Tom Holland’s Peter Parker goes through an unwanted mutation, but Spider-Noir went one further. And the series landing on streaming meant we got a far more R-rated version than the MCU could ever deliver on. The only issue now is I really want to see a full-blooded horror movie with Man-Spider in.
All 8 episodes of Spider-Noir are streaming on Prime Video now. What do you think? Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the ComicBook Forum!
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