Cut to the chase: “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” is crawling up the wall with originality, powerful images and an epic story that shoots down any spidey naysayers. Catch this one in theaters to get the full experience worth the lengthy runtime.
The marvelous, myriad, amazing spider-people
Oh what fun the Marvel universe has become, and Spider-Man is at the MCU apex these days. In 2015, Sony, who has owned the film rights to the property since 1998, agreed to collaborate with Marvel, who owns the rights to Spider-Man comic book and merchandise. After joining forces, the partnering production companies made headlines with “Spider-Man: No Way Home”, a live-action installment that united Spider-Men (Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield and Tom Holland) from different spidey reboots over the past two decades. Fans and critics went wild for the self-referential, ironically derivative film that poked fun at the Sony/Marvel arrangement and appealed to viewers intimately knowledgeable of the web slinger’s history.
In that vein, Marvel and Sony have struck gold again with another inventive, nostalgic and joyous work: “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse”. A follow-up to 2018’s similarly-titled “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” which won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film, “Across the Spider-Verse” is a brazenly dark and inspired entry, a twisty cine-web of gorgeous art design, full-bodied storyline and characters that are easy to forget are computer generated. Their development, both visually and emotionally, fill the screen with phantasmagoric sequences that race across the screen almost too fast to fully register. Frames are filled with so many details and hidden Easter eggs, it may take several viewings to appreciate the film completely. Most notably, the references to previous Spider-Man characters from hundreds of prior iterations is the bait that traps viewers in its web.
Let’s traverse the Spider-Verse
Picking up where the previous film left off, “Across the Spider-Verse” follows young, accidental Spider-Man Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) from Earth-1610. He’s struggling to juggle his dual life as a high schooler and web-slinging city-saver, particularly as he pines for Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld), Spider-Woman from Earth-65. With a new understanding of the Multiverse, Miles is no longer content with his small life in Brooklyn.
Gwen has also had a difficult time in her world, losing her own Peter Parker to a freak occurrence and finding herself the number one suspect in his death. When a secretive team of Spider-People offers her a place in their elite force tasked with protecting the very existence of the Multiverse, she readily accepts. Gwen returns to Miles’ universe to track down a dangerous anomaly, The Spot (Jason Schwartzman), a former scientist whose unholy (pun intended) ability to open interdimensional portals poses an existential threat to every world in the Multiverse.
Miles meets troves of Spider-People from the endless number of universes, each one delightfully original or cleverly familiar. Miles follows Gwen to new worlds where he learns the true hazard of having multiple Spider-People together is enough to unravel societies and cause universes to cease to exist. Miles must battle all the multitude of Spider-Creatures, claw his way back to his home and save his father from the fatal “canon event” set to cement Miles as a true, tormented Spider-Man of comic book lore.
The bug is contagious fun
Like the aforementioned “No Way Home”, “Across the Spider-Verse” is an ebullient good time. Composed of rich, colorful layers and animated in the various comic book styles, the film is a mood board for a teenager’s emotional evolution set against a universe-traveling superhero thriller. The angst of Miles and Gwen turns emo at times when backgrounds veer in and out of focus or half of the picture begins to look like it is literally melting off the screen. Many scenes recall the feel of an 80s Brat Pack drama, melancholic but at a tempo that allows the film to move fluidly and irresistibly.
Directors Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers and Justin Thompson play with radical images and innovative artistic direction from scene to scene. Vibrant, poignant and completely avant-garde: it’s nothing I’ve seen or felt before in an animated feature, and the energy it imbues onto audiences is, like a bite from a radioactive spider, infectious.
Know before you go
- MPAA Rating: PG for action-peril and thematic elements
- Recommended Age: 10+
- Runtime: 140 minutes
- Nightmare inducers: The Spot, the often-bumbling villain, is a comedic force for much of the film with the exception of a few heavy sequences that find him turning maniacally evil. As a whole, “Across the Spider-Verse” looks and plays like a film noir with a darker color palette, stark lighting and a consistently brooding tone. This overall penetrative atmosphere, not just one scene or character, could unnerve younger viewers.
- Difficult concepts or emotions: “Across the Spider-Verse” is not what you’d expect from an animated superhero movie. The plot is dark and incredibly complicated. Miles and Gwen flit through multi-verses, encountering hundreds of other Spider-Mans of all shapes and sizes until, eventually, they are left grappling with a somber reality: some character deaths are so intrinsic to the canon of the superhero, that to save the one they love would have catastrophic, world-ending consequences. Viewers should be mature enough to handle discussions of death, life-threatening situations and complicated friendships. They would ideally be old enough to have some understanding of Spider-Man’s history – or superhero mythology in general – to fully appreciate the film.
- Watch the official trailer here
