[8.8/10] The cliche for any sequel is “more”. Take what the audience liked from the first installment and just keep piling it on. On the surface, you could mistake *Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse* as suffering from the same pathology.
Its predecessor, *Into the Spider-Verse* had seven spider-people. *Across the Spider-Verse* has a hundred. *Into the Spider-Verse* gave us a glimpse of a handful of alternate realities. *Across the Spider-Verse* spends meaningful time in scads of them. *Into the Spider-Verse* clocked in at less than two hours. *Across the Spider-Verse* spills twenty minutes over that benchmark and demands another outing to finish its story. To the casual observer, this surfeit of cinematic real estate and the spider-beings who occupy it could be mistaken for second-installment bloat.
Except that *Across the Spider-Verse* is not mere excess. It is, insead, redolent with added ambition. Its predecessor stunned with a distinctive, cel-shaded art style, occasionally pierced by denizens with more anime or Looney Tunes-inspired aesthetics. *Across the Spider-Verse* elevates the visual brilliance to jaw-dropping, superlative levels.
Miles Morales’ cel-shaded digs return. But so too does Spider-Gwen’s watercolor world. The futuristic metropolis and impossible geometry of Spider-Man 2099’s headquarters. The parchment-styled weathering of a da Vinci-inspired Vulture. The bustling, South Asian-inspired environs of Spider-Man India. The Zine Queen cut out look of Spider-Punk. The transfixing and occasionally disturbing visage of The Spot as his form grows more and more frazzled and medium-defying the more interdimensional energy he absorbs. 2-D. 3-D. Stop Motion. Live action. Digital designs. Ink and paint creations. Comic panels. Old polygons. New pixels. The new Spider-Verse entry is a triumph of medium-blending glory where the milieu is part of the text and subtext and themes at the heart of the piece.
The same goes for the action. *Into the Spider-Verse* featured all manner of memorable sequences. *Avatar: The Last Airbender* veteran Joaquim Dos Santos is among the film’s co-directors, and it’s hard not to feel his influence as this follow-up feature ups the ante. Miles has a comical but brilliant “Now that’s thinking with portals” skirmish with The Spot. The omnibus all-comers spidey-fight is the pinnacle of arachnid spectacle it should be. The kinetic and frenetic energy, rife with medium-mixing action, remains a staple of the movie’s cinematic grammar.
But it’s just as winsome in quieter moments. The way the light brightens amid a hug between Gwen and her father. The way she and Miles share a peculiar perspective as they gaze upon the skyline of the city together. The look of pain in her and Peter B. Parker’s eyes when Miles learns the truth. There is an expressiveness, a commitment to using every last inch of every last frame to make you marvel and gasp and *feel* the meaning behind each moment through imagery alone that would be worth the price of admission even if *Across* had nothing else to offer.
Thankfully, it also has a plot that is remarkably ambitious and untroubled by traditional forms. Despite its multiversal bent, *Into the Spider-Verse* is a remarkably tight and focused film. That’s to its credit, taking a wild-eyed story, anchoring it in both the universal and the specific, and making it feel deceptively simple.
As a follow-up, *Across the Spider-Verse* is epic, multi-faceted, even messy. There are scores of moving parts. Two reintroductions and brief “While you were gone” recaps to orient the audience. All of space-time is at stake once again, but the solution is not as straightforward as stopping the big bad machine. It’s to resew the fabric of the universe as tears emerge in the wake of the last solution. The villain is an overlooked consequence of the first movie’s adventures swollen to eldritch horror proportions; and the villain is one of your own, sacrificing the noble principles that your kind are founded upon in the name of preserving the status quo; and the villain is...well...you, denied the good fortune and cosmic protection you inadvertently stole. Oh yeah, and it’s only part one.
Despite the scope, the movie never feels like too much or anything less than self-assured. There’s a lot going on here, narratively, personally, and thematically. But it all feels built to fit together, designed to build toward a greater whole, while embracing a complexity and ambition that few films are willing to entrust general audiences with.
Part of what keeps that kaleidoscopic plotting accessible and comprehensible is that it’s always grounded in the emotions and psychology of the characters. This is, on the surface, a story about myriad reflections of the Web-Head crashing down on one another. But it is, at heart, about two adolescents struggling with their relationships with their parents as they try to “find their tribe” and their place in the world as budding adults.
The great claim-to-fame of the original Spider-Man comics was that Peter Parker was a hero who fought colorful bad guys on rooftops, but who also had real problems like family and rent, just like you. *Across the Spider-Verse* carries on that spirit. Amid the reality-shifting dramatics, the film is spurred by Gwen suffering when her loving father learns her true identity and recoils. And it’s spurred by Miles wanting to grow up and grow away from his loving but enveloping parents, so he can venture off and find a community that he thinks will understand him and help him to follow his dreams.
The circumstances are extreme. But the conversations between parents and children are real. There’s an almost shocking verisimilitude -- borne by writing, performance, and animation in concert -- to the back and forths between Gwen and Captain Stacy, and between Miles, Jeff, and Rio. The tone of being reluctant to accept the love of someone you worry won’t fully accept you. The frustration of failing to live up to your parents’ standards while still trying to define your own. That definitively Spider-Man quality of feeling as though you’re trying so hard and still letting everybody down. Peer down into the bottom of this film, and you will find truth, gushing out of each frame as much as the aesthetic glory.
You can feel it in the way Gwen and Miles relate to one another, two kids on unique journeys who feel like the world doesn’t understand them. You can feel it in the words of parents like Jeff, Rio, Captain Stacy, and a gloriously returning Peter B. Parker, who think the world of these kids but worry about their future and how to keep them on the right path. And you can feel it in that universal, youthful sense of longing for a new adventure worthy of the new you, and in the equal and opposite chastening that can come when you realize it’s not always less complicated or as warm as the comforts of home.
This is an epic film, full of big ideas. But it never floats away or gets lost amid its own dizzying scale. Because it keeps those real feelings at the center of everything it sets out to achieve.
Those ideas give the movie ballast though. The premise of the film is that Gwen has joined an interdimensional “Spider Society” whose mission is to repair the anomalies caused by Kingpin’s collider in the first film. The twist is that Miles cannot join her there, because he is, in many ways, the original anomaly. His spider bite came from an arachnid meant for another universe. He wasn’t meant to be Spider-Man.
The reveal works on so many levels. There is great power in making the practical and emotional obstacle of the piece a statement to a mixed race child that they don’t belong. He receives nothing but rejection from a community he thought would accept him, because of what he is rather than who he is. In a film with people of color prominently in front of and behind the “camera”, that comes with a particular resonance.
To the same end, there is a meta commentary on the nature of Miles as a character and his place in the broader Spider-Man media franchise. Considering the real life racist backlash to the fancasting of Donald Glover as Spidey (which gets a nod in the form of his cameo as MCU Prowler), it’s easy to read those sentiments about him as being an aberration or a mistake in the light of fans who rejected Miles because he wasn’t Peter, because he was Black and Latino, because he didn’t fit all of the standard tropes that had been cranked out for Spidey across hundreds of projects.
I trust the rebuke of these things will come in time, but textualizing the backlash Miles’ champions have had to fight in real life, with the same sentiment Miles must combat in a fictional one, dovetails with the sharp meta commentary that has come with these films to date.
And last, but not least, it’s worth noting that at the core of the dispute between Miles, who wants to chart his own path apart from both mom and dad and the Spider Society, and Miguel O’Hara, its ostensible leader who wants to repair the foundations of the multiverse, is characterized as a dispute over “preserving canon.”
There’s a striking notion baked into that framing. The film posits that certain events that have recurred across time and mediums for Spider-Man -- things like a mentor perishing, the death of a noble captain, and other iconic Web-Head moments -- are fixed points in any Spider-Man story. They must occur, lest the bounds of reality be shattered and everything be lost in their wake.
In a less complex film, that could be taken as the bare oppression of conformity (one sure to be dismissed reflexively by Hubie Brown, the film’s infectiously entertaining anti-authority punk Web-Head). More to the point, it dovetails with themes of established gatekeepers telling a mixed race child that the status quo must be maintained, and comics purists rejecting alternate takes on the traditional (mostly white) vision of Spider-Man.
But the purveyors of these ideas are not facile straw men. They are, for one thing, Miles’ friends. The thing that spurs Miles to resist is the sense that this adherence to canon means his soon-to-be-promoted-to-captain father must die. Peter B. Parker makes the case, one made in countless Spider-Man works before, that loss is difficult, but that it helps spur Spider-people to be who they need to be, to accept the responsibility that comes with the great power and be a force for good in the world.
As much as he is the film’s antagonist, Miguel O’Hara is a poster child for someone who tried to disrupt that idea, and lost everything in the process. He lost his family, and pulled a *Rick and Morty* (whose influence is keenly felt here) by hopping into another universe where his alt-reality equivalent died to take his place. The rush of images we see suggest the universe rejected him like a human body rejecting a new organ, and the whole world, including the daughter he wanted so desperately to reunite with, was lost. He has walked the path of putting your own happiness and desires above “the way things must be”, and he’s seen the consequence.
More than that, the shocking tease at the end of the film is a clever depositing of Miles into the universe whose spider he inadvertently stole. He sees the consequences of a world without a Spider-Man. He sees the hardship and misery, for his family and for his community, that his own self-actualization is accidentally built on. These are not easy things to reject or ignore, but rather strong counterbalances to our natural sympathies for Miles.
And still, despite that, there remains great sympathy for the defiers of canon. Much remains to be explored and vindicated in the forthcoming third film in the series. But signs point to validating our heroes even if they stray from the usual or accepted arachnid touchpoints. If *Into the Spider-Verse* seemed designed to prove that anyone could be legitimate as Spider-Man so long as they take in his ideals and refuse to give up; the two follow-ups seem poised to suggest that you can, in fact, chart your own path away from what has always been, and be no less valid, no less real, no less worthy.
The other main poles of the story exemplify that. The delightful-turned-horrifying Spot is a “villain of the week” determined to flip the script and become a true nemesis and fearsome destroyer of worlds. Spider-Gwen is a version of a character who is, in the vaunted canon, meant to be one of those tragic losses that wounds the Web-Head but ultimately sharpens his resolve; and she is, instead, the hero who lost *him* and decides to keep going. And Miles is an accident, someone who became Spider-Man by happenstance and deviation rather than by inertia or fate, who nonetheless validates his place in the silky firmament of arachnid tales with each choice he takes to vindicate the good they fight for, and the good in himself, whether or not it fits with what came before.
To encompass all of this in one-hundred and forty minutes is remarkable. To try to accomplish it in double that time still seems like a lot. But as kinsmen like *Everything Everywhere All at Once* (which receives a small shout-out here) demonstrates, there is great transcendence to be had in weaving together text and metatext and character and commentary and stunning visual acumen into a greater whole.
*Across the Spider-Verse* is certainly that too. It is a worthy successor to the 2018 film, maintaining the same comic air, remixing energy, and emotional depth. But it also raises the bar, letting its palette, its ideas, its characters expand and grow more complex with the added mandate and leeway that comes with such a success. The creative team behind the film have arrived with something that does not simply go for more. It goes achingly deeper, jaw-droppingly wider, and poignantly further than anything we’ve seen before.
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