Typing these titles out is going to be exhausting.
I think the best compliment I can give Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is that it made me interested in a a genre and a medium (respectively) that I have next to no interest in anymore: the superhero movie on the one hand and the big budget animated film on the other.
The ubiquity of the former speaks for itself. Nerds rule the world now, and we’ve become a poorer place for it. The latter is a more of an individualized peccadillo, but the glut of subpar Pixar and Pixar copycat films with their same rising and falling action has certainly contributed to this exhaustion. That the first “Spider-Verse” movie came out like a bolt from a blue/manna from heaven/whatever cliché you want to use is basically holy writ. Even the biggest critical curmudgeons I know (bigger than me!) loved it. And while I think a subsequent revisit lessened its charms a hair for me, it was absolutely the most deserved Oscar win in its category in a very long time, and is the kind of movie I would hold no shame in alofting as an ideal example of the “hero’s journey”.
The sequel has a lot working against it: expectations, a changed creative nucleus, and being buffeted between live action films that keep riffing on its same multiversal concept (one, The Flash, is even coming out two weeks hence). That it largely bounds over them all is deeply impressive. That it manages to find a way to actually say something about the genre and its adherents is near miraculous.
Across the Spider-Verse picks up a few years after Into the Spider-Verse left Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) saying goodbye to his friends from other dimensions, namely Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld) and Peter B. Parker (Jake Johnson) and getting back to life as normal. Balancing out his superheroic life as Spider-Man and his obligations to school and family remains difficult, but his police officer dad Jeff Morales (Brian Tyree Henry) is about to get promoted to Captain and things look to be on the upswing. That is, until a villain that Miles inadvertently had a hand in creating, The Spot (Jason Schwartzman) begins to wreck havoc; first in Miles’ home turf and then across the multiverse. Then stokes off a reunion with Gwen, which leads to Miles stumbling into a entire consortium of Spider-People, all led by the futuristic Spider-Man Miguel O’Hara (Oscar Isaac). To which Miles discovers that even among people who share his amazing abilities, he’s still seen as an outsider.
Much like its predecessor, Across the Spider-Verse not only carries over the same visual panache, it enhances it. Kicking off with a vollying between the vibrant cityscape of Miles’ Brooklyn and the cooler pastels-inflected version of Gwen’s home, rather than pulling back, the film gets wilder and wilder in its pop art leanings. Before you know it, your eyes feast on an array of mixed media and character designs that all carry their own specific palettes. From Hobie Brown’s (Daniel Kaluuya) punk-print newspaper aesthetic to Ben Reilly (Andy Samberg) being ripped (pun intended) right out of the late Tom Lyle’s pen, even when the narrative felt like it was buying some time for an extended action sequence my attention only flagged a hair because there was always something fascinating to look at.
Yet, in the service of the script, that stuff is just candy-coating and happily the story mostly does find its way to justify its own existence beyond franchise extension. It could just be a fun romp and the cynical part of my brain would only occasionally register the commercial aspect of it all. But it’s hard not to admire how the creative team found a way to calibrate the sort of opiate the masses have come to expect while diving into a message that has something of a bite. Long-story short: racist comic book fans have taken umbrage with Miles since his inception over a decade ago. So to see a film that centers Miles as an outlier and even a “canon-breaker” as he’s being hunted by a literal army of Spider-Men and Women feels daring, even if fairly inside baseball for the general public. There’s even a terrific cameo to drive that point home.
That Gwen and the key supporting Spider-characters are more than just window dressing this time is also a big win. Gwen in particular gets a fully fleshed out character arc and her police officer father (Shea Wigham) is a key figure. Peter also gets a nice bit of evolution now that he’s reunited with Mary Jane (Zoe Kravitz) and have had their first child. And even more backgrounded characters like Miguel and Hobie are presented in a more three-dimensional way than the jovial but thin presentation of the cast that populated the previous effort. What’s most impressive is that even with this extra screentime, Miles’ own journey is never sacrificed. He remains the central figure and everything revolves around him to Across the Spider-Verse‘s benefit.
If there’s a qualm to be had, it’s that even with all of these plates to spin, there is still a bit of a struggle with time management particularly when the third act kicks in. There were points where, no matter how visually splendiferous, one can only watch Miles hop through building corridors so many times before overload sets in. Though that’s more or less endemic to these superhero joints by now, more troublesome is that Across the Spider-Verse doesn’t actually have an ending. For those who haven’t paid much attention (like me!), this is the first part of a duology that will see its conclusion in March of next year. That’s not disqualifying in of itself, but that it meekly makes its way to the finish line with a routine cliffhanger that screams Saturday Morning Cartoon is a bit deflating.
But a film that’s 80% excellent or more is hard to turn your nose up at. And for the first time since the last one, I have a Marvel related outing that I could see myself watching again.