Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

The first thing to know about Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is that it’s part one of two. The conclusion is titled Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse, and is scheduled for a U.S. release at the end of March 2024. I mention that up front because if you’re like me and avoided everything you could about the film, you probably missed when that was announced a couple years ago, and also that Kemp Powers (one of the directors) recently revealed that Across the Spider-Verse ends on a cliffhanger. Although, if you took that approach, you likely waited to read my review until after seeing the film, so this doesn’t help you. *shrugs*

I also mention it up top because it explained why the plot setup felt so long. I didn’t have a watch in the theater, but it was probably over a hour of the movie that was primarily concerned with putting the pieces on the chessboard. Not that the table setting ends there; we’re still being introduced to characters until near the end of the film, although by that point they’re almost exclusively ones we’ve met before and just need some more depth/backstory. On the one hand, I appreciate any time a story takes its time unspooling its plot and characters, taking care to build them up and weave a bunch of nuance throughout. On the other, it really dragged out, and it meant that a number of the offers they gesture towards don’t really come into play until the film’s almost over. For example, although we first encounter Miguel maybe 20 minutes into the film, we don’t meet him or get a bigger sense of what his deal is and his role in the story until over an hour later.

Most of these plants do payoff quite well. To keep on Miguel, his place in the Spider-Verse is quite interesting. And although his main role is that of “consistency cop” (i.e. a common role in time travel or multiverse tales), there are a handful of extra wrinkles which raise enough questions to get your head racing, excited to dig deeper into them. I left the theater with a number of hypotheses concerning dangling plot threads, feeling some mix of eager to find out the answers, and frustrated at being forced to wait.

The piece of the story we get is pretty solid, if not too fresh. We start with Gwen (Hailee Steinfeld) lamenting the isolation that comes with these powers and this calling. Of course, her dad George (Shea Whigham) is the police captain hell-bent on tracking down Spider-Woman since he’s convinced she killed his daughter’s best friend. Miguel (Oscar Isaac) and Jessica (Issa Rae) show up to help her defeat Vulture (Jorma Taccone), and she leaves to join the Spider-Society, just after revealing her identity to her father during the battle.

Meanwhile, Miles (Shameik Moore) is trying to juggle high school with crime fighting, and not doing a great job. He fails to contain villain of the week “The Spot” (Jason Schwartzman), who is focused on defeating Miles for ruining his life as a nobody scientist during the climax of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Miles attempts to navigate the fallout of his erratic behavior with his family, but much like Gwen cannot tell them his secret, and so is left brooding. When Gwen shows up, able to hop dimensions now that she’s in Spider-Society, they both revel in being around someone who understands them, where they feel they belong.

And that’s when the story finally gets going. As I said, there’s a lot happening in the plot, and an unfortunate amount of it is given in exposition dumps. But at least the idea is interesting.

When Vulture showed up earlier, he was clearly from another multi-verse. He looked like he was made from the paper you often see used for old scientific drawings. That’s why Miguel and Jessica pop in to help: these accidental and random dimension hops are happening more and more, and Spider-Society is tasked with resolving them. So when Gwen starts dropping some gadgets in Miles’ universe to keep an eye on The Spot, it’s clear Miles underestimated how dangerous he really would become.

So the story is going to follow our heroes interactions with the Spider-Society as they try to contain The Spot, as well as reckon with what it means to interfere with other universes.

Of course, that’s not really what it’s about. Parent/child relationships during the teenage years is a key through line, as we spend a lot of time with Gwen and Miles feeling unable to talk to anyone, which leads to them feeling bitter and angry. The will they, won’t they relationship between Miles and Gwen is a big piece, of course, as anyone could have guessed after Into the Spider-Verse.

But the big one that begins to emerge is fate. First in small ways, when Gwen mentions that in every other universe, where Spider-Man and Gwen get together, Gwen ends up dying. Later, Miguel explains that each Spider-Person experiences “canon events”, and any deviation will cause the dimension they’re in to crumble, killing anyone inside it. Which raises the interesting question of why this is true for all of them, and what is it that truly ties them together? What makes those particular events so important? The movie more directly goes after the more standard question of what fate means, and how set in stone is it. It’s a common multi-verse/time travel question, and one I always enjoy seeing characters grapple with.

Our hero simply asserting it’s wrong because he wants it to be wrong is not grappling with it. Nor is claiming that Miguel is advocating letting an innocent person die because some algorithm says so, immediately after Miguel talks about (and we see) what happened when he tried to circumvent a canon event. And it’s even more annoying when a few other characters come around to Miles’ side with no convincing.

Which is really emblematic of my issues with the film. I liked it overall, but its plot was definitely weaker than Into the Spider-Verse. Each theme and idea raised wasn’t explored too in depth, and it hit the same beats that almost every story dealing with these topics hits. Which isn’t bad, but it’s not going to hit hard or wow me. It sets a high floor, but a low ceiling. Some of that is definitely due to it being told across two films, right? It’s a common and solid tactic to introduce thematic elements in a simple form, then layer on top of them to build your ideas. Sure enough, we start to get some more interesting ideas near the end (one in particular, but that’s a spoiler).

Another major one is some of how it undermines its own stakes. For one, Miles starts to gain some more abilities which help him out in specific situations, but they sort of come out of nowhere, and reduce his need to solve the problem. But worse is establishing power level, which plagues most superhero stories at some point. Our hero fights a minor bad guy and has a lot of trouble in order to keep the scene interesting. Later, they need to fight off more characters, each of whom is highly skilled. You need to do a decent chunk of work in between in order for that to land, and they don’t here. While they’re trying to say it’s because he’s distracted by life, he can’t seem to beat the minor bad guy when they square off. So how can he possibly beat everyone coming after him? It seems to be because the script calls for it.

The film also contained a lot of fan service. Some of them are cameos I’ll leave for you to discover, and if I’m being honest, they kind of work in part because of how loud they are. But many of them are the inclusion of characters or memes that don’t add anything, and are just distracting. For example, the Spider-Man pointing meme is a somewhat fun but mostly a dumb 5 seconds where the movie grinds to a halt, and we already did it during the end-credits of Into the Spider-Verse. More noticeable are the heavy use of comic book editorial blurbs. They’re used to label characters throughout, most extensively in the Spider-Society, when they’re on screen for a split second. It’s an odd choice. Why not leave it a Where’s Waldo? for the hardcore nerds? I’ve heard the suggestion that it’s the filmmakers saying “Listen, you’re not going to be able to read these until home viewing, but just know we know our stuff.” Which would be tremendously insecure: the entire rest of the movie should be what convinces the audience to trust you. Most egregious is the few times it’s used to define terms in throwaway lines, like “hammerspace”. If you don’t have confidence your audience knows the term, then just don’t use it. Especially since all the times they do it, the term isn’t important.

And the humor didn’t often land for me. It did get a few laughs, but it felt…I dunno, unsubstantial? Tossed off? I can’t quite put my finger on it. The way it’s used with Spider-Punk is a great showcase for what I’m talking about: it just doesn’t seem like it received the same care as the rest of the film. Which is all the more noticeable because Into the Spider-Verse really worked for me. But humor is super subjective, so maybe it’ll hit for you.

Alright, enough bagging on the plot, what about the visuals? I left those until the end in part because if you’ve seen the trailer, you know the answer.

Into the Spider-Verse was one of the boldest and most unique looking mainstream movies in quite some time, if not ever. The blend of animation styles in the same frame was completely seamless. Each of the characters from each dimension looked completely different, and had their own entire vibe, and yet all came together in a way that felt like they belonged. It was an incredible achievement, and we’ve seen the impact it’s had on mainstream animated movies since. Most recently, I think of Puss In Boots: The Last Wish, which blended styles for both some of the big fight scenes (like the opening giant battle) and for the Wolf. Into the Spider-Verse taught studios you can try big, bold, intense, impressionistic designs and audiences will accept it, as long as you have a clear motivation for doing so. I don’t think anything from the past five years is on its level.

And yet somehow, somehow, Across the Spider-Verse blows it out of the water.

This is the best looking animated movie you’re likely to see for a good long while, save for Beyond the Spider-Verse, which I have to imagine will be on par due to being worked on simultaneously. The sheer audacity and confidence on display here is astounding. Each dimension has its own, completely different aesthetic and animation style. From hazy water color backgrounds for Gwen’s world to the sleeker modern animation feel mixed with digital separation of Miles’ to the collage style of Spider-Punk’s to the traditional feel with tons of color splashes for Spider-Man India. The portals between worlds look like nothing else, just an explosion of color and distortion and glitching and three dimensions in a flat plane. While many of the scenes are quite busy, all these visual flourishes actually help the characters we’re focused on pop, so following the action isn’t a problem. It all comes together in such a remarkable way, I can barely believe it.

It’s hard for me to convey how stunning it all looks, and how each dimension’s design shows more creativity and risk-taking than most entire movies. They feel appropriate for the content of the world and characters we meet and the purpose they serve. The animation team deserves every single award, a standing-ovation, and the keys to the city. Every city.

There is one more reveal I’d like to discuss, but it gets into spoilers. So be warned that after the jump, I’ll be discussing some stuff from the very end of the movie.

Spoiler alert!!!

The most interesting idea of the whole movie to me is the idea that Miles is himself the original glitch. That the spider that bit him is from Earth-42 instead of from his own Earth-1610, and so the natural order is off, which is why there are more and more random dimension hops happening. Which jives with Into the Spider-Verse: it’s been a bit since I’ve watched it, but I recall that spider glitching in the same exact way a being in the wrong dimension does. Which melds nicely with the idea that most Spider-People feel so isolated until finding their place in the Spider-Society, since Miles literally has nowhere he belongs or can fit in. It also starts to present a reason that maybe he can ignore the “canon events”, although we of course don’t yet know if that will work.

Relatedly, we take note a few times that Miguel seems…different. And the movie really wants us to notice. It calls out how he’s not as goofy as every other Spider-Person, for one. But most significantly, he doesn’t seem to have spider powers. He uses claws to climb the train, and his web seems to be high-tech as opposed to natural. Is Miguel not actually a Spider-Person? If not, was he supposed to be? Was the spider which bit Miles supposed to bite Miguel? Is Miguel a flat out impostor, and if so, what’s his ultimate goal?

And of course, I’m fascinated by Earth-42 Miles as The Prowler, and how Earth-1610 Miles is going to deal with him.

All of that helps bolster my argument that this film feels weaker by nature of being split in two. They come in so late, but are the most complex and have so much potential for exploration and interesting execution.

In any case, this was a pretty good film, made disappointing by wasted potential. But I’ll of course be eagerly awaiting the third one.