When Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse was showered with praise upon release in 2018, the adoration was effusive but concentrated; people were primarily dazzled by the idiosyncratic art style and the meaningful character work amid swells of IP-mashing. James Gunn called it “the best superhero movie ever made,” and indeed it often felt like a best-in-show, pivoting expertly from wild irreverence to hard-earned pathos. Yet, on some level the film was still a relatively traditional origin story that we’d seen many times before. Its sequel, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, travels worlds to upend its own status quo, spinning a truly unique and sometimes devastating narrative that finally matches its visual ambitions.
Funny enough, Across the Spider-Verse is in no rush to impress from the jump: It uses the same tactic as the original of building grounded characters in the early goings and putting tangible, real-life obstacles in their path. At nearly two hours and 30 minutes, it’s the longest animated film to be released by a major American studio, and the lower-tempo first act suggests confidence on the part of writers Phil Lord, Chris Miller, and David Callaham. They have something truly wild up their sleeves, but they know it’s not going to have the proper emotional weight without necessary table-setting.
The only real surprise up top is that the story is told from the point of view of Haliee Steinfield’s Gwen Stacy, who mourns the death of her friend Peter Parker and struggles to connect with her father, a police captain bent on arresting her alter ego (Spider-Woman, but Spider-Gwen to us). She doesn’t feel at home in her universe anymore, a feeling shared by Miles (Shameik Moore), who after saving the world once is more than ready to emancipate himself from the frustratingly finite expectations of his parents (Brian Tyree Henry and Luna Lauren Vélez). Miles misses his Spider-pals, so when Gwen shows up in his universe to monitor a portal-making baddie called The Spot (Jason Schwartzman), Miles isn’t about to stay put when the action starts hurtling through different realities.
To say more about the plot would do a disservice to the host of surprises the filmmakers have in store, but it’s no exaggeration to suggest the second half has as many narrative hairpins as it does artistic innovations. Viewers learn more about the mythology of the Spider-Verse, including details that make us see Miles’ own origin in a different light. Each revelation deftly presents the main characters with new dilemmas that shape what kind of hero they want to be: the ones who fight for the many, the ones who fight for the few, or the ones who think they can do both at what might be the greatest personal cost.
The writers also have baked some crucial meta-themes into the narrative, examining why superhero blockbusters tend to tell pretty much the same story over and over again. Will the universe collapse if a hero forces a change to the canon? If that dire outcome keeps our protagonist from realizing their fullest potential, well, maybe everything should end after all.
Much will be written about how the film blows the doors off traditional computer animation, but the leaps in art styling cannot be understated. We’re used to Miles’ crosshatched, graffiti-tagged world that alternates between 24 and 12 frames per second; but Gwen’s universe is more surreal, with imprecise line work that recalls The Triplets of Bellville and wide paint strokes that refuse to be contained by borders, seeming to blot and spread depending on her mood. (One particular scene prompted gasps from the audience, and it’s just a shot of an apartment bleeding white behind a long-awaited reconciliation.)
There’s also a world where New York is spliced with Mumbai, bearing intricate patterns that host Across the Spider-Verse’s most concentrated color work. Among the many other designs, there’s a throwback four-color comic-strip style, plus some erratic black-and-white hand-drawn animation. Heck, there’s even some live-action footage. It’s a credit to directors Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson that the whole thing doesn’t look like mud. Instead, the various animation styles are carefully deployed so our brains start to associate characters with their respective worlds — such as Spider-Punk, who looks like he was cobbled together from magazine cutouts stuck to the wall of a dive bar bathroom.
Unfortunately, even at an epic runtime, it’s all over too soon: The abrupt closing credits elicit the same exasperation that audiences felt at the end of Back to the Future Part II and The Matrix Reloaded — not just because those were also cliffhangers (Beyond the Spider-Verse will complete the story next year), but because those stories had likewise reassembled the settled science of the original films and had just started to blaze a much stranger path before “to be continued” ruined the momentum.
While some cliffhanger films have learned the subtle art of ending at what feels like a natural stopping point, Across the Spider-Verse seems to just get winded and drop. There’s no real climax here — unless the filmmakers consider it a five-act film, which would qualify a big chase through Spider Society as the story’s culmination — but the story feels like it’s entering its final stretch in a rainy, red-tinted denouement, before cutting to credits after about 20 minutes of new story tangents.
Worse, the film suggests a conclusion via its narrator undergoing an arc, but that arc feels frustratingly surface-level. A character choosing a path isn’t the same thing as having their perspective changed, much as the voice-over insists that it sees things differently now. While the movie is chock-full of emotional upheavals, any satisfaction tied to the final moments is purely the result of clever plot machinations, not changes of heart.
Despite the spoil of riches offered by Across the Spider-Verse, it remains difficult to judge as half a narrative. We could be seeing the early parts of a new genre hallmark, or perhaps Beyond the Spider-Verse will suffer the same fate as many threequels and return to familiarity while restoring order to its universe. The Spider-Verse team hopefully will follow their mission statement of upsetting canon all the way to the end. After all, if we can’t find a resolution for our heroes without putting them through the same paces over and over again, superhero cinema doesn’t have much of a future. And neither does Miles.
Published: Jun 2, 2023 02:54 pm