Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)

Five years and one Oscar later, Into the Spider-Verse just happens to be my favorite Spider-Man film. Apologies to Spider-Man 2 and Far From Home, which are the best that live-action Spidey has to offer, but Into the Spider-Verse is such a diamond absolute of a movie, so entertaining in an effortless way that belies its complex juggling act. It was a joy to queue it up the night before seeing its sequel, Across the Spider-Verse, which might have been a bad idea: Across is fantastic, but its predecessor was perfect. 

Sixteen months after becoming his world’s Spider-Man, Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) is still juggling his responsibilities to his school, his family, and his city. But a surprise visit from his not-so-secret crush Gwen “Spider-Woman” Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld) forces Miles to reckon with his place in the Spider-Verse, an interconnected multiversal web of superheroes under attack from the villainous Spot (Jason Schwartzman). Miles finds himself teaming with old friends like recent dad Peter B. Parker (Jake Johnson) and new allies like Spider-Man India (Karan Soni) and Spider-Punk (Daniel Kaluuya) – all led by the humorless Miguel O’Hara (Oscar Isaac), who understands Miles’s great responsibility better than anyone.

 

Across the Spider-Verse goes big. It’s purportedly the longest animated film in American cinematic history, and it’s packed to the gills with more spider-people than most comic books can accommodate. Across begins with an extended sequence set on Earth-65, home of Spider-Gwen, and it’s such an engaging bit of table-setting that one fairly wishes the whole movie had been Gwen’s; the scene looks like something out of a Robbi Rodriguez comic, and the film might very well have been Gwen’s wholesale had the second act kept her front and center. (Fear not, true believers, Sony has already promised Gwen will be leading a spin-off film and, we can reasonably assume, next year’s Beyond the Spider-Verse.)

 

Indeed, my second-biggest gripe with Across – albeit far from a dealbreaker – is that the film struggles to be a two-hander between Gwen and Miles. It reminds one of middle chapters like The Empire Strikes Back and Infinity War, both of which interposed their antagonists as protagonists while splitting up the good guys on parallel narrative tracks. The first and third acts of Across belong to Gwen, but the middle act is solidly Miles, still plucky and earnest with his tongue firmly in his cheek. In the first film, he managed to turn the theory of relativity into a cheesy pick-up line, and here he’s fully inherited the uniquely Spider-Man brand of goofball sarcasm. Across never quite balances them the way that Empire so gracefully did – we lose Gwen’s plot when we see her through Miles’s eyes – but if Gwen is this film’s Leia, Miles is still squarely its Luke. 

 

Like Luke Skywalker, Miles enters into a much bigger world in Across, serving also as the audience’s gateway into the larger realm of the Spider-Verse. These sequences on the densely-populated Earth-928 are going to be ripe for a home video audience to freeze-frame and analyze, loaded with cameos and references from the last sixty years of Spider-Man content. But amid all these homages and single-frame appearances, the creative team have not forgotten to anchor it all to compelling story arcs for the primary characters – their longing to belong, their fears of commitment, and their rebellious wonderings whether they’re able to write their own stories. This, after all, is what made Into the Spider-Verse such a roaring success – that we managed to meet no fewer than five new Spiders and parallel versions of villains like Doctor Octopus, all in under two hours without shortchanging any of them.

 

The makers of Across have more time to play, but paradoxically it seems they didn’t have enough time, because the film speeds along for two hours and twenty minutes before slamming on the brakes. To be fair, ending a story with “to be continued” is one of the oldest and noblest traditions in comic book history, and it does solidify the film in conversation with Empire Strikes Back and Infinity War. Yet while I’m a little rankled that the film stops rather than ends, I think my principal complaint is actually the fact that I don’t have more of this film already being injected directly into my eyeballs. The principal story arcs have mostly concluded, and the characters have made choices that show how far they’ve grown, but there is still something shamelessly corporate about mandating my attendance at Beyond the Spider-Verse by withholding the end of the story until March 2024. (Don’t worry, guys, I was already planning on it!)

 

I never check my watch during a movie, and so I had thought the third act was just ramping up when Across flashed those three cliffhanger words across our screen. And so, if that’s actually the beginning of a brand-new first act, I’m legitimately excited to see what happens next. I’m equally thrilled to see how the creators deepen the world one more time; the introductions of Spider-Man India and Spider-Punk are so compelling that we forget that we haven’t seen Spider-Man Noir, Spider-Ham, or Peni Parker this time around. Which other spiders are waiting for us just beyond Beyond? If the third installment in the trilogy is as breakneck and beautiful as the second, we might have to rethink whether we let other franchises get away with the cliffhanger ending.

 

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is rated PG for “sequences of animated action violence, some language, and thematic elements.” Directed by Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson. Written by Phil Lord, Christopher Miller, and David Callaham. Based on the Marvel Comics. Starring Shameik Moore, Hailee Steinfeld, Bryan Tyree Henry, Luna Lauren Vélez, Jake Johnson, Jason Schwartzman, Karan Soni, Daniel Kaluuya, and Oscar Isaac.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)

We like to say that “the geeks have won.” It’s a victory that’s been called more often than Barbara Stanwyck’s bedside telephone in Sorry, Wrong Number, but each time it feels like geekdom has achieved the unthinkable – be it the smash debut of The Avengers or introducing comics-accurate oddballs like King Shark and Professor Pyg on primetime. In 2018, the geeks won by having a banner year, with three animated superhero films alongside major showings by their live-action counterparts. However you slice it, we can have a productive argument about whether the cartoon with a Spider-Pig was actually the best one – a true win for the geeks.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (finally) introduces Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) to the big screen as Brooklyn’s new friendly neighborhood Spider-Man after a spider bite puts him in a league with his universe’s Peter Parker (Chris Pine). I say “his” universe, for Brooklyn becomes host to a coterie of spider-people after The Kingpin (Liev Schreiber) tears a hole in the fabric of space-time with a particle accelerator experiment. Joining Miles are a shlubbier Spidey (Jake Johnson), Spider-Woman (Hailee Steinfeld), the black-and-white Spider-Man Noir (Nicolas Cage), and Peter Porker, the Spectacular Spider-Ham (John Mulaney) – all in search of a way home.

I’ve said in the past that Batman is the greatest fictional character because of his chameleonic ability to accommodate whatever his audience needs – he can be the paragon of camp, the apex gargoyle, a space-age dark knight, or a kid-friendly crusader. When I say that, however, I’m usually not thinking of Spider-Man, for whose comparable metamorphoses Spider-Verse makes a compelling argument. Spider-Verse posits a veritable spider-prism (kids next door, rocker chicks, tough-guy gangsters, wise-cracking pigs, and more), each of whom accesses the central truth of Spider-Man – that with great power, there must also come great responsibility. You can’t run away, you can’t turn your back; your family and your friendly neighborhood are counting on you. For all his myriad forms, it’s hard to imagine Batman in a film like this one, teamwork having never been his strong suit. (Singular dislocation suits Batman better than prismatic conjunction; cf. Batman Ninja, Batman Beyond, etc.)

It’s equally hard to imagine that Spider-Verse works as well as it does. Its irreverent approach to storytelling, layering origin stories in a gag that never loses its comedic punch, helps the viewer navigate fifty years of convoluted chronology with deft precision. (Its comics counterpart, 2014’s Spider-Verse crossover, is comparably impenetrable.) Make no mistake, though; for all its spider-people, Spider-Verse is well and truly Miles’s film, a full origin story for the newest Spider-Man (who debuted in 2011). Here Miles is quite a character, engaging and relatable because of his eminent humanity; he’s shy but gifted, funny and earnest. What’s more, there comes a moment in the film where you’d almost rather he not become Spider-Man because of how well we like Miles and the unique story being told with him; it almost seems a shame to put him in a costume and give him a fairly recognizable super-action narrative. But the exceedingly clever script finds a way to weave that hero’s journey into the story already in progress (including a few, ahem, touching callbacks).

Of course, so much of the film’s success owes to its lanky animation style, delicately exaggerated in the best Tex Avery tradition. The slightly jerky movements and modest design tweaks help divorce Spider-Verse from strict representation and move it into a realm where it feels like anything can happen, where any abstract incursion fits right in (cf. Spider-Ham). Animation naturally unfetters a filmmaker’s aspirations in the way that a comic book page renders all things possible beyond constraints of budget. That’s not to say that Spider-Verse is cheap (its budget has been reported at $90 million), but it’s hard to imagine a live-action film capturing all the peculiar quirks of this world, to say nothing of its technicolor climax or the characters that almost need to belong to an animated world (again, Spider-Ham, but also the monochromatic Spider-Man Noir). I knew I was in for a visual treat even from the trailers, but nothing can really prepare a moviegoer for the first appearance of the massive Kingpin – whose sheer mass cannot be understated. Even this, though, is essential character work; Kingpin’s colossal bulk distorts gravity around him, in the way that his particle accelerator tampers with the laws of physics in order to pull in the objects of his plot (no spoilers, but the script is smart to make Kingpin three-dimensional, giving him a full and possibly legitimate reason for risking the fate of the universe).

As dark as the film can be, wading into heavy subplots about betrayal, disappointment, and loss, Spider-Verse is exuberantly, boundlessly fun. I can’t, for example, point at someone or touch their shoulder without thinking of particular jokes in the film and guffawing my webs off. But the film also tickles my specific devotion to superheroes for its relentless optimism. Yes, the situation is dire, with cataclysmic consequences, but here’s a kid from Brooklyn who stands at the center of this massive web with the power to save everyone, and all he needs to do is figure himself out. What’s more, he has a loving family and a network of friends to help him through difficult times; no matter how isolated he feels, Miles Morales is never alone. Reducing him to “the black Spider-Man” doesn’t do justice to the depth of this character or the ways he advances and perpetuates the legend of Spider-Man without the guilt or baggage of Peter Parker.

I’m not ready to wade into the battlefields of “who did it better?” just yet. (As I get older, I’m losing patience with these pithy ‘hot takes’ that end more conversations than they start.) The geeks have well and truly won when we can have Black Panther and Spider-Verse, when we get a long-overdue Incredibles 2 alongside them and Avengers: Infinity War, to say nothing of Aquaman, Venom, Deadpool 2, and Ant-Man and the Wasp. (Phew!) It’s an embarrassment of riches, not unlike the spider-cornucopia presented in Spider-Verse, with something for everyone and everything adding up to a romping good time. Best of all, Spider-Verse got me to dust off my Marvel Unlimited subscription and queue up a slate of spider-comics to read. That’s how the geeks win.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is rated PG for “frenetic sequences of animated action violence, thematic elements, and mild language.” Directed by Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman. Written by Phil Lord and Rodney Rothman. Based on the Marvel Comics by Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, Brian Michael Bendis, Sara Pichelli, and Dan Slott. Starring Shameik Moore, Jake Johnson, Hailee Steinfeld, Mahershala Ali, John Mulaney, Nicolas Cage, Kathryn Hahn, Liev Schreiber, and Chris Pine.