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.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010)

I can say this for Scott Pilgrim vs. the World - it is unlike any other movie director Edgar Wright has brought forward.

Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) is a 20-something Canadian vagabond whose life is filled with his garage band Sex Bob-omb and his 17-year-old girlfriend Knives Chao (Ellen Wong). One day, though, Scott meets the literal girl of his dreams - Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), who rollerblades through his dreams because there's a superhighway shortcut in his subconscious. But as Scott and Ramona grow closer, she clues him in to the fact that, to continue to date her, he'll have to defeat her "seven evil exes," a league of former flames that includes a Bollywood-esque sorcerer, a model-turned-action-hero (Chris Evans), a vegan bassist (Brandon Routh), an angry ninja (Mae Whitman, formerly Cera's girlfriend Ann on Arrested Development), Japanese musican twins, and the big one - record mogul Gideon Graves (Jason Schwartzman).

What Scott Pilgrim does very well is create many memorable characters that have, at the very least, spin-off potential if not a direct sequel. I can't speak for the movie's relationship with the graphic novel series by Bryan Lee O'Malley, but the characters in the movie have got real personality. The supporting characters, that is; the main characters aren't very lively. Scott is, unfortunately, still more of the same Cera character - a gangly, awkward, "if that's okay with you" type who mumbles and falls in love with a girl far out of his league - but at least Cera is still doing a good job; I'm very curious, though, what the right director could do with him. And Winstead, as a thematic sequel to Kate Winslet's character in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, falls flat without very much enthusiasm; she's pretty and therefore easy to fall for, but I think supporting player Anna Kendrick (who's charming and involving as Scott's sister Stacey) might have done a better job - but that's probably, as I've said before, because I'm a little bit in love with that girl. At the very least, Cera and Winstead are no Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, Wright's previous collaborators.

Fortunately the supporting cast is very entertaining - not the best ensemble, but the supporting talent is more talented, I'd say, than what Cera and Winstead demonstrate here. The standout supporting cast member here is Alison Pill as world-weary drummer Kim Pine, a variant on the Juno brand of snarky; Pill is a scene-stealer, with deadpan delivery of memorable lines like, "Scott, if your life had a face, I would punch it" as well as signature moves like her clacking drumsticks and her feigning suicide by pistol with only her fingers and a dramatic flourish. Chris Evans, too, as Ex #2, is probably my favorite Ex, a gleeful caricature of the action star who can't actually act; he growls his dialogue - all of it puns - with a tongue firmly in cheek. And Jason Schwartzman, as the seventh and final Ex, is suitably smarmy and deftly loathsome.

But unlike Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, Scott Pilgrim takes itself seriously - perhaps too seriously. Where Wright's previous films had a satirical bent and often acknowledged incredible plot turns with characters exclaiming, as Simon Pegg did in Shaun, "Oh, for f--k's sake!" Scott Pilgrim has none of this self-conscious edge. Characters don't bat an eye when "extra lives" or swords of love and self-respect appear out of thin air, and only Scott's roommate Wallace (a wonderfully droll Kieran Culkin) expresses incredulity at the increasingly improbable fight scenes with dry murmurs of "Scott, fight, go." There's a shameless showiness in the film that's doubtless an homage to the story's comic book nature, but it's all bang and very little substance. The very premise is built on thinness - Scott must fight these characters because he must - and it never attempts to be anything more than shallow eye candy. Where the scenes with Scott and his friends are clever and well-written, the battle scenes which dominate the film play out like watching someone else play a video game. It's a bit like watching a Quentin Tarantino film in German (no, not Inglourious Basterds); there's a sense that there's a lot of flair going on that other people can appreciate, but for the immediate audience in the moment, something's lost.

There's also a problem with pacing. The first Ex battles don't begin until about an hour into the film - when little more than half of the film remains. Consequently the film feels bisected - a comfortable and cutesy comedy with quirky characters, followed by the video game montages to which I just couldn't connect. By treating the audience to so much of the avant garde "quirky" plotline - directed with innovative quick-cut flair and punctuated by thought bubbles and floating onomatopoeia - Wright practically spoils his audience to the point where the second half just doesn't live up to the first. Indeed, the second half feels bloated and over-long, as though so much action is being thrown at the viewer because the filmmaker realized halfway through that there was still the matter of the seven evil exes to cover in about an hour's time.

But I think the other half of the movie - the one that doesn't have you grabbing for a joystick that isn't there - is worth seeing. It's got Wright's comedic sensibilities with an American edge, and it's got some of the cleverest dialogue and editing gags (like Lisa Miller, who swears but has the ability to somehow censor herself with a black box and a record scratch). Maybe you'll want to go for popcorn during the combat scenes, because it's not as though Scott isn't going to win. Spoiler warning?
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is rated PG-13 "for stylized violence, sexual content, language and drug references." There's some canoodling in underwear, as well as mild talk about sex and the problems of and with dating a minor. The combat scenes are visually dynamic, with no blood but with plenty of people hitting each other, some of whom explode into coins. Drugs and alcohol are mentioned, but only abused once; the F-bombs in the film are all comedically censored.