Across the Spider-Verse

An incredible spectacle and an ambitious and worthwhile successor

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is an excellent feat of animation, a successful conversion of comic book ideas and ideology onto the big screen. The film’s greatest strength, as with its predecessors, is that it understands how to translate comic book aesthetics to film, and it is truly stunning to watch. The combination of CG, hand-drawn, and cell-shaded styles is incredibly fluid, accented by the masterful way light and color are managed; all of it used to brilliant literal and metaphorical effect. It is a bigger film than Into the Spider-Verse, but it’s hard to say whether it’s better. The expanded scope brushes the plot against the now-familiar problems and hiccups of dimension-traveling stories but these weaknesses are minor frustrations relative to the way a similar premise renders the story of No Way Home moot or the inadequate exploration of the ideas in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Those films are referenced here nearly by name, and there are cameos, crossovers, and nods towards other Spider-Man properties in the sort of brain stretching way that bends the postmodern meta of the story’s setting toward meaningless absurdity. Combining this with the cliffhanger ending could have created an unsatisfying picture. Instead, three directors (Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K. Thompson), three writers (Phil Lord, Christopher Miller, David Callaham), an exemplary cast (led by Shameik Moore and Hailee Steinfeld), and a right army of artists, animators, and designers created something beautiful and brilliant (if perhaps not accessible for people with light-sensitivity related neurological disorders). It may not be a narrative masterpiece, but as an audiovisual craft object, a piece of visual art, it’s certainly something close.

Leaving accolades and hyperbole aside for now, deep inside this is a familiar superhero story about sacrifice, a familiar Spider-Man story about not being able to save everyone, a theme echoing from 2018’s Into the Spider-Verse. Much like that film, Across the Spider-Verse focuses on Miles’s internal conflict over whether to confess his powers and secret identity to his parents, glued atop a general conflict about whether he’s worthy of the title of Spider-Man. This plays out in part through his connection with Gwen Stacy/Spider-Woman (Hailee Steinfeld), who is given a more central role as this film’s secondary protagonist. Oscar Isaac’s Miguel O’Hara/Spider-Man 2099, who appeared in a post-credits meme reference after the last film’s plot, is an antihero secondary antagonist in this one. Miguel runs an interdimensional team of the best Spider-people – their ages, genders, ethnicities, and even species vary greatly. Their job is to protect the Spider-Verse (or Arachno-Humanoid Poly-Multiverse, I think he called it) by returning people to their original dimensions and ensuring that canon events (similar happenings across dimensions which craft the personal character of Spider-people) go off as planned. In trying to help a Spider-Man in a different universe, Miles disrupts a canon event, raising Miguel’s ire. All the while, a cast-off dismissed villain, the Spot (Jason Schwartzman), bides dimension-hopping power and starts trouble across the multiverse as he seeks revenge on Miles for destroying his life.

The film has exciting chase scenes, creative combat, and great gags of both the physical and verbal variety. It’s a laugh-out-loud adventure which is also a feast for the eyes. The goal was to take the Into the Spider-Verse formula and build it, expand it. Across the Spider-Verse succeeds in this. It is not, however, flawless. The explicit and implicit allusions to other ongoing, parallel, and past corporate projects across film, game, and cartoon studios invite an encumbrance of issues that stick in the back of my head and would sink a lesser film. So how does Across the Spider-Verse avoid weighing you down with the vague unsettling meaninglessness of a story with ever wider, less comprehensible stakes, or the artistic compromises that necessarily exist in a brand management exercise this expansive?

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse pulls this trick by forcing a focus on the immediate and intimate; by drawing Miles’s attention to trying to protect his own family, by having the circumstances of his super-heroism empower a villain, endangering his own life, confounding his own efforts, and end without resolution. The infiniteness of it all doesn’t matter because Miles isn’t trying to fix everything (like Tom Holland’s Peter Parker in Spider-Man: No Way Home) or set it all one way (like the TVA in Loki or the Illuminati in The Multiverse of Madness). That’s Miguel O’Hara’s problem. The head-scratching continuity (and the audacity to write “canon events” in the script) gets time out of focus. I can’t help thinking about it; lots of people won’t be bothered.

Because Across the Spider-Verse ends on a cliffhanger, it’s difficult to resolve the questions the film asks and impossible to resolve Miles’s arc. One weakness of the film, specifically because it is a film for children, is that Miles doesn’t seem to learn or change very much throughout the film. He learns a neat trick from Daniel Kaluuya’s Hobie Brown/Spider-Punk but his heart and mind aren’t changed; only those around him. (I also find it hard to believe his cop dad and overbearing mother would be so relatively chill when the last person they saw him with shows up to tell them they don’t know where their 15-year-old son is). Still, perhaps that’s a worthwhile lesson for the children as well: sometimes you don’t learn anything and you’re just stuck, despite all your talents, skills, and best intentions.

Nonetheless, the arc that Spider-Gwen goes through is engaging, the original and returning cast are effective, and the art is truly stunning. It’s a joy to look at, which shouldn’t be a rarity among superhero films, but sort of is. There’s almost nothing I wouldn’t forgive knowing at least one group of people making superhero films knows they should be visually captivating, and that animation is the simplest way to channel the strengths of drawings and paintings – though it was by no means, simple, I’m certain, to combine as many different sorts of digital and drawn imagery as they did. It’s enrapturing – it’s a corporate product, it’s colors on a screen, but it truly feels like more than that, even if it feels uncertain what it wants to say – because what it shows is so gorgeous.

Aside from the meta-narrative aspects evident in the comedic and winking universe crossovers, there are sometimes on-screen comic definitions in little text boxes, or labels such as Spider-Man from the PS4-PS5 games by Insomniac labeled as “Insomniac Spider-Man.” This could all get to be a bit much, but Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is phenomenally entertaining – glorious to look at, and frequently laugh out loud funny, to boot. It’s too pretty for me to be enraged at its minor annoyances. The biggest problems with the multiverse could have been avoided if the other movies it nods at were better written. Comic book superhero-inspired films continue to dominate the box office. Almost all the genre is developed with children in mind, but Across the Spider-Verse embraces that factor without ever losing vibrancy, gusto, or adult approachability. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is funny, charming, and electric. Despite what the box office receipts show, there are very few “must-see” superhero films – blockbusters within and without the genre are not immune from being forgettable. There are fewer still must-see animated features showing in the big theaters – the cutting edge for animation seems frequently to be in avant-garde works showing only on streaming services or in indie cineplexes. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is the rare wide-release commercial work worthy of the advertising and development budget, the rare kid’s film where you sit down and within seconds get what all the hype is about. It’s a monumental achievement, a stupendous work of art.

…

[If you can believe it, I actually made cuts to this. Some of what was removed will be the basis of a follow-up essay on police depiction and the problems with multiverses in Across the Spider-Verse. Tune in soon!]