Josh Reviews Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse!

As Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse opens, we see that more than a year has passed since the end of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.  Gwen Stacy’s secret life as Spider-Woman is leading to a painful conflict with her police-captain father.  Meanwhile, in his universe, Miles Morales is settling into his own super-hero life as Spider-Man, but it’s impacting his school-work and his parents know their son is lying to him about something.  A goofy encounter with a wannabe supervillain called the Spot turns dangerous when the Spot gains the ability to access the multiverse and draw power from alternate-universe versions of the same accident that originally gave him his abilities.  Gwen, along with an assembly of alternate-universe versions of Spider-Man/Woman, set out to track and defeat the Spot.  This leads to Gwen’s reunion with Miles, and Miles’ eventual confrontation with Miguel Ferrera, Spider-Man 2099, who leads the multiversal Spider-Society and who views Miles as a dangerous threat to the safety of the entire multiverse.

I thought the original animated Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was a masterpiece, a near-perfect piece of work that was by far the best Spider-Man movie I’d ever seen.  Spider-Man: No Way Home, which also told a fantastic multiverse story, gave Spider-Verse a run for its money, but I think Into the Spider-Verse still stands as my favorite Spidey film.  We’ve had to wait four long years for this sequel, but Across the Spider-Verse delivers on every level.  I’ll need to watch it a few more times before I can evaluate whether I think it’s better than the first film, but it for sure stands proudly alongside it.

This is a fantastic sequel on every level.  It gives us everything we loved about the first film: great character drama, funny comedy mixed with actual emotional stakes, terrific action and dazzlingly beautiful and creative animation.  And on every level, this sequel takes those elements and moves them forward beyond what we’ve seen before.

The animation is once again jaw-droppingly extraordinary, beyond anything I’ve ever seen in an animated film.  My heart sung just seeing this film’s opening titles, when we once again got to see the crashing collision of multiple different styles of animation.  Every character from a different universe in this film has its own distinct animation style.  And so the opening sequence set in Gwen Stacy’s universe features an almost abstract look with pastel-colored brush-strokes, like we’re looking at the artwork through a rainy window.  That’s quite different from the crisp, hyper-detailed lines found in Miles’ home universe.  Each new look is more beautiful and creative than the next.  In a film as jam-packed with different characters as this one is, the result of this approach is an eye-popping collision of colors and styles.  This could have been a mess, but the result here is staggeringly beautiful.

I’m overwhelmed by the ambition of the film.  There’s never been an animated film that’s looked like this one has.  This film is stuffed to the brim — and then some — with characters and circumstance.  It’s almost too much to take in on one viewing.  My first thought upon seeing this film was that I needed to see it again.  There is so much here!  I love this ambition.  And have I mentioned that Across the Spider-Verse is, I believe, the longest American animated movie ever made?  At 140 minutes long, this film is a beast!  But I was never for a second anything less than enthralled with the film.  Quite the contrary: probably its biggest weakness is that I was left wanting so much more.  This “part one” film is only half the story.  That’s by design, of course.  But I was still left wanting more.  (Was the film too long? On the surface, 140 minutes seems like an insane length for an animated film.  But I’m hard-pressed to think of what could have been cut.  Maybe the fight with Renaissance-universe Vulture could have been shorter — it takes multiple Spider-people an awfully long time to beat that one old-fashioned bad guy — but that’s all I could come up with.)

I’m going to dig deeper into the film, now, so beware SPOILERS ahead.  If you haven’t seen this film, know that I highly recommend it and suggest you go watch it immediately!!

OK, still here?

Let’s go…!

I absolutely adore the film’s choice to open, not with Miles, but with Gwen.  I love that this sequel is just as much Gwen’s story as it is Miles.  Hailee Seinfeld (Kate Bishop on Hawkeye) is marvelous as Gwen, and it was a pleasure getting to explore Gwen’s world, her family, and her backstory.  We’d heard about the death of her Peter Parker in the first film.  It was great to get to see that, and to discover her fraught relationship with her father, Captain Stacy, who is perfectly voiced by Shea Wigham (True Detective, Agent Carter, Vice Principals).

As a long-time reader of Spider-Man comics, I loved how pivotal the death of Captain Stacy storyline from the comics wound up being to the story of this film!!  I suspect most film-goers had never before heard of Captain Stacy before seeing this movie (even though he was a character in the Andrew Garfield Spider-Man films), so I’m impressed the filmmakers chose to focus on this idea that police captains in Spider-Man’s orbit are always in jeopardy.

I also loved the idea of a “canon event” that is essential to the creation of Spider-Men across the multiverse.  It’s very cool to take this fan concept of “canon” and apply it to this type of cinematic multiversal story.  I am very curious to see how this will resolve in the third film.  In this film, Miguel O’Hara tells us how his change to the canon resulted in the annihilation of his universe, and we see the beginnings of damage to Pavitr Prabhakar’s “Mumbahattan” after Miles inadvertently saves someone who was supposed to be killed.  But as a viewer I agree with Miles — I don’t like the idea that Spider-people should stop doing everything they can to save as many people as they can.  The idea that some people are “fated” to die feels wrong to me.  I’m curious how they’re going to get out of this in the third film without undermining what we’ve seen in this film…

Shameik Moore is once again terrific as Miles Morales.  I love how well they’ve developed Miles.  He’s heroic and flawed, just like a Spider-Man should be.  After two movies, I love Miles so much!!!  He might be my favorite cinematic Spider-Man.  I also love Miles’ parents: his dad Jefferson (played by Brian Tyree Henry) and his mom Rio (played by Luna Lauren Vélez).  It’s a fun and different dynamic, seeing a super-hero with both parents still alive and in his life.  (I hope they don’t kill one of them off in the next movie.)

Jason Schwartzman (Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Moonrise Kingdom, The Grand Budapest Hotel) is a delight as the Spot.  Mr. Schwartzman is so funny as this goofball of a villain; and he’s also able to escalate into true menace as the Spot’s powers grow.  I love the choice to use this little-known villain as the big bad in this film, and I laughed a lot to discover that the Spot is the “bagel!” dude from the first film.  That was a fun connection.

The post-credits scene of the first film teased Spider-Man: 2099, and Oscar Isaac (Inside Llewyn Davis, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Moon Knight) is terrific as this super-serious, angsty character.  He’s an interesting contrast to the youthful Miles.  We don’t really get to know this character too well yet in this film.  We get a bit of his tragic backstory, but I hope we’re able to get deeper into who he is and what makes him tick in the next film.

This film introduces us to about a billion new alternate-universe Spider-people. Karan Soni (Deadpool) is terrific as Pavitr Prabhakar, the Indian Spider-Man.  I love the infectious, youthful joy Mr. Soni brings to the character.  Also a delight is Daniel Kaluuya (Black Panther, Judas and the Black Messiah) as Hobie Brown/Spider-Punk.  I couldn’t understand half of what he was saying (which I think was part of the joke), but his animation style — made to look like he’s magazine cut-outs — was incredible.  I loved the look of Issa Rae’s character, the motorcycle-riding, pregnant Jessica Drew version of Spider-Woman, though we didn’t get to know her that well.  I hope to see more of her in the third film.

I was of course thrilled that Jake Johnson returned as Peter B. Parker, now a happy dad with a baby girl in toe.  Speaking of whom, I loved that “Mayday” Parker (an alternate-universe child of Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson from the comics) was brought into this film, and that adorable little girl basically stole the movie.  (Seeing her pull-down her knit Spider-Man hat/mask at the end was amazing!!)  I missed seeing the other alternate-Spider-people from the first film, but I think they were all teased at the end (when we see the team-up to save Miles), so I hope we get to see more of them in the next film.

What else?

• I loved that they incorporated scenes from previous live-action versions of Spider-Man into this film’s depictions of multi-versal Spider-Men!!  It was so cool to see clips from the Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield films.  (I’m certainly hoping Tom Holland makes an appearance in the third film!!)
• I was over-the-moon happy to see Donald Glover appear as a live-action alternate-universe version of the Prowler.  That was an incredible connection to Mr. Glover’s brief appearance in Spider-Man: Homecoming, in which he alludes to his young nephew (who we know is Miles).  That was so clever and funny!!
• I haven’t seen the Venom films so I was a little mystified at the lengthy live-action scene in a convenience store.  I read online afterwards that that woman was from the Venom films.  That didn’t land for me, but I like the idea of this film connecting to every possible Spider-Man universe!!
• Speaking of which: the Lego universe sequence was amazing!!
• I laughed a LOT at the film’s very funny skewering of the Scarlet Spider from the 90’s Spider-Man comics (and specifically the abysmal “Clone Saga”).  That’s a deep-cut joke for comic book nerds.
• I loved the reference to villains being able to make weapons appear from nowhere by drawing them from the “Hammer-verse”, a great call-back to Spider-Ham from the first film.  (I also love how so much of this film’s story is based on the wonderfully melancholy line-reading that John Mulaney gave as Spider-Ham in the first film, when he lamented that sometimes even a Spider-Man can’t save everyone.)
• I’m glad that Miles’ roommate was identified as Ganke, even though he didn’t have much to do in the film.  (Mile’s best friend Ganke was a HUGE part of Mile’s comic-book stories.  But the Tom Holland Spider-Man movies weirdly cannibalized this character; they gave us a perfect depiction of Ganke, played by Jacob Batalon… only they called him Ned Leeds, the name of Peter Parker’s friend in the original Spider-Man comics.)
• I loved the device of seeing different comic book covers as chapter breaks in the film.
• I also delighted to see “Editor’s notes” on-screen (just like we always used to see in classic Marvel comics.)
• I loved seeing “bag-head” Spider-Man (from the classic issue of the comics after he got rid of his black costume).
• The ending was great.  I loved getting to hear Mahershala Ali back as Aaron Davis, and it felt exactly right that Miles’ true enemy in that alternate-universe should be a villainous version of himself.

This review is getting very long, and yet I still feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface of this movie!

Bravo to writers Phil Lord, Christopher Miller, Dave Callaham, and to directors Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson, and to all the hundreds of artists who worked to create this incredible film over the past four years.  This is a tremendous achievement, and I cannot wait for the conclusion of this story in the third film.

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