For someone who’s never really liked superheroes, I’ve seen a whole lot of movies about them — including the versions of Peter Parker/Spider-Man played successively by Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield and Tom Holland. By 2018, when writer-producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (The Lego Movie) brought us the animated Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, I decided I was done with angsty teen web slingers.
The joke was on me, though. The advent of a new Spider-Man named Miles Morales (voice of Shameik Moore) won enormous critical acclaim and even an Oscar. With the sequel, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, now doing record box office, I went in cold to find out what I’d missed.
The deal
As comics fans already know and the rest of us may have guessed, there isn’t just one Spider-Man. There’s a multitude of them, spread across the limitless multiverse of possible realities, though not all of them are technically Spider-Men.
Mopey teen Spider-Woman Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld) lives in a dimension in which she slew a rogue Peter Parker instead of becoming his love interest. After her cop dad discovers her secret identity, Gwen takes refuge with an interdimensional society of Spider-People led by the humorless enforcer Miguel O’Hara (Oscar Isaac).
Meanwhile, on another version of Earth, young Miles became Spidey after the demise of his own world’s Peter Parker. Unlike Peter, he’s blessed with two living, loving parents (Brian Tyree Henry and Luna Lauren Velez), but he struggles to balance his superhero duties with his schooling and family loyalty.
When Gwen shows up in Miles’ world tracking a dimension-hopping villain named the Spot (an amusingly sheepish Jason Schwartzman), Miles seizes the chance to follow her into the greater Spider-Verse. There he learns disturbing truths about himself and his destiny — truths that pit him against O’Hara, who’s determined to keep the chaos of variant realities in some sort of order.
Will you like it?
If you’re already a Spidey or a Marvel fan, you don’t need this review. If, however, the preceding summary struck you as a confusing mishmash of things you don’t care about, here’s all you need to know: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse could be the most visually riveting movie you see all year. Don’t care about teens coming of age? Don’t care about superpowered battles or obscure in-jokes? Just sit back and let the film’s stunningly surreal animated imagery wash over you.
With a few exceptions, superhero movies have eschewed the stylized look of comic books in favor of a facsimile of real life. By contrast, Across the Spider-Verse embraces the visual flair that makes comics a world apart.
Directors Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers and Justin K. Thompson use split screen in some shots to suggest panels. Swinging from webs or dangling from skyscrapers, the Spider-People move with a dreamlike, hyperreal fluidity.
More radically, the multiverse conceit allows each alternate Earth to have its own animation style. Gwen’s world has impressionistic, watercolor-esque backgrounds that change with her mood, while “Mumbattan,” a world inspired by the Indian version of Spider-Man, is all bold splashes of color, with a Bollywood-style hero to match.
When characters from these different worlds interact, they bring their visual styles with them, resulting in deliciously trippy culture clashes. In the Guggenheim Museum (itself a visual playground), Gwen battles a villain who appears to have stepped from one of Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings. The disturbingly faceless Spot brings his black-and-white aesthetic with him. Miles’ new friend Spider-Punk (Daniel Kaluuya) is a Sex Pistols album cover come to rowdy, glorious life.
Given that every scene offers new kinds of eye candy, viewers can be forgiven for not paying the closest attention to the story. The witty dialogue (scripted by Lord, Miller and Dave Callaham) sometimes gets lost under the musical score. But the coming-of-age plot is smart and serviceable, with Miles, his parents and Gwen grounding the multiverse madness in relatability.
Once seen mainly in hard-core science fiction, the multiverse concept is now inescapable in pop culture. It even infiltrated prestige cinema with the Oscar triumph of Everything Everywhere All at Once. The notion has a special resonance in comics, however, where alternate worlds can be used to explain the inconsistencies that result from many writers and artists working on the same material over decades.
In Across the Spider-Verse, O’Hara represents the coercive insistence on establishing a “canon” to make sense of this mess. The whole movie works against his outlook, however, promoting a thriving chaos of clashing aesthetics and narratives. When it ends on a blatant cliff-hanger, it defies what we expect from movies, even in the Marvel era.
But as Spider-Punk growls appreciatively when confronted with a Spider-Offspring, “Kids are anarchists.” Across the Spider-Verse plays to young viewers’ wild imaginative energy while showcasing immense adult craft — the recipe for a film that even a superhero skeptic can enjoy.
If You Like This Try…
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018; Fubo, rentable): While the sequel is comprehensible to anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of Spider-Man lore, its Oscar-winning predecessor is certainly worth watching.
The Mitchells vs. the Machines (2021; Netflix, rentable): Producers Lord and Miller have said their team developed some of the techniques seen in Across the Spider-Verse while making this animated family comedy.
“Loki” (one season, 2021; Disney+): Freedom versus determinism in a multiverse is also the theme of this droll Marvel Cinematic Universe series in which the god of mischief (Tom Hiddleston) runs afoul of interdimensional cops. Another season arrives this fall.
This article appears in Jun 7-13, 2023.
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