Spiderman: Across the Spiderverse (2023)

mild spoilers ahead

Man, it has been a LONG time since I wrote a movie review.

Turns out having twin infants takes up a lot of time and energy, so while I’ve still been watching movies, it’s so hard to find the will-power to collect my thoughts into a cohesive review.

But here we are! And I can’t think of a better movie to restart this with than “Spiderman: Across the Spiderverse” (2023)!

“Across the Spiderverse” is a direct sequel to 2018’s breakout hit “Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse” and it continues following Earth-1610’s Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) as one of the many other spider-permutations, rejoined by Spider Gwen (Hailee Steinfeld) and Peter B. Parker (Jake Johnson). Spider-Ham, Peni Parker, and Spider Noir all made brief appearances but their part of the arc was not continued here.
In fact, those general absences made it better.

Back when I reviewed “Maleficent: Mistress of Evil” (2019), I pointed out that if the hero of a movie was a different species/race/color/etc. than everyone else, then in the sequel said hero would inevitably find a colony of their kind somewhere. Those others would be living happily yet weirdly unaware of the hero, who would then lead the new crowd of peers into action.
This is generally a very stupid trope as it requires us to believe that the hero – a very distinct individual – was inexplicably dropped off and completely forgotten about by the only others of their species, until the hero finds their way “back” via sheer, improbable chance.

“Across the Spiderverse” was able to flip that on its ear, easily explaining that away with the concept of the multiverse, where each universe only has one spider-being to begin with, but with access to macguffin technologies that have brought them all together.
In this case, it was Miguel O’Hara (Oscar Issac), who invented the technology to skip dimensions and who saw it as his responsibility to ensure that every spider-world followed roughly the same story: someone is bitten by a radioactive spider, that someone gains any number of spider powers (wall climbing and spidey-senses are universal; web slinging isn’t), and then someone emotionally important to them dies and Spidey can’t save them. Uncle Ben, Gwen Stacey, Mary Jane, etc. Someone critical must die for the universe to carry on, and if that person doesn’t die, then that universe will collapse.
In bringing together all of the other spider-beings and not focusing on the same cast from the last film, we got a chance to meet characters like Spider Car, Spider Cat, Spider-Man with eight legs, Spiderman with Doc Ock arms, disabled Spiderman, pregnant Spider Woman, Bane Spiderman, and a presumably infinite number of others in the background, all living in an Avengers-tower-type building in Nuevo York on Earth-928. We even saw glimpses of the Anthony Garfield and Toby McGuire spidermen! Presumably there was a Tom Holland reference in there too, I just didn’t catch it.

Meanwhile: Spot (Jake Johnson) had the unfortunate luck of being an employee at the ALCHEMAX research facility in the first movie. In true villain-origin fashion, he was hit with ethereal goo from the explosive destruction of the super-collider and found himself to be the personification of holes in space-time. He initially tried to use his powers for relatively harmless crimes like stealing cash from inside an ATM, though immediately declared himself to be Miles’ nemesis as it was Miles’ last large fight that turned this mild-mannered nobody into Spot.
Once he discovered he could step between universes instead of just open up wormholes in basic machinery, Spot made it his goal to absorb more power from elsewhere and become unstoppable, as super-villains are wont to do.

***

Comic books are a very particular art form: they rely so heavily on the individual frames and cells and cut-outs on each page to tell the story, whether it’s to reveal multiple characters’ emotions at once, showing things happening at the same time, or allowing a block of narration to connect points between character dialogue and actions. Some movies have tried to adapt this style to the big screen, like 2003’s dumpster-fire “Hulk”, while Disney-Marvel gave up on that all together to just make action movies.
“Across the Spiderverse” managed to carry that comic book feeling to the big screen, constantly splitting the view up across multiple angles without detracting from the scene at hand.
Actually, that screen-splitting made the fight scenes feel so much more intense.
As Miles and Gwen and anyone else were in active combat, there was so much on the screen that you could feel the frenetic energy and the split-second decision-making that all of them had to do, far surpassing anything I’ve seen in any live-action action flick.
And to make it even more impressive: it never felt like too much. Sure, the screen was constantly full of activity and the animators pulled out the 512-color Crayola box and went to town, but it was also clean in such a way that I was never looking at messy blotches of color or confusing fights. I could parse what was happening at any moment.

Like with the first movie, the soundtrack for this one wasn’t for me, but I cannot deny that it fit flawlessly with the movie and the story they were telling.

This is the third movie this year to play with multi-verse concepts, starting with last year’s “Spiderman: No Way Home” (2022) and then “Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness” (2022), but “Across the Spiderverse” trumps those two so hard without feeling restrained or tied to anything but its own predecessor, or wasting time trying to leave easter-eggs around for the larger Sony/Disney/Marvel universe.

The animation style was cornea-dazzlingly-colorful, but the actual art styles shifted constantly throughout. Every time the cast moved to a different universe, the art style there change to match. Most of those universes were just animation, though one of them was an actual stop-action LEGO universe!

And to note: regardless of universe or actor or any other detail around the Spider-hero of the week, every single iteration of J. Jonah Jameson is the same angry old white man that J.K. Simmons brought to the screen in 2002 and I love that.

I absolutely recommend you see this on the biggest screen you can find.

Or, barring that, buy yourself a 4K disc player and get this movie on 4K BluRay.