More of the same, that’s what Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse delivers. The follow-up to Into the Spider-Verse is another blistering, migraine- and epilepsy-inducing collision of animation styles, the sort of thing which, if it had been done in the 20th century, would have taken the entire 20th century to do.
And if you like it, there’s still more to come. This is the second instalment of the tripartite series and it ends with an abrupt “to be continued”, comic-book style. Beyond the Spider-Verse will complete the cycle.
Quick recap. There are many parallel universes out there. And in many of these there are parallel Spider-Men too. Some look a bit like this, others a bit like that, but in the one we’re interested in Miles Morales is the webslinging teenager, a Spider-Man whose concerns are very much the same as Peter Parker’s – supervillains, parents, girls.
To put a bit more flesh on the story, which takes about a third of the movie to announce itself, in one or other of the various multiverses there is an elite club of Spider-People, among them Gwen Stacy, aka Spider-Woman. These Spider-People work together to stop the various realms from collapsing into each other. And it’s this group that our Spider-Man has ambitions to join, once he discovers that it exists. At the same time he’s fighting off periodic attacks from a creature called Spot (like a Rorschach blotter with abstract impressionist ambitions), hoping the feisty Gwen aka Spider-Woman will notice him and dealing with parents whose helicopter tendencies are at odds with his Spidey activities, not to mention his future at Princeton university (they want him to stay closer to home).
The good news is that Phil Lord and Christopher Miller are again on the writing team and they’re still all about the jokes. In fact there are so many of them that the movie must be watched several times to fully take them all in. I liked an entirely incidental one about a supervillain called Typeface, who’s only on screen for a couple of seconds, just long enough for him to shout “Go to Helvetica, Spider-Man!” Font-related humour, hey.
Lord and Miller are more about the jokes than the plot, in fact, though they do include a discussion on free will and determism, and throw in a trolley problem for Spider-Man. Should he save his dad and cause untold destruction or let Dad die and restore peace? Standard Spider-Man stuff, dealt with in the never entirely honest Spider-Man way – if it’s good enough for Stan Lee etc.
Talking of Stan Lee (and yes, I know Steve Ditko had more than a large hand in Spider-Man’s creation), it is all very much in the bombastic, quip-ready, smart and flip style that Lee promoted. At times it feels as if what Lord and Miller and the team did was put every back issue of Spider-Man they could find in the shredder and then feed the ensuing confetti straight onto the screen.
The animation is again beyond brilliant, constantly suggesting other dimensions with each urgent, cracking, cleaving, pixellating, dissolving, morphing stroke. Acid-tinged, you’d say, not forgetting that Spider-Man is a 1960s creation.
Daniel Pemberton returns as composer. His music is a unifying element in a film that could so easily fly off into a billion fractals, but it’s straightforwardly brilliant too – pounding and euphoric when the action really gets going.
Five stars! Six stars! Actually, before breaking into a surfeit of admiring parts myself, I’m going to just say that the only real problem for a film like this is a conceptual one. In a universe of a billion possibilities, there are also at any given moment a billion ways of ducking away from danger. Though the adventures of Miles Morales and the Spider-People are never less than entertaining, there isn’t really any jeopardy. It’s the Gandalf thing again – you shoot them down and they just bounce back, more powerful than you can possibly imagine. No, hang on, wasn’t that Star Wars?
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
