If there’s one unifying trait that almost every live-action superhero film shares, it’s that they don’t care much for their source medium. Now, I don’t mean this in the way that a whole lot of nerds often do when they take to their subreddits and still-active BBSes – few people genuinely do not give a fuck about whether or not the mythic poetry of Matter-Eater Lad’s origin will be fluently translated to the screen into the somehow inevitable Legion of Superheroes movie – as Marvel proved that fidelity to the comics wasn’t an insurmountable obstacle for audience interest and involvement (only after some 18 years of studio executives seeing the tangled web of comic book canon as something for nerds to scream while they’re getting wedgies). Unless you have one of the creators directly involved in the production (like, say, Frank Miller in Sin City), modern comic book movies are usually estranged from the aesthetic quirks that define them and their inherent qualities as populist entertainment and are often seen as an obstacle.
Comics are colorful and vibrant, which is almost impossible for adaptations in our current era of fast-cheap digital effects, given the “good” in that rhetorical triangle was abandoned long ago to meet the aggressive nature of three-a-year production schedules. They’re appropriately stylish yet varied in their execution: A Steve Ditko book will look, feel and read differently than a Jack Kirby one. They’re inclusive, and not necessarily just because their palette of characters has expanded to encompass more than just white dudes. Prior to the era of intense serialization in monthly floppies (which took off right around the time that the “serious” superhero movie did, almost as if it were a response), a casual reader could pick one up off the shelf and find themselves in a world where they could easily pick up the basics and then enjoy whatever adventure was contained within.
Of course, there are exceptions to these rules, as there are with any form (and they often exist in defiance of the superhero dominance of them, especially in the indies) as visually-centric media, one can see plenty of parallels between these two mediums as forms of art, and this places them in an interesting sort of conflict, vastly separate from, say, the one at the heart at adapting text for the screen.
That is a whole lot of prologue to say that the best screen adaptations of comics are cartoons and that Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is, like its predecessor, one of the few modern superhero films to openly embrace both mediums as they are. It shows that they’re directly compatible in ways that flatter both. It offers the brightest counterpoint to the failings of the stolid status quo in superhero cinema directly by confronting its biggest failings. There’s plenty in this film that I won’t want to spoil for you – and given the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nature of all the fun packed into every frame in this film, it would be almost impossible to reveal everything in a single article – so I’ll be as general as possible when discussing its story. Despite almost five years passing between the release of this movie (in our world) and its predecessor, Into the Spider-Verse, only a year or so has passed in the world that Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) calls home. He’s had a bit of a growth spurt, struggled with aspects of his alter-ego’s fame (in various amusing ways), and still hasn’t told his parents that he’s going out at night and fighting all sorts of crime. Most of all, he misses his inter-dimensional buddies, including his mega-crush Gwen (Hailee Steinfeld), whose origin story (and subsequent heartbreak) opens the film. After a tragedy, she took up with a group of universe-traveling Spider-People, led by Miguel O’Hara (Oscar Isaac), a Spider-Person from a distant future who tries to leverage the power of his counterparts from across the multiverse to prevent the whole thing from collapsing. When a villain called The Spot (Jason Schwartzman) emerges in Miles’ world, having an obsessive desire to ruin the hero’s life and the potential power to bring all of reality to an end, everybody’s forced to meet up in order to try and stop him. Yet harmony isn’t exactly on the menu, as Miguel is a brooding and tortured asshole, and he has a big beef with the very fact of Miles’ existence and the path he took to become a Spider-Man.
I’ll return to that thematic tease at the end here because there’s a lot to praise before I do a dance around the film’s subject matter. Normally when you see six credited names across the directing (Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson) and writing credits (David Callaham alongside producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller), it’s a cause for alarm – it means nobody was really steering the ship in a productive way, and though good movies can emerge from that creative soup, it’s an uphill battle to get there – but Spider-Verse avoids that problem entirely. Perhaps it’s the very nature of the film’s hyper-detailed and hyper-active nature, but it’s hard to imagine that a stray thought or suggestion was abandoned in favor of some studio dictate. Every frame, every scene, and every line of dialogue is both packed to the point of excess and yet fine-tuned to run fast and hard, like a well-calibrated McLaren engine.
The dialogue is punchy and witty but not quippy in the Whedonist style of modern live-action Marvel, having the tenor and tone of an updated Abbott and Costello routine (there’s a great bit about “Chai Tea” in there, occurring in the middle of an action scene set in a Mumbai-styled Manhattan, which is nearly lost in the chaos). It’s ferociously paced, even if it’s a little bit longer than it needs to be. That narrative speed never feels like a burden, becoming an asset in the way that it directly mirrors a child’s excitement when cracking open a freshly printed and stapled 24-pager off the rack at their local comic book shop. And it rejects a key aspect of the modern franchise film in exactly how it deals with its characters’ lore and iconography: it is not perpetually teasing you with things that might pop up, instead treating the Spider-Pantheon as a sort of collective Where’s Waldo of Easter Eggs. The film doesn’t stop to fete the appearance of a particular Spider-Man, because it’s more concerned with overwhelming you, much like its lead is, with the enormity of this continuity in all of its aesthetic forms.
And good God, those aesthetics. It’s been a bit since I watched the original Spider-Verse, but the animation is either as good or better than that film. Sure, the budget’s a little larger, but five years’ worth of development and production adds up, with the time and effort showing in so many different ways that it’s almost impossible to catalog them in one essay. The varied worlds that we encounter here are so richly detailed that, no matter how briefly they’re glimpsed, they make an impression, with changing textures and moods enhancing the transformative experience of interdimensional travel. This is the benefit that a medium like animation provides: Think of the world that Doctor Strange and America Chavez visit in Multiverse of Madness. No matter how detailed or well-constructed it is, it is still a three-dimensional space defined by the limitations of reality with only so much that CGI can do to alter it (it’s also not helped by the rushed MCU production schedule and its effect on their productions’ appearances).
In this animated world, the team can do whatever the hell they want as vibrantly and vividly as possible, maxing out the peak luminescence and depth of color on an IMAX projector. It’s almost as if they’d taken all of the discarded colors from the past thirty years of superhero movies and decided to use them all at once. But their creativity knows no boundaries imposed by a costume department or a budget or by dreaded “realism.” Want a Leonardo Da Vinci-inspired Vulture, that looks as if it were ripped off verbatim from one of the genius’s concepts for a flying suit? Sure. How about Spider-Punk, who is essentially a walking and talking Sex Pistols cover with ripped newsprint and aggressive color? Totally. Surely they won’t have a LEGO Spider-world? You might (Spoilers! I’m not saying anything for sure!) be wrong. It’s all here, and, importantly, it’s cohesive in a way that pays ample tribute to the diversity of styles within the comics medium while keeping it inherently cinematic (though the film is often littered with rotoscoped allusions to the previous Spider-Films, much like how Marvel used to re-color and reuse panels in certain comic books). Across the Spider-Verse is yet another visual triumph from this crew and good lord, we’re somehow getting another one of these in nine months. I can’t even imagine what ground that will cover.
On the other hand, it probably won’t be as thematically interesting as what we have here. It’s in its conception of the ethos and pathos (yeah, we goin’ Greek) of Spider-Man as a figure that makes this Spider-Verse one of the most intriguing interpretations of a superhero’s identity, regardless of who is under the mask. In keeping with the “fan service as set-dressing, not as thematic content,” the film directly counters No Way Home and its ilk by broadly refuting their assertions about the nature of the hero’s relationship with fate. Our era is one of meta-storytelling – the shared-universe model pioneered by the on-screen Spideys’ co-parents at the Mouse ensured that it would be the defining modus operandi in blockbuster cinema – but few of these films about alternate worlds, and our interactions with them ever delve into changing one’s fate, and our responsibility to it. Suffering is inherently part of being Spider-Man: His life is defined by his tragedies, while his victories are quickly forgotten once a reader hits the letters page. The film confronts that in a direct way that doesn’t just accept it as a necessary sacrifice for the good.
A series of slam-bang revelations near the end of the film – hitting right before a cliffhanger so intense that those mortified by Fast X‘s ending will once again be apoplectic – reinforces Miles’ unique position among Spider-People. It isn’t just a group hug over dead Uncle Bens, either, given that they’re unburdened by the layers of iconography accumulated by their live-action counterparts, which is to say that there’s a real conflict between them. Can a Spider-Man really have it all, or is their suffering really upon what their entire existence hinges upon? That’s a question that’s left for the next film in the series to answer, but the crew behind Across the Spider-Verse has ensured that audiences can come pretty goddamn close to having everything they’ve ever wanted from a comic book movie.