Shortened: ‘Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse’ review.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

In 2018, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse set a new standard for eye-popping animation. Now, the guiding hands behind it, Phil Lord and Chris Miller, have upped their ante with Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. It’s the ‘Empire Strikes Back’ of the series, which doesn’t make it better than the original, fellas. But it’s darker, more serious, more mythic, and ends on a crazy cliffhanger. Critics are falling over their knees in tribute to Into the Spider-Verse, which is also very good. If its audience is enthusiastic, it will be a repeat audience over the next couple of weeks and launch this picture into the spider-man-across-the-spider-verse/” title=”Shortened: ‘Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse’ review.”>box-office stratosphere.

Plot

• Miles Morales is now 15 years old and is lonely and isolated because no one knows he’s Spider-Man.
• Miles entered the realm of the superhero in the first movie with company to help him, as those other Spider-Men ended up in his universe to mentor and teach him.
• His universe is not ours, by the way. In his, the center of the show-business world is Inglewood, Calif.—not Hollywood.
• Our Peter Parker returns in Across the Spider-Verse, along with Miles’s erstwhile classmate Gwen Stacy, who’s Spider-Woman in her universe.
• The fights and chase sequences are to ordinary fight and chase sequences as a speeded-up Benny Hill girl-chasing skit is to a conventional depiction of a man trying to ask a woman out on a date.

Visuals

Everything is thrown out of the window here. Backgrounds go abstract, which erases any sense of perspective or place. The characters hurtle in and around objects and obstacles you can barely make out. It’s eye-popping but verges on the incoherent, at least. What’s impressive about Across the Spider-Verse is that it’s so radical in its visual conception. Rather than play it safe, Lord and Miller and their creative team double-down on what made the original a distinctive work of animation and take it almost into the realm of the abstract.

Verdict

Anyway, I still think Into the Spider-Verse ranks as a towering achievement in animation and isn’t surpassed by this new one, but people who want to take these movies more seriously than I do are going to favor Across the Spider-Verse. But just like the people who favor The Empire Strikes Back, they will be wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.