Riot’s Reviews: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
**Before I begin, I wanted to add a context note to this review for two reasons. 1) On my first pass at Across the Spider-Verse, my wife and I were 10 minutes away from finishing the film when some punk kid (I’m old enough to say this now) pulled a fire alarm, evacuating the building and forcing us to re-watch the movie a day later. 2) Also on the first pass, I complained to my wife that the sound mixing in the theater was excessively poor, especially for the dialogue (I am not sure whether or not this was intentional). And when we returned to the theater for the second showing, we got sent back to the same theater room!!! Unsurprisingly, the sound was still awful (sad face emoji). This being said, did it affect my opinion of the film? Nah, I just wanted to vent because that’d never happened to me before. Now, onward.**
There are a select few films out there that have ever contended for what I would consider to be a perfect movie. The now prequel, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, is one of them. I was so compelled by the film, I actually designed a mock English collegiate course (as a graduate class assignment) that centered around the movie as a shining example of masterful storytelling. Coupled with groundbreaking and outright sensational artwork, the 2018 film seemingly came out of nowhere to blow audiences away. So of course the sequel to such a masterpiece would have exceptionally large shoes to fill. Spider-Man as a singular character has been a part of my family for my entire life and through all of its live-action iterations and cartoon series, none have come as close to representing what I would consider as the real essence of the character as the Spider-Verse (soon to be) trilogy.
Skipping any introduction to completely avoid risk of spoilers, Across the Spider-Verse drops us back into the story not long after the conclusion of the first movie and hits the ground running much like its predecessor. From that point though, the film diverges pretty dramatically (emphasis on drama). Since it’s not a spoiler to say Across the Spider-Verse is part one of a two part story, what the audience gets this time around is a much more methodical building of the narrative. The first movie leaned heavily into the comedy, which is one of the reasons why I would argue it is the most accurate representation of Spider-Man as a character. In fact, to date (controversial take incoming), there has been no better Spider-Man than Jake Johnson (who was critically underutilized in this film) as Peter B. Parker. What part two of the Spider-Verse trilogy does is to lean heavily on the trauma and highlights the struggle of taking on the mantle of Spider-Man.
There are positives and negatives to this. Being that Spider-Gwen (Hailee Steinfeld) was a character that came into the canon long after I had left the comic book world, I was elated to be given a plethora of scenes that explored what she was all about. Even casual Spidey fans know that Peter Parker is very often a tortured soul, so it made sense to expand on the origin stories of the many new Spidey variations that grace this film. Because the story diverges so hard into the drama, it risks having the performances of its actors go astray, but the amazing cast proved themselves up to the task. But even if you threw the voice acting aside, visually I’ve never seen anything quite like this movie. Sincerely, the real stars of the film are the animators and art directors, I am at a loss for words for how incredible each and every scene looked. Gwen’s universe in particular, coupled with her emotionally brutal dialogue with her father Captain Stacey (Shea Whigham) had me completely transfixed on each frame, as the beautiful pastels and watercolors shifted from scene to scene.
Much like the first film, Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) and his father Jefferson Davis (Brian Tyree Henry) put on a vocal acting clinic, especially in their scenes together. Across the Spider-Verse did itself a huge favor by expanding on the relationship between Miles and his mother Rio (Luna Lauren Velez) as well and while I thought the pacing was a little slower than it needed to be during their dialogue, putting a magnifying glass on the trio really served to enhance the link the audience already had to its characters. Newcomer Spider-Man 2099 (Oscar Isaac) provided a foil that pushed the boundaries of believable tension story-wise, but didn’t take away from how well Isaac fit the character. Finally, Jason Schwartzman as the film’s new antagonist, The Spot, was the right kind of mix of comic relief and insanity (much like one of my other favorite roles of his in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World).
Across the Spider-Verse all-in-all was a bit of a mixed bag for me, but ironically I don’t view it in a negative way. The cliffhangers that end the film (again, not a spoiler because it was already common knowledge it was setting up a trilogy) were predictable but in the right kind of way. The bread crumbs that are dropped along the way allow the audience to reach the conclusion themselves, avoiding that “giant arrow pointing at the ending” feeling that often comes with badly written twists. In my opinion, the film’s greatest weakness is its pacing, where overtly dramatic dialogue chews up more time than it probably should. It gets repetitive but because it affirmed the building blocks that are going to be needed for the conclusion of the trilogy, I didn’t find it to be a negative mark against the film. A similar impression is felt in what I’d view is its other semi-weakness, the extremely large cast of characters. None of the new additions actually hurt the story, but there are a couple (namely Jessica Drew (Issa Rae) and Spider-Byte (Amandla Stenberg)) that felt like they should have had more impact than they inevitably did. Sadly, Jessica Drew’s involvement pushes past the line of believability (you’ll see why) and Spider-Byte was underutilized. I personally think both will have redemption arcs in the next film.
Combating the slightly adverse effects of the “do little” characters (as mentioned above) there are high-impact introductions like Spider-Punk (Daniel Kaluuya) and Pavitr Prabhakar (Karan Soni), two alternate universe Spider-Men. As a final note for new characters, Mayday Parker is the real MVP in my book and I was pleasantly surprised with Andy Samberg’s few lines as Ben Reilly. Being that the Scarlett Spider (Reilly) is one of my all-time favorite iterations of the character, I do hope the next film has him heavily featured.
Across the Spider-Verse accomplishes what set-up sequels are supposed to, they leave the right amount of questions that need answering, they keep the tension high, and they don’t degrade the titles that came before them. Having just written a large ranking review of the Harry Potter films that failed to do this properly, it was incredibly refreshing to see the Sony Animation Studios get this one right in nearly every way. Truly, their biggest challenge at this point will be to provide a satisfying conclusion to what is, undeniably, the best Marvel series so far. Much like The Super Marios Bros Movie its dizzying how many deep cuts and spectacular references the film made to the source material. By incorporating all of the Spider-Man iterations, it loops in every single fan of every generation, simultaneously presenting the emotionally complex new hero everyone is rooting for in Miles Morales.
Riot’s Rating: 9.5/10: Load up the fam and go see this movie right now.
Cool deal. The boys are looking forward to seeing it.