Holy Shit is Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse Ever Great!
You know how everyone says the new Spider-Man cartoon is amazing? They're right!
It is no criticism to say that I remember very little about 2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse but I adored it all the same. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was overwhelming in the best possible sense.
I gave myself over to Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. I let it have its way with me. I made a conscious decision to sit in that magical chair in the movie theater and let the movie take me anywhere it wanted to go, no matter how crazy or extreme.
Unlike the dreary old souls at LucasFilm I have faith in the terrific twosome of Phillip Lord and Christopher Miller. They’ve earned it through their consistently brilliant work on projects like 2012’s 21 Jump Street, 2014’s The Lego Movie and 22 Jump Street and Clone High.
Lord and Miller made you cry as well as laugh at a movie based on plastic building toys for children and made feature film adaptations of 21 Jump Street so powerful that they single-handedly cured Kanye West of his virulent anti-Semitism.
Lord and Miller created cinematic magic out of a movie about little toy bricks. It’s not surprising that they helped create a Spider-Man movie unlike any other. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse didn’t just feel like the giddy culmination of everything that the Spider-Man movies had been working towards since 2002’s Spider-Man; it feels like the culmination of everything comic book movies as a whole have been building towards over the course of the past half century, since the big bang of Richard Donner’s Superman.
I don’t remember much about Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse except that I dug it. I don’t know where it ended but I know that Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse opens with Hailee Steinfeld’s Gwen Stacy/Spider-Woman delivering narration about the precarious place she’s in emotionally that resonated with me on a profound, almost uncanny level.
Within the first five minutes of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse I was WEEPING like a baby and saying, silently, to the screen, that sacred, sacred screen, “YES! You GET me, sequel to an animated Spider-Man movie! You understand the exquisite pain of existence and how it unites us all paradoxically, in a great cosmic cycle of loss and grief and acceptance! You know EXACTLY what I am going through right now!”
It was intense. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse doesn’t start slowly and give us time to get acclimated. Instead it throws us cavalierly into the deepest part of the deep end because it knows that we can handle it.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is DEEP. Watching its first ten minutes made me realize that it is not just the fate of super-heroes to suffer and fail and experience death and loss and excruciating rejection. It is ALL of our destinies.
Don’t believe me? Think of it this way. EVERYBODY THAT YOU KNOW IS GOING TO DIE. EVERYBODY. That includes you!
The mothers and fathers and uncles and aunts of superheroes MUST die for the sake of their origin stories. That’s also true of EVERYONE. Your mother and father and aunt and uncle are all going to die. Dunno if that qualifies as a spoiler or not. They’re not necessarily going to get killed by a random street criminals but all of your relatives are going to die.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse has a unique understanding of the innate loneliness and futility of existence. The awful knowledge that its heroes will need to experience the deaths of the people closest to them in order to realize their own heroic destinies lends an element of melancholy to even the most high spirited scenes.
Across the Spider-Verse doesn’t start slowly and ramp up gradually. Instead it begins at 11 and maintains that level of emotional intensity for one hundred and forty minutes.
ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY MINUTES! This animated Spider-Man cartoon has a runtime of nearly two and a half hours. TWO AND A HALF HOURS! That is a long, long time but it does not feel like it because Across the Spider-Verse has got you by the throat the whole time. I didn’t even use the bathroom while watching what is apparently the longest animated film an American studio film has ever released and it feels, if anything, short.
Miles Morales begins the film in an all too relatable place. He’s depressed, mired in a very precocious existential funk and he has an intense crush on Gwen Stacy/Spider-Woman. As charmingly voiced by the immensely appealing Hailee Steinfeld, Gwen is extremely crush-worthy.
Miles’ sense of being alone and unique in the universe is complicated by the existence of a seemingly infinite number of people who might not understand EVERYTHING that he’s going through but do know what it’s like to have spider super-powers.
Gwen joins a secret league of amazing spider-creatures led by Miguel O’Hara/Spider-Man 2099 (voiced by an appropriately intense Oscar Isaac) who looks and seems more monstrous than super heroic that includes scene-stealers like Spider-Punk, a British super-rebel infected with the righteous spirit of 1977, and Pavitr Prabhakar, AKA the Indian Spider-Man.
Across the Spider-Verse makes a spectacular case for diversity in comic book entertainment. It’s a movie that doesn’t just look like our increasingly, exhilaratingly multi-cultural country; it looks like our world as well. If you can’t handle that, make way for the future, because it’s not a bunch of fragile white people hogging all the representation.
With the exception of Into the Spider-Verse scene-stealers Spider-Ham and Spider-Man Noir it seems like just about every Spider-Something since the beginning of time is in Across the Spider-Verse, if only for a split second.
Like its predecessor, Across the Spider-Verse is incredibly dense with ideas, energy and spectacle. It’s intentionally much too much, a wildly excessive extravaganza. You could watch Across the Spider-Verse a dozen times and find something new and exciting with each viewing.
Nicolas Cage does not return as Spider-Man Noir but the Coppola family is represented through the central presence of his cousin Jason Schwartzman, AKA the talented one in the family.
I’m kidding! They’re all talented but Schwartzman and Cage make nepotism and their family look GREAT! I was excited and surprised to learn that an awesome but not insanely popular cult figure like Schwartzman wasn’t just in the movie but also the main villain.
I was even more excited to learn that Schwartzman would be playing, of all of the Spider-Man villains, The Spot, AKA Dr. Jonathan Ohnn, a bad guy who can travel through dimensions through holes that act as portals.
Sony had so much faith in the filmmaker’s instincts and abilities that they seemingly gave them carte blanche to go as deep and nerdy as possible. So if they wanted the villain to be a Poindexter whose super-power is that he can create and toss around holes played by the kid from Rushmore and I Heart Huckabees, then gosh darn it that’s what was going to happen in a billion dollar sequel to a smash hit follow-up to an Academy Award winner for Best Animated Film.
The Spot is a great and unexpected villain in part because he is so sympathetic and relatable. He’s like all of us: confused, overwhelmed and struggling to make sense of a world that seems random, cruel and unknowable.
I would go deeper into the plot except that plot really doesn’t matter here. It’s more about mood and emotion, about taking audiences to a place at once fragile and vibrant, achingly sad as well as strangely hopeful.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is great on a historic level. It legitimately might be the best superhero movie ever made. There’s just so much of it and it’s pretty much all great.
You don’t need me to tell you to see this movie. You can listen to everyone else ranting and raving about it.
I never thought I would write these words but Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse convinced me that movies based on comic books, which have universally been dismissed as silly nonsense for small, simple-minded children, might actually have something to offer adults as well.
Four Stars out of Four Stars
Well, y'know, Nabin—Kathleen Kennedy just couldn't understand what Lord & Miller were up to, because they're not...easy to get like, say, Opie Cunningham is....
I honestly feel bad for Ron Howard because I think he's a good, and sometimes great, filmmaker, but all too often Hollywood turns to him as the "safe" choice, and he's been there too long not to give the studios what they expect. Lord & Miller are on a whole different wavelength that our inner fans hear loud and clear, though it's really unlikely anybody else can replicate it (though maybe The Daniels can?).
You are not wrong, sir! Saw it twice in 24 hours and sammiched a rewatch of Into the Spider-Verse in there. Depending on how the next one goes we just might need to shut all of cinema down and call it a day.
Lord and Miller deep dive forthcoming? I joke with my kids that Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs is my favourite movie of all time...but am I really joking?