After reuniting with Gwen Stacy, Brooklyn’s full-time, friendly neighborhood Spider-Man is catapulted across the Multiverse, where he encounters the Spider Society, a team of Spider-People charge...
My most anticipated film of this year, Across The Spiderverse has finally hit theaters and no point at sugarcoating it…..but I may have just found my film of the year….at least for now. I’m truly at a loss for words to describe the kaleidoscopic phenomenon I just saw on screen.
But I’m gonna try.
What immediately hooked me into this from the offset is how emphatically dense the presentation of this film turned out to be, deftly juggling hearty, deeply personal, more mature content with crazy multiverse content on a narrowly thin but razor sharp edge. This robustly-built universe boasts such alacrity that, while not breaking any molds, combines the best of Lord and Millers penchant for grounded wacky ideas with an ever-sprawling but earnest direction.
Nearly every shot of the cinematography is so beautifully illustrated with verbose yet succulent editing, a cavalcade of brief but exceptionally well-used production designs, a grandiose quality of gags and in-jokes that mostly left me chuckling, spry, frisky dialogue with the chemistry and admin to properly sell it between voice actors and words are NOT ENOUGH to express how electrifying the music starts out and grows to.
So many characters, major and minor, bleeds vulnerability while adding extra layers to their persona; Miles, Gwen and Miguel O’Hara in particular stand out in particular. Voice acting to said characters have so much gravitas and soul to them, and as expected, the animation is absolutely breathtaking: the mixture of 2D hand-drawn and 3D computer generated imagery is like a modern-art museum on acid with madly eclectic images that forge different textures, aesthetics and abstract techniques together, constantly finding creativity in the most microscopic of details and quickly turns into a ethereal concert. It defines the boundaries and lengths animation can go but also sets the bar while simultaneously raising the stakes at once.
Everything leading into this story permeates this grounded and purposely odd but dramatically compelling intersection between the true gravity of responsibility and the frustrating but ultimately significant stigma of young people refusing to submit to any concept of what a hero should do or needs to be; all of it is handled wonderfully. While it maintains those common narrative threads of loneliness and love that help frame itself as a Spider-Man story through and through, the very medium this film uses gives them free range to experiment and play around with the general tried-and-true tropes and themes you expect from this genre. Not only do they do it in a very self-aware manner AND subtly builds itself on the underlying messages while poking fun at the Spider-Man mythos but NONE of it gets lost in translation at all. It has the potential to get worrying for a little bit with so much happening at once but Lord and Miller are able to salvage nearly all of it.
If the first film is about how anyone can be a hero, this expands upon that by dissecting how you plan to define what KIND of hero you are or want to be. Railing against those that oppose change is one thing but as the film expands upon the first films basic themes of adolescent isolation, communication breakdown, the messy, stressful business of growing up and finding your people, you realize how densely plotted and important that is not to just the foundation of the overarching story itself but the characters also. And payoffs and character revelations that were only hinted at in the first film are carefully, deliberately unraveled and come around beautifully.
I barely have any complaints about this cause they’re so minuscule.
Honoring and reimagining the Spider-Man mythos for a new generation of movie fans with an artistic bent and maturer backdrop, it brings validity to the statement that sometimes MORE IS MORE. Yes, it’s frantically busy and wheel-spinningly slow at once. Yes, it’s definitely sensory overload. Yes, there’s an occasional exposition dump or one-liner or cameo that probably could’ve been cut out and no harm would’ve been lost but the vision that comes forth as a result is worth the mess it may cause.
