Review

Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse Review

  • First Released Jun 2, 2023
    released
  • movie
Phil Owen on Google+

It's gloriously beautiful, incessantly funny, and deeply emotional, but this Spider-sequel's story misses the spot.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is a visually breathtaking movie that will constantly leave you in a dizzy awe of its trippy animation. It's also a clumsy story that can never figure out what it wants to emphasize, ending very abruptly and leaving the next movie to figure everything out.

That makes Across the Spider-Verse very difficult to evaluate. This is effectively only half a movie, both because of how it's structured and because it's one part of a two-part story. And so, in a very real way, the quality of this film will ultimately be determined by its sequel, which is scheduled for next March.

In the meantime, let's talk about Across the Spider-Verse on its own terms, as best we can, anyway. It opens with the tragic backstory of Gwen Stacey's Spider-Woman (Hailee Steinfeld)--in which her Peter Parker becomes the Lizard and dies fighting her. Gwen's universe has its own surrealistic art style that's astonishingly pleasing to watch, and it's all delivered to the rhythm of a song. I'd go as far as to say this is the best opening sequence of any superhero movie.

Gwen's universe is so striking and awesome-looking that when it's time to catch up with Miles Morales (Shameik Moore), it feels a little bit mundane. But, fortunately, things get weird quickly when a mysterious figure called The Spot (Jason Schwartzman) shows up. He's a blank person with a bunch of dimensional portals on his body; he owes his existence to Miles in some way, and he's about to wreak some havoc on the multiverse.

The Spot starts tearing through the multiverse looking for a world in which the big multiverse collider from the first film is still intact. And the Spider Society--which includes Gwen and basically every other Spider-Being besides Miles--shows up to try to deal with it, and Miles hitches a ride through the spider-verse even though the other Spiders don't want him to.

From here, Miles falls all the way down the rabbit hole in a multiversal journey of self-discovery, starting with a team-up against The Spot in Mumbai with Gwen, Spider-Punk (Daniel Kaluuya), the Spider-Woman Jessica Drew (Issa Rae), and the Spider-Man Pavitr Prabhakar (Karan Soni). After a spectacular sequence in Mumbai, Across the Spider-Verse stops caring about The Spot and instead focuses on Miles' dealings with the other Spider-folks while he tries to figure out where he belongs.

It's not a bad shift on paper. The best scenes in the film are ones where its characters have emotional conversations with each other while the trippy animation heightens the mood--not the big action set-pieces and battles against villains. The issue, though, is that the first half of the movie establishes this fascinating villain who has a strong personal connection to Miles, and then that villain is absent for nearly the entire back half of the movie.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

It's extremely frustrating because Across the Spider-Verse works like gangbusters until there are about 15 minutes left. That's when the cracks start to show. Although it's at this point where we get probably the single most impactful scene in the whole movie, the scenes around it are rushed and abrupt, lacking coherence right when it needs it most. Across the Spider-Verse is never bad, but it unravels at the end in a way that takes it from all-time classic to…something less than that.

The cliffhanger ending is certainly much clumsier than the one at the end of, say, Avengers: Infinity War. That film told the story of how Thanos gathered all the Infinity Stones and then used them--that's a complete story with an overly dramatic tease for the next movie. Across the Spider-Verse, by contrast, has the feel of a movie that they decided to cut in half because it was way too long. This cliffhanger is not a natural stopping point for the story, hitting you with the "to be continued" right when things are ramping up. This is a movie that has no climax.

It's killing me to spend so much time harping on the ending of a movie that I otherwise loved. We're talking about one of the most beautiful and vibey movies I've ever seen, a movie that made me laugh constantly and cry more than once. A movie that introduced me to my new favorite Spider-Bro: Daniel Kaluuya's Spider-Punk, who looks like he was cut out of a magazine and steals every scene they let him be in. Which is not enough, frankly, because he's hilarious.

While Across the Spider-Verse is not a wall-to-wall laughfest--it's got too many heavy moments for that--it manages to land nearly every joke it attempts. That's not the biggest surprise, considering we're talking about a movie written by Phil Lord and Chris Miller (the guys responsible for the Lego Movie and Jump Street remakes). These two don't miss, especially when it's time to break the fourth wall with comedy--which Across the Spider-Verse does frequently.

Also, did I tell you that the movie is super gorgeous? I know I did, but it really does bear repeating: Across the Spider-Verse is a visual feast unlike anything I've ever seen before in a movie theater. It's transcendent, really. Maybe, for this film, that's all that will end up mattering.

Phil Owen on Google+
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The Good

  • One of the most breathtaking theatrical experiences I've had
  • Guaranteed to make you tear up, if not full-on cry
  • Spider-Punk deserves his own movie

The Bad

  • Abrupt and unsatisfying cliffhanger
  • Forgets about its main villain for the entire second half of the movie
  • Is not a complete film

About the Author

Phil Owen is a freelance writer. Sony provided a screening of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse for the purposes of this review.