'Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse' A Review

Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse is an animated superhero movie the follow up to 2018's excellent Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. The movie opens on Gwen in her reality(Earth-65) dealing with multiverse fallout and tensions with her father. She gets assistance from an organization of Spider-People who she then joins. Meanwhile in Earth-1610, Miles is lonely, searching, and still grieving his uncle. He faces off against a new villain The Spot created by the collider explosion in the last movie. Enter the Spider-League and things get exciting from there!

The returning voice cast are all excellent and newcomers Jason Schwartzman, Issa Rae, Karan Soni, and Daniel Kaluuya(among others) are wonderful additions and, again, the comedy and emotion, the thrill and theme, are all woven through the performances and characters beautifully. The plot isn't as lucky, in the first film it was stuffed to bursting but never tipped over, here it reaches bloat pretty quickly and the extended Gwen-centered prologue doesn't help. Not that she's not a compelling character but this franchise is about Miles and it's distracting that we don't get to him for almost 1/4 of the runtime. This on top of the extended parade of Spider-People which is so large none of them are really able to differentiate themselves. Not to mention the conflict is split too many ways, the antagonists are The Spot as well as Spider-Man 2099(in a way) as well as substantial interpersonal issues that both Miles and Gwen are facing. The result is compelling but muddled.

Visually the movie attempts to one-up the first and the more-is-more approach, similar to the plotting, is successful but uneven. There are some stunning sequences but it at times is so much, so many colors and animation styles cycling so quickly, it at time becomes simply cacophonous. It's still an achievement, still unique, but falls short of capturing the magic of it's predecessor and ends abruptly with a "to be continued" as it is not apparent this, like Dune, is actually Part 1 of 2.

Entertaining, propulsive, but too expansive to land with significant narrative impact.

Currently in theaters, coming soon to VOD.

Rent It.