****/****
written by Phil Lord & Christopher Miller and Dave Callaham
directed by Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K. Thompson
by Walter Chaw Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is fucking spectacular. Taking the baton from Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse‘s Oscar-winning team of Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman, new co-directors Joaquim Don Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson have created something that feels like a chi-chi art gallery in uptown Manhattan, where geniuses who make things you can’t believe you’re seeing are all exhibiting their mind-blowing riffs on the same pop-cultural theme. I even thought of Peter Greenaway’s work in how the characters have colour-coded costumes to exist in mood-specific settings that transition from one to the next at a dazzling, dizzying, breakneck pace. Every inch of Across the Spider-Verse is filled with light and detail without being overcrowded. It’s a sensory amphetamine, kaleidoscopic, exhilarating, yet somehow not exhausting. I sometimes forget why I ever loved superheroes and comic books, given the direness of the flavourless gruel parade masquerading as outsider art nowadays. Then along come Into the Spider-Verse and now Across the Spider-Verse to remind me how important these stories are when they’re told in the voices of the oppressed rather than through the stock portfolios of the oppressors. In the hands of the people who are hurting, comic books can be and often are fantasies of hope. In the hands of the wealthy seeking to become wealthier, they’re fantasies of exploitation, colonization, and fascism.
Miles (voiced by the returning Shameik Moore) protects Brooklyn from small-time crooks and the occasional super-powered villain while juggling responsibilities at the elite prep school his parents, Rio (Lauren Vélez) and Jefferson (Brian Tyree Henry), struggle to afford. He foils the mysterious, wormhole-creating The Spot (Jason Schwartzman), who’s trying to steal a bodega’s ATM, but he’s late for a conference with his principal (Rachel Dratch). And he pines away the hours doing sketches in his notebook of Gwen (Hailee Steinfeld), his canonical crush from a different dimension, whom he’ll theoretically never see again. Miles is having trouble managing his time and emotions. He’s letting down his parents, who are worried about where his head’s at and who he’s hanging out with as he hits an age where talking to them is a chore and an air of mystery is a test of love and trust his parents know they’re failing.
Heavy stuff, told in Across the Spider-Verse with lightness and verve. For instance, after not being able to summarize his thoughts regarding his father’s promotion to police captain for an icing dedication on a cake, Miles asks the baker if she can write smaller, and she asks Miles if he can express himself more succinctly–which is amusing enough, but the gag is punctuated visually by Miles leaving the bakery a few minutes later with two cakes. The real payoff, though, is when he finally shows up at the party, having stopped multiple times along the way to fulfill the duties of his Spider-Man persona, and the heartfelt sentiments on the cakes have been muddied into an alphabet soup spelling out the opposite of what he’s intended. It’s a carefully crafted joke that is not only funny but also poignant in addressing these pictures’ themes concerning the difficulties and rewards of communication between the generations. It deepens Miles’s struggles with his responsibilities and exacerbates his parents’ exasperation with him; it’s a misunderstanding in which both parties have engaged with love and good intentions. And it’s one of dozens of like moments that form the heart of these films.
More, these Spider-Verse movies serve as a template for how to do representation and inclusion on an expansive, mainstream, IP/tentpole scale. (Disney, take note.) They are works of indisputable art created by minority artists or with the voice of minority artists guiding their creation, and because of that, with seeming effortlessness, they feature multicultural characters and places that look and sound exactly like they are, not how another culture imagines them to be. They aren’t sentimental (sentimentality is patronizing), though they are suffused with unconscious, unforced love in the characters’ environments, their mannerisms, their style of dress. I think of that Bane line from Nolan’s third Dark Knight movie where he says, “You think darkness is your ally? You merely adopted the dark. I was born in it, molded by it.” You can learn some things, but you have to be one hell of a study to fool people who live those things. Minorities in the Spider-Verse films are not connected to their “source land” in some mystical way. I was stunned by a digression into a Bollywood dimension where each of the visitors from other places, jigsawed together by the manifold forces employed to locate them in this place at this time, retain their unique look and style. The consistency of their character is a potent political statement. All the more so for being made without a single pulpit pounded. In Across the Spider-Verse, Miles’s Puerto Rican mother Rio tells him she wants him to explore the world but to show the child he used to be the same care and love his parents showed him. “Don’t get lost,” she says–and the parent in me is shaken by the simple desperation of that plea. I spent the rest of the film watching for evidence that Miles loses himself, but Miles, because he’s been raised with confidence and self-love, never does. We have faith, too, that should he ever stray, the way he’s animated will fray and stutter. It hasn’t yet. In the Spider-Verse, the out is an expression of the in.
I can’t fully express how beautiful Across the Spider-Verse is to look at, and how that beauty only deepens upon contemplation of the emotional landscapes it’s planted as these fulsome, pregnant seeds while we’re distracted by the richness of its visual astonishments (the villain made of da Vinci sketches, the world made out of watercolour). Its action is next-level, three-dimensional stuff and still manages to tell complete stories of its participants in how they move and their split-second decisions in moments of crisis. There’s less a true villain in the piece than an overriding message about interconnectedness, predetermination vs. free will, and the costs and arguable rewards of personal sacrifice. Big questions, you’ll agree. Superhero stuff, when it’s working, is about not the punching but the lonely toll that drives tension and weakens the ties that bind us to our families, our identities, and the communities we serve and wish to preserve. It’s one of a recent spate of multiverse pictures, though only it, its predecessor, and The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All At Once seem to understand that a multiverse should function as a metaphor for regrets. It’s not an opportunity to pull in every other example of your hero as they’ve appeared in popular culture–although Across the Spider-Verse does that, too–but a device to be used as it was in It’s a Wonderful Life: to show its ambiguous and flawed protagonist that for as bad as things are, they can be worse than you could imagine. An alternate Spider-Man, Miguel O’Hara (Oscar Isaac), tries to police chaos as the head of a group of Spider-People committed to “fixing” dimensional anomalies. He wants Miles to accept that he has no real say in how he lives his life, since Miguel’s own life has gone terribly wrong. He means well, but living in chaos is no excuse for making choices, especially for others, from a place of nihilism.
I don’t want to give too much away except to say that as much as the first film is centred on Miles Morales, this sequel revolves around Gwen Stacy. In her dimension, her cop dad, Captain Stacy (Shea Whigham), is on the hunt for Spider-Woman (Gwen, natch), whom he blames for the murder of The Lizard along with Gwen’s best friend, Peter Parker. It opens with Gwen playing in a garage band called “The Mary Janes” (!) and leaving over a disagreement with her mates. As illustrated in a horizontal split-screen, we see Gwen in close-up walking off against a streaked, angry background, while her mates are seen in wide shot occupying a more placid space in the frame below. It’s pop expressionism at its finest; just minutes into the film, I could feel my jaw drop and the breath catch in my chest. Later, Gwen and Miles–briefly reunited, for maybe the last time–are paired in a riff on the “Can You Read My Mind” sequence from Richard Donner’s Superman (1978) that ends with them sitting next to each other on a New York City landmark as her face grows slowly pinker from the setting sun, from her blushing proximity to Miles as his hand sneaks closer to hers, and from the blood gathering in her face because they’re both hanging upside-down. I mean, c’mon. I love these movies, and the conclusion to this one strongly suggests there’s at least one more in the pipeline. As it is, I’m shocked there was another entry even remotely the quality of the first film, cocked and ready in the barrel. We are unbelievably blessed, is what I’m saying, and I’m grateful, whatever comes.
