(PG) ★★★★
Director: Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers & Justin K. Thompson.
Cast: (voices of) Shameik Moore, Hailee Steinfeld, Brian Tyree Henry, Luna Lauren Vélez, Jake Johnson, Jason Schwartzman, Issa Rae, Karan Soni, Daniel Kaluuya, Oscar Isaac, Shea Whigham.
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| Come-As-Your-Favourite-Superhero Day was as predictable as ever. |
So you've made a successful Spidey-movie. In fact some say you've made the greatest comic book movie of all time. Your success can buy you creative freedom, and the power to tell yet more Spidey-stories.
But with great power, comes great responsibility (phew, got there in the end). After all, there is a rich web of Spidey-tales to honour and be true to, even while weaving a brand new strand. This is both the curse and the beauty of Spider-man storytelling in this day and age. Much like Batman, we are so familiar with the origin stories and raison d'êtres that we don't even need to have them explained, but it means you need to do something different and fresh each time because of that familiarity.
But with great familiarity can come great innovation. Batman and Spider-man are ideal for telling a range of different stories in a range of different styles for this very reason. Want a noirish detective story? Both can work for that. Manga and anime? Go right ahead. Or, as is the case in Across The Spider-Verse, you can use a Spider-man story to explore the very nature of Spider-man stories. No Way Home did a similar thing, digging into what makes Spider-man Spider-man via the multiverse, but Across The Spider-verse goes even more meta. And a little bit crazy. In a good way.
The story again follows Miles Morales (Moore) AKA Spider-Man, 16 months on from his first adventure. It finds him more at home with his powers, but still struggling with his responsibilities. A new villain named Spot (Schwartzman) is giving him grief, he's finding it hard to balance his school/home life with his web-slinging life, and he misses Gwen Stacy (Steinfeld) AKA Ghost-Spider/Spider-Woman.
But when Gwen drops in from the multiverse, Miles finds there are more Spider-people out there than he ever imagined, and their role in the multiverse is more complicated than he ever realised.
Basically, like most sequels, Across The Spider-Verse is about doing "more" of everything. More of the insanely inventive visuals, more Spider-people to explore in relation to the mythos, more gags, more action, more everything. Chaotic, ferociously paced, frenetic and fun, Across The Spider-Verse almost goes too far in this more-is-more approach. Some action sequences only just stay on the right side of being too much, and the blurring of visual styles can be jarring and hard to take in some moments.
But the sequel is also excellent at expanding the themes of the first film. Whereas Into The Spider-Verse was very focused on the perils of teenage life, this one spends a welcome amount of time on the perils of being a parent of a teenager. The nature of what Spider-Man is and what he represents is taken to an exaggerated post-modern level, which actually gives the film a lot of its central tension.
Despite this bigger-is-better approach, the film still works. It's as fun and free as the first, though there's a dark undercurrent that grows as it barrels towards its cliffhanger ending (Beyond The Spider-Verse is due out in March next year). And it never forgets where its heart lies, which is in the teenage chests of its two main heroes. Their respective plights are painted in metaphorically rich colours to match the literal visual splendour going on around them.
Into The Spider-Verse was undoubtedly one of the great superhero movies, and easily one of the most important animated films of the past 20 years. That's a tough act to follow, but Across The Spider-Verse lives up to its predecessor, continuing to spin another vibrant thread in the tangled web of Spidey-stories.
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