Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse review – crazily frantic sequel with full-spin energy
In 2018, writers Phil Lord and Rodney Rothman gave us a delirious and utterly unexpected new web-spin on the infinite self-replication of Marvel Comics IP and its most reliable hero, SpiderMan. Instead of yet another MCU live action version, directed and produced in that hard, depthless CGI light, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was a brilliantly inventive animated fantasia about the Spidey mythology, riffing on movies and comic books. The SpiderVerse was a cosmos in which different Spider-folk existed in parallel: a multiverse at least as interesting as that of Dr Strange, and more interesting than the solemn awards-prestige of Everything Everywhere All at Once. Everyone who saw it wondered how this kaleidoscopic new take could be applied elsewhere: James Bond: Across the James-BondVerse or Bilbo Baggins: Beyond the Bilbo-Baggins-Verse.
Now we have a sequel subtitled Across the Spider-Verse – could it be that they wanted a certain Beatles track and Apple wouldn’t let them? – with a threequel (Beyond the Spider-Verse) in the pipeline. This second instalment features a plethora of Spideys and the result is as crazily frantic and eyeballfrazzling as ever, but with something exhausting about it now. Its funny jokes – including a gag about the “SpiderMen pointing at each other” meme – and poignant touches get obscured in the endless maelstrom. But there’s no doubting the full-tilt energy, the pure blizzard of narrative data and the twists and turns that it would be unsporting to reveal.
Miles Morales (voiced by Shameik Moore) is a Spider-Man whose parents are naturally exasperated by his unreliability; Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld) is a super arachnid in her own universe and, like Miles, has a parent in law enforcement. (This is her dad, although it isn’t immediately clear why her gender-flipped status doesn’t entitle her to a cop mom.) There’s also a Spider-Man India (Karan Soni) and a grown-up Peter Parker (Jake Johnson). Miles is threatened by an enemy connected to his original calamitous spider bite and an existential crisis looms.
These Spider-Man movies supercharge and hyperamplify the existing potent teen metaphor of identity in Stan Lee’s great creation. Peter Parker was unable to “come out” as SpiderMan to his parents or his friends; his Spidey-ness was a core part of his bodily being, a superpower and yet a burden, introduced into his bloodstream from that spider bite. Now this secret is upgraded to a cosmic range of possibilities; to be Spider-Man is no longer to be alone, rather, it is to be part of a global range of Spider-people who are different. Viewers have been invited to identify with Spider-Man since the first adaptations of the comic book in the 60s, and are now given a choice of how to identify. It’s dynamic and intriguing, though the detail and the emotion can get lost in the splurge.
• Spider-Man: Across the SpiderVerse is released on 1 June in Australia, and 2 June in the US and UK.