Web and flow
SPIDER-MAN: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE
Cert PG ★★★★★ In cinemas now
When it arrived in cinemas in 2018, Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse blew the cobwebs off a franchise that was running dangerously short of ideas.
We had seen three big screen Peter Parkers in the previous decade, and the stunning animation freshened up an achingly familiar origins story.
Based on a character from the Ultimate comic book series, teenage graffiti artist Miles Morales wasn’t just the first Black Spider-man, he was also a very different type of webslinger.
And a bold script took a swing at the endless reboots and franchise building by adding grit, anarchic comedy and a strong visual style.
So it’s fitting that in his first sequel, Miles is battling the very concept of a formulaic plot.
We’re back in the multiverse again as a new villain called The Spot ( Jason Schwartzman) opens up a new set of portals, and Miles comes up against a secret society of multiversal Spider-people.
Their ruler is Spider-man 2099 (Oscar Isaac), a humourless, muscle-bound action man determined to patch up any anomalies.
Miles, like all Spider-men, must suffer to keep the timelines intact. That means his tentative romance with Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld), one of the few Spider-women, must be squashed and tragedies in other worlds must stay on track.
Miles’s adventures take us to some of these alternate worlds, each one rendered in a different style of animation.
Daniel Kaluuya voices Spider-punk, a mohawked crime fighter from late-1970s London, who looks like a restless Sex Pistols collage.
Then there’s the Indian-comic inspired Mumbattan and Gwen Stacy’s Earth which, in a homage to her comic books, is rendered in watercolours that change with her ever-switching moods.
It’s witty, moodily scored and gorgeously animated. But it’s Miles and Gwen’s love story and their touching family dramas that keep this high-swinging sequel grounded.
‘‘ Adventures take us to alternate worlds, each in a different style