My relationship with Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023) is long and complicated. Like many people I had become burned out of superhero movies, falling under what can be called “superhero fatigue”, and I still don’t really care all that much for superhero movies save for a few. Few superhero movies dared to challenge me or anyone, they often fell into the same status quo that was already established. I want more from blockbusters, I want more from popular filmmaking, and for the most part the answer lied within the animated Spider-Man movies. But even then, why waste my breath on superhero movies? There’s a world of limitless potential and imagination out there, why restrict myself to just superhero movies anyways? I had already seen other movies anyways. Part of me wishes that superhero movies would take from their comic book counterparts and be colorful, exciting, audacious, formally interesting, and so on. What draws me to my favorite films is that they challenge me. Some of my favorite comic books challenge me, so why can’t the films do that? It’s disheartening seeing people just accept the current state of blockbuster filmmaking and how bad it is and can be. Everyone always says “Hollywood’s just remakes and sequels”, and that’s true to some extent, however it negates the whole point of art. Exploration. Again, why limit yourself just to superhero movies and the biggest blockbuster events when there’s a whole host of other things out there to see? Even more recent sequels/blockbuster movies have tried to challenge audience’s conventions and expectations of what a blockbuster is. Films like Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017), The Matrix Resurrections (2021), and even (reluctantly) The Dark Knight (2008), all dare to push the limits of what a blockbuster can do or be formally. When Scorsese said that the Marvel movies were just themepark movies he was right. This conception that blockbuster filmmaking is the only legitimate form of filmmaking is wrong. That is what Scorsese is arguing when he says that. Superhero movies do not challenge anything, they exist within the status quo and continue to perpetuate it, which is why movies like Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023), are so interesting to look at. These are two films that try their very best to challenge the notion of what a superhero movie can even be. But first we need some context.
Spider-Man’s cinematic history is long and arduous and can be traced all the way back to 1977, the same year Star Wars (1977), Suspiria (1977), and Eraserhead (1977) all burst onto the scene. Spider-Man got his cinematic start with a TV movie staring Nicholas Hammond and a spinoff of a Japanese Spider-Man TV show. Then nothing really happened after that. Obviously the character made appearances in TV shows of the animated variety, namely the fox animated shows, but nothing much came of the character in live action. By the turn of the century, after Marvel had gone kind of bankrupt, they sold the film and television rights for the character to Sony, and so the story goes. Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man (2002) released in theaters, introducing a new generation to the webcrawling pulp hero of old and launched a media franchise that lasted until 2007 with Spider-Man 3 (2007). After the failure of the third installment, Sony rebooted the series with a new lead, replacing Tobey Maguire with Andrew Garfield in a new series called The Amazing Spider-Man (2011–2014). This series was a miserable failure that pretty much tanked the character. Studio meddling and just all around bad filmmaking led these films to pretty much be disliked by the general public — after all this came from the wave of dark and gritty superhero reboots that plagued the industry following the success of Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy — and so with that the series was, for lack of better terminology, canned after several failed projects. We all know what happened next, the rights were shared between Disney and Sony, and Spider-Man entered the Marvel Cinematic Universe, creating a new trilogy with its whole host of issues visually, narratively, and so on. But that one managed to be more successful than the Raimi trilogy, at least in terms of long lasting longevity, nothing will hold a candle to the cultural impact those three movies had, for better or for worse. But I digress. A run through of the tumultuous history of Spider-Man’s film life makes it easier to understand why people gravitate towards the animated Spider-Man films. I haven’t even mentioned the cartoon shows that so many generations grew up watching. So now we arrive at a crossroads: Marvel Studios is generating tons of money with their new Spider-Man, and Sony is slowly tanking itself with boundless projects that get cancelled or never release. Sony Pictures Animation announces an animated Spider-Man project, which surprises most, as Sony Pictures Animation isn’t really a household name known for their quality animated movies. And then it releases.
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) made waves when it initially came out, garnering critical praise and intense commercial success. Here we have a Spider-Man film that appealed to pretty much everyone whilst being interesting, formally exciting, and generally exciting. It marked uncharted territory for almost everyone as the character of Miles Morales wasn’t as well known upon release (at least in my opinion), and most people didn’t know what to expect from a Sony animated film. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) was bombastic, loud, and ambitious for an origin movie but still worked. It is undeniable the impact the film had on the animation industry, many studios would try and ride off of its success, copying its visual style completely in some cases (Puss and Boots: The Last Wish (2022)) or doing something new and interesting with it (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2023)). Suffice to say it sent a ripple effect throughout the industry that forever changed it. It marked a point where mainstream animation could be experimental again, gone were the days of Disney/Pixar’s boring 3D hyper-realistic style, a mix of 2D and 3D became the new standard. However, the film did have a host of issues, namely the fact that when shifting perspectives from Miles it became abundantly clear the writers really didn’t know how to balance the characters well. Most everyone except Miles and Peter are boring. The central conflict and parallels between the two are interesting when explored fully, but much of the side stuff with the other characters detracts from any real weight the story has. Into the Spider-Verse (2018) embodied the oldest thematic trick in the Spider-Man book, this idea that anyone can be a hero, and that resonated with audiences. As mind-numbing as it can be to watch another earth ending event be stopped by the Avengers, Into the Spider-Verse plays into that and creates something exciting. 2018 itself was an interesting year for superhero movies as the latest installment in the Avengers series of films had released, which reminds me of how banal and pointless they all are. So surely this Spider-Man installment was riding off the coattails of that right? Wrong. Marvel movies are typically really bad, boring, overstuffed, glorified homework movies that never really do anything formally interesting. But here we have the rare superhero movie that actually does something. There’s a point after the birth of the modern superhero movie — Iron Man (2008) — where things began to change. 10 years of the Marvel factory churning out movie after movie after movie, sequel after sequel, became quite frankly dreadful. But this movie proved to most people that there was still hope in them. And then after 5 years the next one came out.
“Let’s do things differently this time.”
The issues I had with the sequel Across the Spider-Verse (2023) didn’t really come about until after a few viewings. Like most I think I pretty much thought it was flawless at first. I was so overwhelmed by the visuals and the story and everything that I couldn’t think straight for a while. I then saw it again. And again. Until eventually I knew every plot detail and point well enough. But within each of those viewings a new crack revealed itself. If anything the film is formally audacious and bombastic, it’s loud, funny, chaotic, and slides from frame to frame with so much ease. But that’s on the surface level. It acts kind of like a meta deconstruction of the first one and the whole Spider-Man mythos by way of the Wachowskis’ Matrix sequels. It takes the first one and recontextualizes a lot of what goes on and what happened through this new concept called the “canon event”. To put it short the “canon event” is a response to the obsession most comic book fans have with the canon of a story. What’s not canon and what is canon is always subject to debate. The “canon event” is a vessel for the writers to essentially critique the very idea of the canon when it comes to superhero comics. The secondary antagonist of the film Miguel O’Hara (Spider-Man 2099 in the comics) explains to Miles that each Spider-Person has a canon event, that is, events that occur throughout every single story that are the same. If you stray from that event then the world collapses and if enough people stray then so does the multiverse. It’s needlessly complex for something that could so easily just be used as a vessel to critique fanboyish obsession with arbitrary things. But we live in an age where the meta-textual nuances of films are made so needlessly complex in service of a larger narrative of pedaling nostalgia. This isn’t a new criticism but the canon event idea is completely convoluted and goes counter to the entire point of the Spider-Man character. It might just be the fact that the multiverse is so popular in the current film landscape right now — Marvel pivoted after the Infinity Saga wrapped up into doing multiverse stuff, so did DC with their disastrous Flash movie, and even A24 and the Daniels did this with their movie Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022) — or it might be the tied into the question of “how do you follow up such a good self contained movie?”. It most certainly is a result of this need to have everything be interconnected, had that post credit scene not been in the prior film none of this really would have mattered. But in its ambitions, Across the Spider-Verse flies too close to the sun and burns its wings off. I do not hate the movie, it is a genuine artistic achievement, but at what cost? (poor working conditions allegedly). It’s so tied to the franchise filmmaking model that it cannot really break free, it is so tied to the intellectual property that if it does anything to challenge audiences they might reject it. So there’s this weird contrast of playing it safe and also being too ambitious and losing sight of the story.
“His name is Miles Morales. He was bitten by a radioactive spider, and he’s not the only one. He hasn’t always had it easy, and he’s not the only one. And now he’s on his own, and he’s not the only one.”
I don’t know how controversial it is to say this, but Across the Spider-Verse is less focused on Miles than it is Gwen. And that’s awesome, I think shifting perspectives a little in a sequel is great, Miles had his spotlight, and still does, and now Gwen gets one. It’s how the film tries to balance Gwen and Miles that really muddies the waters for me. Gwen’s story in Across the Spider-Verse is one of heartbreak. She is a character who is torn between her love for Miles and her duty to the Spider-People that Miguel is trying to protect. It makes for some much needed narrative tension along with providing some genuinely complex character work. Gwen’s story is one of acceptance, of self acceptance. In fact pretty much everyone’s story in this film is one of acceptance. Miles needs to learn to come to terms with himself and “come out” to his parents as Spider-Man. It’s not very subtle but it very much mirrors queer acceptance. The movie doesn’t balance these well at all. In fact it’s very disjointed and all over the place, and normally that’s not the worst thing ever for me, but it can give some narrative whiplash. The film is constantly bouncing around ideas and concepts and never completely fleshes them out, making them all pointless. And once more I’m never one to complain about runtime in a film, however long is needed to tell a story doesn’t matter to me, but when I say this film is long, I mean it. At times the runtime drags. It drags so hard that the last 20 or so minutes could be cut out and it would feel complete. In fact those last 20 or so minutes are genuinely some of the worst most jarringly paced final 20 minutes within any superhero movie ever. It forgoes the typical narrative three act structure and goes with this weird 4–5 act structure, where there is a clear ending point and then it just continues. And continues. It doesn’t stop. And then you realize there’s a good 30 minutes left. And it just keeps going, and going, and going.
I still like the film, I think, but it is becoming increasingly harder to genuinely praise and enjoy when these flaws become so glaringly obvious. I think most of all the issue lies within the blockbuster and franchise filmmaking mold that the film seems to be stuck within. It is a sheer testament to trying to break boundaries and for that I think it’s worth looking at. It just is not doing much for me by way of offering anything substantive due to the fact that it is by and large a product. As mentioned prior, it gets caught up in its own logistics far too often making it less and less compelling. (However the original anomaly scene was incredible and impactful.) But it is far more artistically accomplished than the MCU ever could be and once more I appreciate that.
