'Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse' Is a Multiversal Masterpiece
Since 2002, there have been three live-action Spider-Man franchises, with a different actor playing the lead role of Peter Parker in each. The most recent of the eight live-action films even brought the three Peters together to share the big screen and embody the Spider-Man pointing meme. Add on two Venom entries, the meme that is Morbius, and one animated masterpiece, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, and you have a lot of Spider-Man or Spider-adjacent trips to the movies over the past two decades. On top of all that, we’re currently living in the multiverse era of superhero films: The MCU’s current saga of movies and TV shows is named after this very concept of parallel universes, while DC Films is releasing its own multiverse blockbuster just two weeks from now.
Into this glut of Spider-Man and multiverse content comes the sequel to Into the Spider-Verse, Across the Spider-Verse. You might expect Across the Spider-Verse, which arrives less than two years after the release of Spider-Man: No Way Home, to lose some of its predecessor’s novelty in an overcrowded field of superhero movies. But that’s not an issue for the team responsible for the follow-up to the Oscar-winning Into the Spider-Verse. Writer-producers Phil Lord and Chris Miller, along with new writer Dave Callaham (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings) and a trio of new directors (Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson), have ensured that the sequel is bursting with the same creative energy that made the original an instant classic.
Just as Into the Spider-Verse did before it, Across the Spider-Verse uses the audience’s familiarity with Spider-Man as a consistent source of humor. But it also enlists those Spider-tropes to help chart its course through a frenetic, multiverse-jumping story that elevates its scale and ambition in myriad ways. Now a year older, Miles Morales (voiced by Shameik Moore) faces greater challenges and a lot more Spider-people as he navigates his dual life as a high schooler and burgeoning superhero. While the first movie brought five of Miles’s multiversal counterparts to his world as he became Brooklyn’s very own Spider-Man, Across the Spider-Verse sends Miles to alternate dimensions full of new possibilities.
Before catching up with Miles, though, the film focuses its opening sequence on Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld). After returning to her world, Spider-Woman deals with her own struggles to navigate her solitary life on Earth-65 as her father, Capt. George Stacy (Shea Whigham), continues to hunt a superhero he doesn’t realize is his daughter. Across the Spider-Verse positions Gwen as something of a second lead, presenting the second chapter of Miles’s story partly from her perspective and granting her a more complete backstory in the process. (The opener also works as a preview for what we can likely expect from an animated Spider-Woman spinoff, which producer Amy Pascal recently teased is in the works—as is a live-action Miles Morales movie.)
It’s through Gwen that we’re introduced to the Spider Society, an elite task force of Spider-beings led by Miguel O’Hara (Oscar Isaac). This group ties into the events of Into the Spider-Verse, as they take it upon themselves to hold the fabric of the multiverse together against threats like the Spot (Jason Schwartzman), an initially unassuming villain who harnesses the power of Super Colliders to strengthen his abilities to manipulate the interdimensional portals on his body.
On Gwen’s Earth-65, the film also provides its first taste of just how much its animation has evolved since the last installment, even after it reshaped the industry in its image. While Into the Spider-Verse blended the anime stylings of Peni Parker and the Looney Tunes aesthetics of Peter Porker into the dominant animation style used to distinguish Miles’s Brooklyn, Across the Spider-Verse uses each universe to reflect its respective hero, making every unique environment feel like an extension of its characters.
Every world is a new canvas for the Across the Spider-Verse artists to experiment with, and six distinct animation styles are used to clever and often stunning effect. Gwen’s Earth showcases a watercolor-wash style inspired by Spider-Gwen cocreator Robbi Rodriguez’s comic book covers; it looks like a living painting and reflects Gwen’s emotions. Mumbattan, inspired by 1970s comics in India, is a cross between Mumbai and Manhattan that serves as the home of Pavitr Prabhakar (Karan Soni). New London, home to Hobie Brown (Daniel Kaluuya), consists of images stitched together in a collage-style tribute to London’s 1980s punk scene. Nueva York, the stomping grounds of Spider-Man 2099’s Miguel O’Hara and the film’s Spider Society HQ, is a techno-futuristic vision of New York that draws from Syd Mead’s illustrations. The ever-shifting animation styles and changes in setting add new dialects to the franchise’s visual language as Sony Pictures’ Imageworks VFX team continues to transmute comics into movies with astounding fluidity.
Time spent with the film’s many new Spider-people is short given how much ground there is to cover, but each character still makes a lasting impression thanks to the personality breathed into them by their designs and voice acting. Along with main additions Jessica Drew (Issa Rae), Ben Reilly (Andy Samberg), Hobie, Pavitr, and the menacing O’Hara, every supporting Spidey who’s introduced will leave you wanting to learn more about them. (Even, or perhaps especially, the Spider-Cat that drops in for just a moment.) But their time is limited for good reason, as Across the Spider-Verse stays grounded by keeping its focus on Miles, Gwen, and their respective families.
Miles’s evolving relationship with his parents, Rio (Luna Lauren Vélez) and Jeff (Brian Tyree Henry), still serves as the film’s lifeblood as he hides more and more behind his secretive double life. Even with all of the jokes that stem from self-aware Spider-humor, some of the biggest laughs come from situations in which Miles is just being a 15-year-old kid, whether he’s getting chewed out by his parents in front of friends and family or enduring a meeting with his mom, dad, and college admissions counselor. And quieter scenes, such as Miles and Gwen spending time atop the Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower, gazing on an inverted New York City skyline as they hang upside down together, make some of the most lasting impressions. In Spider-Man stories, the life and struggles of Peter Parker have always been as important as, if not more important than, the adventures of the costumed hero himself, and that tradition lives on as Miles endures trials of his own.
For all the spellbinding Spider-people and alluring alternate dimensions that Across the Spider-Verse boasts, the film works so well as a sequel because it never loses sight of Miles’s central coming-of-age story and its examination of what makes him unique in the company of an entire Spider Society. The film engages with that question in a clever, meta way as Miguel explains to Miles the definitive “canon” events that are immovable across time and space and the danger that arises when those crucial moments are altered. This idea binds Miles not just to the other animated Spider-people in the franchise, but also to the concept and history of Spider-Man in the character’s totality. That connection sets up Across the Spider-Verse’s seamless references to events and imagery from Sony’s greater Spider-Verse, the MCU, and beyond—including some live-action crossovers—without those callbacks ever feeling cheap or forced. The film has earned the right to draw on those events by teaching the audience how drastically different these worlds’ environments can look in the course of two movies.
The integration of existing canon hearkens back to an idea from the first film and challenges it. In Into the Spider-Verse, Miles and his new Spider-friends bond through their shared losses—the deaths of their loved ones and the failures that they still blame themselves for. Miles comes to understand that those moments helped define their journeys to becoming superheroes. But Across the Spider-Verse asks what happens when those moments don’t happen and the canon is broken. Who do you become then?
Far too many multiverse movies use the concept of parallel universes simply as a means to an end, a storytelling device that can bend narrative rules to bring characters back to life, transport them to strange new worlds, or, in the case of No Way Home, bring three generations of Spider-Men together in a crowd-pleasing reunion special. (If you’ve forgotten how it all happened, they arrive in the same universe thanks to a little magical mishap amid Doctor Strange and Peter’s college admissions scandal.) But in some of the more exceptional entries in the genre, such as Into the Spider-Verse or another Oscar winner, Everything Everywhere All at Once, the storytelling device has the greater purpose of exploring the root of what makes someone unique when there are infinite versions of them across the multiverse.
For Miles, the answer to who he becomes will have to wait for another day. Across the Spider-Verse ends with a cruel cliff-hanger, but also with the promise that the story will soon resume in Beyond the Spider-Verse. (The conclusion to the trilogy is due in theaters next March.) And if Miles’s next chapter is anything like the preceding two, Sony Pictures Animation will have put the finishing touches on another Spidey classic.
