We're all in the Spider-Verse now, and it sucks
The movie is a victim of its own success.
Hi folks! I was going to publish part 2 of my Too Many Bones: Unbreakable series this weekend, but I saw the new Spider-Verse movie over the weekend and wanted to get some thoughts down. The TMB series will continue in two weeks.
When Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse debuted in 2018, it was the best Spider-Man film and easily one of the best superhero movies ever made. It looked stunning, had good jokes, and its narrative aspirations felt simultaneously ambitious and personal, even if it couldn’t fully escape some of the unpleasant aspects of the Miles Morales origin story (ie, a black kid’s two primary role models being a street tough and a cop). The first sequel, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, was five years in the making, but it was finally released last weekend to much anticipation – and by the time it was over, I couldn’t wait to leave the theater.
Five years is a long time. In the interregnum between Spider-Verse movies, the blockbuster entertainment complex ripped off a bunch of the original movie’s shit, and the franchise’s creatives went bigger on the elements of the original that should have remained small. In other words, Across the Spider-Verse is a victim of Into the Spider-Verse’s success.
From the start, it’s obvious that the creative team behind what I’m just going to call Spider-Verse 2 (more on them in a bit) wanted to one-up everything that made the first film work. It’s immediately apparent in the visuals, which are frequently stunning and at times approach abstraction; there were times when I thought the whole thing would play better Fantasia-style, just watching the beautiful hybrid animation play out over Daniel Pemberton’s evocative (if a bit repetitive) score. However, when the scope of the story begins expanding, the movie runs into trouble.
At 140 minutes, Spider-Verse 2 is about 20 minutes longer than its predecessor, and you can really feel it thanks to the movie’s pacing, one of the movie’s two monumental flaws. Spider-Verse 2 is not actually a complete movie. It just kind of ends after a certain point with the promise that Miles Morales will return. This is not inherently a problem; I love films like Back to the Future Part II and The Empire Strikes Back, which do something similar. The difference is that those movies still have an overall dramatic arc, and Spider-Verse 2 does not.
The filmmakers pretty clearly decided to make a five-hour movie and cut it in half, and the result is that Spider-Verse 2 moves at a glacial pace, dropping the film’s actual premise on the viewer around 90 minutes in and reserving what should be mid-film plot twist for the cliffhanger. On the bright side, this allows plenty of time for characterization and ambience in the movie’s first hour (by far the best segment), but when the movie actually kicks into high gear, everything feels tired and overlong and talky, pieces moving around a chessboard so that everything can pay off next year when the third film comes out (it doesn’t help that all of this exposition keeps the core team dynamic of the first film relegated to the background). Of course, I would probably be a lot more forgiving of the end of the movie if I was the least bit interested in its subject matter, which is Spider-Verse 2’s other fatal mistake.
It's worth noting here that the credited lead creative team behind Spider-Verse 2 is largely different from the writers and directors for the first film. Outside of a script credit on both movies for Phil Lord (also a producer on both films with his writing partner Chris Miller, who joins Lord on the screenplay duties this outing), all the other credited writers and directors are different, and their creative history suggests some of where this movie went wrong. Potentially instructive is the presence of co-director Kemp Powers, who wrote and co-directed Pixar's Soul, another animated film in which the characters cannot stop explaining the rules of their universe to each other. More damning is co-writer David Callaharn, who's penned a variety of mediocre blockbusters over the years, including superhero fare like Shang-Chi and the Legend of the 10 Rings and the disastrous Wonder Woman 1984.
This is, ultimately, the primary problem with Spider-Verse 2. While the first film used the multiverse superhero conceit as a framework to tell a story about rejecting received wisdom and charting your own path, the second film is about how there are a lot of Spider-Men, and wouldn't it be bad if one Spider-Man went rogue and did some stuff with Spider-Man's continuity that is not usually allowed. This allows the filmmakers to cram the film with references and cameos, everything from Venom side characters to deep-cut 90s comics continuity to the Spectacular Spider-Man show from 15 years ago. There are even multiple shots that let us know that this Spider-Man exists in the same universe – or, sorry, multiverse – as all of the character’s live action film permutations. It was one of these, a flashback to the death of Uncle Ben in The Amazing Spider-Man (a worse movie than this), that broke Spider-Verse’s 2 spell.
“Wait a minute, movie!” I wanted to holler. “We’ve done this shit already!”
When Spider-Verse 1 debuted, a film that played with multiverses was still a pretty fresh idea, albeit one that’s been deployed in comics for decades. In the five years since, however, everyone from The Flash to Everything Everywhere All At Once to, most crucially, several Marvel Cinematic Universe movies and TV shows, have taken huge bites of that apple, enough that the idea of such a thing is no longer natively interesting (and that would be true even if most of those movies, EEAAO excepted, didn’t completely suck, which they do). Spider-Man: No Way Home already showed me Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire, and it was bad the first time, too!
The problem is, the idea of a multiverse was never particularly interesting on its own. It was how the first Spider-Verse used the multiverse concept to create a human and funny story. Studios with long-running franchises, however, love the multiverse idea because it allows them to create stories that exist primarily to reference earlier stories in the franchise’s histories. The films become monuments to themselves, a celebration of monolithic entertainment dominance and the elevation of the familiar over the new.
There is an argument that can be made that Spider-Verse 2 is aware of that – that its primary antagonist, who angrily explains the rules of the universe and insists on everyone’s strict adherence to them, is a commentary on a certain kind of fan who is too into all of this stuff. Certainly, it appears that the next film, Beyond the Spider-Verse, will be about Miles bucking the established canon of what is “supposed” to happen to Spider-Man.
But the movie wants to have its cake and eat it, too. Even if we are to read it as a critique of the self-referencial obsession of modern pop culture, Spider-Verse 2 expresses this idea by, you guessed it, cataloging every media iteration of the property Sony could lay its hands on. For all of the film’s visual inventiveness, what I saw portrayed a distressing lack of imagination – a world where the most interesting thing you can imagine is yet another version of Spider-Man.
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What else is good on the internet?
This taxes the idea of what “on the internet” means a little bit, but the Blank Check podcast has been doing a series on the feature films of Buster Keaton. The episodes have been very fun, and the movies themselves, which I’d never seen before, are mostly quite good, with two or three legitimate masterpieces of physical comedy. The podcast can be found wherever you get your podcasts, and most of the movies are free to stream on Kanopy, which you likely have access to if you have a library card.
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From the vault
I really did love the first Spider-Verse film, as you can see from the review I wrote back then.
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Follow me on Twitter @RTHowitzer, read my Letterboxd reviews @mrchumbles, listen to my Star Trek podcast at outofcontreks.podbean.com, or email me at outofcontreks@gmail.com.