Rating: PG | Runtime: 140 minutes
Release Date: June 2nd, 2023 (USA)
Studio: Sony Pictures Animation / Columbia Pictures / Sony Pictures Releasing
Director(s): Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers & Justin K. Thompson
Writer(s): Phil Lord, Christopher Miller & Dave Callaham

We’re supposed to be the good guys.

The hope at the end of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was that destroying Kingpin’s super collider would wrap things up with a tidy bow. And for a little more than a year, things seemed to have died down accordingly—at least on Miles Morales’ (Shameik Moore) Earth. Since we don’t know exactly how many times Doc Ock tested the device and thus how long its rifts stayed open, we cannot begin to guess the ramifications on everyone else’s world. Nor can we ignore the reality that someone figuring out a way to portal between universes on one Earth all but guarantees someone else figured it out on another. So, we shouldn’t be surprised when Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse opens on Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld) needing to subdue an anomaly of her own by way of a Renaissance-era drawing of Vulture (Jorma Taccone) or that she receives help from yet more Spidey-sensing versions of herself.

It’s the perfect reintroduction to this world by writers Dave Callaham, Phil Lord, and Christopher Miller. Rather than go straight back to Miles, they give Gwen her own prologue to set-up her world (a gorgeous watercolor mood ring of changing pinks and purples), origins (the unknown circumstances surrounding the known death of her Peter Parker), and family (Shea Whigham’s Spider-Woman-hating police captain George). Because we need to see that she’s struggling with the same issues facing Miles so that the idea that they are “the same” shines through more than just as a means to a potentially romantic end. The choices that Miles will soon have to make are the same ones she is making now and being “the same” doesn’t necessarily mean the context behind that sameness won’t lead them to different answers. The simple fact that Miguel O’Hara (Oscar Isaac) approaches Gwen first demands it since she won’t have the benefit of a trusted friend’s ear before deciding.

O’Hara is more-or-less offering a job if not an adoptive universe hopping family of like-minded souls in pursuit of one goal: sending all anomalies back to their birth worlds and maintaining each world’s “canon” timeline as a result. The way he and second-in-command Jessica Drew (Issa Rae) explain it is pretty cut-and-dry on the surface. Capture out-of-place baddies like Vulture and stop them from screwing with fate. Unfortunately, villains killing people who shouldn’t be killed is only one side of that coin when you consider O’Hara’s team also becomes an anomaly in pursuit of that quest. What then happens if they save people who shouldn’t be saved? Where is the line? Is there a line? We’re talking butterfly effect to the nth degree since you cannot know what you might do in service of stopping figures you cannot control. And when you do decide to find out—to consciously become aware of who is allowed to live and die—it shouldn’t take long before you’re questioning whether you’ve stopped being the hero you thought you were.

It’s a heavy psychology litmus test wherein those who are supposed to risk everything to save one life in the gray areas of existence have suddenly adopted an inflexible black or white code of utilitarian conduct. It’s hardly a new concept in the realm of superheroes, but very little is these days. Where Across the Spider-Verse excels is therefore in the authentic evolutions of those forced to reconcile the two lines of thinking and how that which seems intellectually sound may not be emotionally so. Do you let your heart take over? Can you steel yourself to the tragedies that will ensue when choosing your mind? And where does the pressure of conformity come in? How about legacy and experience? Because who are Miles and Gwen in comparison to Miguel, Jessica, and the other hardened and wise Spideys bouncing around the multiverse? Will they have the courage to speak their truth in opposition of their elders? What about acting on it too?

The stakes are appropriately high from the start in service of these questions. They have to be when you consider the push and pull of dealing with the isolation of being a friendly neighborhood Spider-Person and the longing for what could be if only Miles and Gwen had each other too. We’re talking about getting pushed into corners that make them want to tell their parents who they really are. Or choosing to forsake their pasts for a future alongside O’Hara without fully grasping that doing so will only be avoiding the real issues at-hand. Callaham, Lord, and Miller are doing so many great things with character development here that you would be forgiven for forgetting there is a supervillain in the middle of the chaos. And that’s not without intent since Spot (Jason Schwartzman) is hardly a formidable foe as much as he is a slippery one. But while Miles and Gwen solidify their motives and open their eyes to the bigger picture, Spot is consolidating power to become something they may not be able to defeat.

That’s for Beyond the Spider-Verse to handle, though. This is very much a “part two,” complete with cliffhanger—a conscious choice once the script ballooned to the point of needing over four hours to do it justice. The battles here are more internal. Finding personal strength to be who you think the world needs rather than the person the world thinks it needs (it’s all those police parents hating their vigilante kids for daring to color outside the lines extrapolated onto a macro scale). And while Miles and Gwen wrestle with it, directors Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson facilitate an absolutely gorgeous display of animation. Because it’s one thing to bring multiple aesthetic into Miles’ atmosphere, but another to bring multiple aesthetics into multiple worlds. See Daniel Kaluuya’s punk Hobie Brown (a rendering nightmare of 2D cutouts pasted together like old Sex Pistol album covers) dropped into Pavitr Prabhakar’s (Karan Soni) colorfully unique Indian Mumbattan for the craziest mix.

Between the disparate styles co-existing inside wildly different settings that ooze culture, nostalgia, postmodern technique, and/or all the above and the breakneck, entertainingly constructed action sequences, you’d be having the time of your life even if the filmmakers decided to phone the plot in. That they didn’t results in a dense work that stimulates the senses more than even Into the Spider-Verse could. Add a slew of Spidey lore Easter eggs that prove how little I know about the character beyond the Hollywood films and you can understand why so many people are seeing it multiple times. I personally can’t wait to get it for home viewing to pause frame by frame and soak in the detail since there’s simply too much happening to catch it all at once. How that truth doesn’t render it an over-saturated jumble of a mess is a testament to the craft because the visuals are always legible. Every composition measured to perfection. I’m almost scared to hope Beyond can match its brilliance.

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Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) and Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld) take on The Spot (Jason Schwartzman) in Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Animation’s SPIDER-MAN™: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE. PHOTO BY: Sony Pictures Animation ©2022 CTMG, Inc. All Rights Reserved.