By the time of the release of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse in 2018, the concept of the multiverse had already become virtually ubiquitous in mainstream culture. It’s been a major plot point in most of the recent MCU films and even played a crucial role in this year’s best picture winner, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s Everything Everywhere All at Once. If the novelty of a multiverse setting has lost much of its luster of late, Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson’s Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse arrives, with its splashy colors, shapeshifting animation styles, and hyperkinetic sense of constant movement, as a forceful reminder of its narrative and aesthetic possibilities.
Stretching across six alternate universes, each with its own distinct animation style and tone, Across the Spider-Verse takes the already staggering visual achievements of its predecessor and one-ups them. The fluid, watercolor-infused universe of Gwen Stacy (Hailee Stenfield) ultimately gives way to the 1950s pointillist pop art inflections of protagonist Miles Morales’s (Shameik Moore) world, with ample time left over to crisscross and loop back through the vibrant chaos of Mumbattan (a mashup of Mumbai and Manhattan) and a futuristic London, where the pair team up with the gleefully narcissistic Indian Spider-man Pavitr Prabhakar (Karan Soni) and the nihilistic, guitar-wielding punk Hobie (Daniel Kaluuya).
Elsewhere, other characters come to life as pencil drawings, in anime style, and even in live action. We even get a few comical appearances by those block-rockin’ fanatics from producers and producers and co-writers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s other popular franchise. These disparate styles, which often intermingle at the same time, are further enlivened by meticulously detailed backgrounds and surrealistic swirling shapes and on-screen text that lend the film a dizzying energy while also mirroring the emotional ebbs and flows of its major players.
With over 200 characters and complexly rendered, multilayered settings that are designed to indulge, and often overwhelm, the senses, Across the Spider-Verse should, by all discernible means, be a scattershot experience whose visual delights are far and away its greatest qualities. But for all of the film’s breathless chase sequences and hyperactive aesthetic strategies, with everything from rapid cutting and split-screens to its various references to comic book panel framing, Across the Universe remains surprisingly grounded in very human drama.
The burgeoning romance between Miles and Gwen plays a central role, as do their individual struggles that emerge from having to continually hide their superhero identities from their loving but extremely overprotective parents. These sequences imbue the film with a surprising tenderness and heart, while also serving as much-needed breathers between their universe-hopping and intermittent battles with the initially laughable Spot (Jason Schwartzman), an all-white being full of inky black blotches that work as portals that allow him to punch and kick in unexpected places and conveniently double as jump points for interdimensional trouble.
Spot’s growth in power, stemming from his obsessive grudge against Miles, who caused the explosion that initially left him in this state, doesn’t diverge all that much from the typical comic-book villain template. But the filmmakers complicate matters, adding subtle moral gray overtones that are usually smoothed out in the films of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, by introducing a vigilante group of Spider-Men and Spider-Women who, with Gwen’s help, are trying to keep the increasingly overlapping universes from eventually merging and imploding.
Miles’s meeting with this group, which, for reasons unknown to him, have tried their best to exclude him despite Gwen’s protestations, introduces us to such dynamic characters as the aforementioned Pavitr and Hobie to their domineering leaders, Jessica Drew (Issa Rae) and Miguel O’Hara (Oscar Isaac). These characters not only help expand Miles’s understanding of the intricacies of the multiverse, but introduce an element of predestination that greatly complicates the emotional stakes of the young man’s ordinary life in his own universe.
Going on to explain how certain events in all of the Spider-Men’s lives must occur in the same manner or else the multiverse is in danger, Miguel goes on to speak of the “nodes” (shared events) that connect the various universes together. His lengthy speech about the importance of canon and its power to bind everything together comes from the good intentions of fighting for security via an abundance of caution. Yet, because of the domineering manner in which he delivers his diatribe, one could easily imagine the same words being delivered from a high-level Marvel exec as they lord over a boardroom like a mustachioed Ned Beatty in Network.
It’s a fascinating twist that ultimately speaks to both Spider-Verse films’ desire to break free from the now suffocating demands of the MCU’s ever-growing interconnectivity, functioning as they do as completely standalone creations that aren’t beholden to the events of a dozen other films. Indeed, when Miguel and Jessica call Miles the “original anomaly,” stressing that he was bitten by a spider from a different dimension, and was thus never “meant” to be Spider-Man, he, too, rejects the constricting limitations they attempt to set on what he can and can’t do.
Miles’s own rebellion is thus essentially that of the film, as both ditch all the unnecessary restrictions that hold back their contemporaries (comic book characters in Miles case, films in the latter). In doing so, Across the Spider-Verse proves the exception to the rule of the rapidly diminishing returns of Marvel’s live-action releases. Instead, it achieves the rarest of feats of any tentpole Hollywood release, animated or not: gleefully matching exhilarating stylistic experimentation with a multi-tiered narrative of equal ambition.
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