Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse - Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers & Justin K. Thompson
Miles Morales returns as Spider-Man from an alternate dimension but this is much more than his story this time around. The overall premise of this story is that there are cannon events in every Spider-Man life that must happen – if they don’t then the multi-verse can be destroyed.
In order to illustrate this the story starts with Gwen. The opening is extremely well written and we get here entire back story in a few minutes.
She is quickly unmasked in her world and her dad goes to arrest her. This whole situation is devastating.
Something I absolutely love about this film is the way they change the animation to show the movement between universes. Such a neat and easy visual clue that we have moved.
The washed out water colours of Gwen’s world contrasted with the haphazard almost scribbled backgrounds of Pavitr’s is great.
By starting the story with Gwen it allows the writers to portray Miles as a jerk in the opening of the film – which they do with aplomb
The desires of the individual characters are contrasted with the overall premise to save the spider-verse by removing anomalies and ensuring cannon events occur is interesting.
We get to see both views of this contrast through Miles and Gwen. Miles sees it from the outside as he and we are inculcated into the spider-verse. We also see it from Gwen’s perspective as someone who has already gone through this.
We are shown things that give good examples that if anomalies are allowed to occur and cannon events are interrupted it can wipe out entire worlds.
Given all of this Miles is still keen to fight against what he sees is wrong. Gwen is torn between what she sees as the right thing to do – save the worlds – and what she individually wants – Miles and a return to her world and a relationship with her father.
Because of the way these things are portreyed to us we end up on Miles’ side. This is very strange because logically we are supporting the destruction of the spider-verse.
I really enjoyed the villain – spot – learning his powers throughout the film. This was very funny to watch.
Miles’ mum’s speech to him about going out into the world to do what he wants is amazing – just stellar writing.
Every aspect of India-Spiderman (Pavitr) is brilliant. The chai-tea bit links brilliantly to Miles ATM bit from the start.
They do some great references to the comics with little boxes of descriptions etc coming up on the screen – the film opens with an animated ‘Cough’ on the black screen before the titles.
The boxes allow them to introduce a brit punk rock Spider-Man that speaks in his local lingo and we get translations through the boxes – also just a great character in general.
We learn that the whole reason that all these anomalies are happening is because of Miles – the spider that bit him is from another earth so he is an anomaly.
The film ends with a rebellion group of the spider-men who join together to fight the main group of spider-men who are protecting the spider-verse from destruction.
I have a problem with how this all came together. The punk rock spider-man is stealling stuff constantly from the spider-man HQ and he builds all there own portal devices. But he destroys his original one when he quits. My question is why? All the others do need him to make one for them because they no longer have one.
Miles ends up in the wrong dimension because he is sent back to where the spider that bit him came from. And in this dimension he has become the ripper from the first film.
Big BOOOO to the ending finishing on a cliff hanger. So this film has some serious issues with the narrative structure because the climax doesn’t answer the central question – obviously because this is part one of the story. The film still manages to score 9 out of 10 for me because of how brilliant the rest of the pieces are.
