Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

e spider-masterpiece is the vanguard of a new era in animation.

Citizen Kane rightly has a reputation as a landmark of lmic innovation. But what Orson Welles did was not so much invent new techniques as push existing technologies to their full potential. Gregg Toland, the cinematographer whose work was so integral to Kane’s aesthetic that Welles insisted their credits appear together on-screen, had been working in Hollywood for a decade; writer Herman Mankiewicz had been punching up scripts since the silent era. Welles’ genius was synthesis. He saw new ways to put the pieces together.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is not Citizen Kane, but producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller have seen a new way to put the pieces together.

ey have a lot of pieces to play with. ere are o cially three directors: Portuguese animator Joaquim Dos Santos, who cut his teeth on Avatar: e Last Airbender; Justin K. ompson, a veteran production designer; and Kemp Powers, the playwright behind One Night in Miami and co-director of Pixar’s Soul. e animation team is by far the largest ever assembled. 2018’s Into the Spider-Verse’s credits boasted a thenunprecedented 140 animators — for the sequel, it’s more than 1,000. Pity the poor payroll people! e battalion of artists takes the audience on a 140-minute tour of everything that is possible with digital animation in 2023. e lm is a nonstop urry of visual styles, all mashed up together. e miracle at the heart of Across the Spider-Verse is that it all meshes, and somehow makes sense.

e rst line spoken in Across the Spider-Verse comes from Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld). “Let’s do things differently this time,” she says, before the lm blasts through your defenses with a thundering drum solo and a visually dazzling sequence that imparts more plot information than most M. Night Shyamalan movies. I brie y thought, “ ey can’t possibly keep up this pace,” but they hadn’t even oored the gas pedal yet.

Ostensibly, Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) is the lead spider, but this is Gwen Stacy’s movie as much as it is anybody’s. She comes from Earth-65, a reality where she was bitten by the radioactive spider, and her love interest Peter Parker (Jack Quaid) died in her arms. Her father George (Shea Whigham) is a police captain who thinks Spider-Woman killed Peter Parker (which is kind of true, but he had turned into a giant lizard at the time. It’s complicated). Alienated from her family, Gwen is recruited by the Spider-Society. Di erent versions of the same dimensionally disastrous accident at the Alchemax particle collider from Into the Spider-Verse played out in di erent ways over the countless realities of the multiverse. Many of the SpiderMan variants, now alerted to the possibility of multiverse travel, have banded together to address existential threats to reality. e most pressing of which is e Spot (Jason Schwartzman), a former Alchemax tech who accidentally gained quantum powers in the explosion. e Spot’s motivation is similar to Jobu Tupaki’s in Everything Everywhere All At Once: ey want to collapse the diverse existences of the multiverse into a singularity contained within themselves. It’s kind of an ultimate, all-encompassing narcissism that stands in contrast to Marvel’s wisecracking, everyman hero. ere’s enough Spidey for everyone to identify with, from Pavitr Prabhakar (Karan Soni), aka SpiderMan India, to Jessica Drew (Issa Rae), a Black, no-nonsense, motorcycle-riding Spider-Woman.

Each Spider-person is drawn in their own style, which they maintain even as they travel from world to world. SpiderPunk (Daniel Kaluuya) is especially striking, with his cut-and-paste aesthetic. e collage e ect isn’t just for show; it helps build emotion. During Gwen’s emotional confrontation with her father, her watercolor world weeps with her.

Across the Spider-Verse will be viewed as a landmark in animation, and rightfully so. In the future, it may also be seen as a standard bearer for a new artistic movement. Like Rick and Morty and Everything Everywhere All At Once, it is a multiverse story, featuring di erent versions of the same characters interacting over a sprawling variety of settings. But there’s something deeper going on, too; a maximalist reaction to decades of minimalism and primitivism. As seen in Moonage Daydream, Brett Morgen’s experimental biography of David Bowie, it embraces post-modernist remix, while pointedly rejecting PoMo’s nihilist tendencies in favor of an e usive humanism. I’m not sure this nascent movement has a name yet, but it’s awesome, and I want more of it. While I’m waiting, I’ll go watch Across the Spider-Verse again.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse Now playing

By Chris McCoy

Our critic picks the best films in theaters.

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts Optimus Prime (voiced by 81-yearold legend of the VO game Peter Cullen) is back for yet another sequel of questionable necessity. This one has him leading his robots in disguise in defense of the Maximals, who are robots disguised as animals, against the Terrorcons, who are also robots in disguise, only bad. Good news: Michael Bay isn’t directing!

The Boogeyman

Adapted from one of the early 1970s Stephen King short stories that earned him the reputation as a master of horror, The Boogeyman stars Sophie Thatcher (of Yellowjackets fame) as a teenager whose home is invaded by a creature who, hides under the bed, comes out at night, and feeds on fear. If you’re afraid of the dark, this is not the film for you. If you’re into classic horror, check it out.

You Hurt My Feelings

If you’re looking for an escape from summer blockbusters, Julia LouisDreyfus’ new comedy with director Nicole Holofcener is here for you. Beth’s (Louis-Dreyfus) husband Don (Tobias Menzies) is a therapist, so you’d think he would know better than to admit he doesn’t like the new book she’s been writing. Guess not. Surely, that one little slip-up can’t have life-altering consequences? Oops again!

By Robert C. Koehler