Two Spider-friends chatting about their tangled webs.
It isn’t writer’s block exactly, but jovially verbose movie entries that amount to “WOWIE WOW WOW WOW 11/10 no complaints!!!!1!!” take far longer to coalesce in my head than irritated MST3K-ish nitpickery of a more disappointing flick. Hence why Transformers: Rise of the Beasts got an entry before Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse did, even though I saw the latter first on opening weekend. Obviously I can’t simply not write about it, but it took days to turn “WOWIE WOW WOW WOW 11/10 no complaints!!!!1!!” into any kind of fun writing exercise. Hence: pointless listicle time! I haven’t churned out one of those in months.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse introduced Shameik Moore as Miles Morales to the big screen and millions of new fans. It was my favorite film of 2018 and later became an Academy Award Winner. Guiding lights Phil Lord and Chris Miller return as producers and as two of the three credited screenwriters (alongside Shang-Chi‘s Dave Callaham), working with a different trio of directors — veteran animator Joaquim Dos Santos (who dates back to the amazing colossal Justice League Unlimited), Kemp Powers (writer of One Night in Miami…, co-writer/co-director of Pixar’s Soul), and Justin Thompson (okay, him I don’t know). Personnel rearrangements can make or break a film series, but the peaceful transition of power perfectly maintained the structural and qualitative integrity of the sequel. They’re both equally exactly awesome.
To an extent the Spider-structure remains intact: in a multiverse of infinite Earths containing infinite Spider-heroes (which means one of whom is Spider-you!), a Big Bad with the means to breach the walls between those alt-dimensions unwittingly threatens to unravel the space-time continuum’s hypersensitive fabric and destroy zillions of lives, up to and including all the infinite yous. a band of diverse Spider-heroes plucked from their respective Earths can save the infinite days….provided they can overcome the weight of their tragic backstories and use their great power to shoulder such great responsibility. (As the film itself questions: if you didn’t feel a loved one dying in your arms, are you even a Spidey?) In comics it’s formulaic because Marvel and DC heroes do this all the time to the point of cosmically noisy ennui, but it’s not so bad in a film where viewers aren’t required to go watch thirty-six other tie-in films in order for the one film to make sense.
Whereas Into the Spider-Verse brought variant Spideys to Miles Morales’ Earth for one big Marvel team-up on his turf, this time it’s Miles’ turn to play Earth-hopping variant. Troubles begin in his world sixteen months after Into when he runs afoul of a new villain called the Spot (a stream-of-consciousness seether voiced by Wes Anderson’s avatar Jason Schwartzman), whose head-to-toe Dalmatian-looking skin is covered in portals to a dimension filled with nothing but portals. He can transport objects or teleport through that spotty pocket dimension, which is a great power that was wildly underestimated when Marvel Comics mainstay Al Milgrom conceived him on a goofy lark when I was a 12-year-old Spidey fan. All the Spot can think about is getting revenge on Miles, who played a part in the secret origin that turned him into a man-shaped 200-sided die. After a series of wacky fights with dots and limbs popping and flying every which way, eventually he takes a closer look inside Spotlandia and figures out how to unleash the power of multidimentionsal intersectionality. Hilarity and chaos ensue!
Fortunately for every version of everyone ever, Spiders are everywhere and they’rve become aware of the Spot’s imminent incursion potential. Across moves beyond Into‘s core Spider-team (a few of whom return only in cameos with recycled dialogue) into an out-of-control brainstorming list of Spidey variants. Many are preexisting do-gooders from decades of assorted Spider-media, while some Spider-revamps debut in this very film. One could rattle off the entire voice-actor list alone along with capsule evaluations. One could list every Spider-face they recognized. Easter-egg fetishists could create the definitive Spider-Verse answer key, voluntarily reducing their theatrical experience(s) to a Highlights for Children picture puzzle, proudly holding up a double-page spread covered in crayon circles and shouting, “MOMMY, LOOK, I SOLVED IT!”
I lost interest in consciously fronting as a Geek Authority years ago, an even tougher pose to strike here considering the myriad interlocking, endlessly self-absorbed, nigh-impenetrable Spider-titles haven’t factored majorly into my weekly comic-shop habit in a long, long time despite their major role in my childhood upbringing. Not to mention I rarely rewatch any movie multiple times as required for quasi-professorial internet articles that begin with “Here’s All the Stuff You May Have Missed!” That said, I did recognize old friends and I do have opinions — some defensible, some arbitrary. Such is the raw material of which every rank-and-file hobbyist’s ranking file is made.
From the Home Office in Indianapolis, Indiana: my top ten favorite Spider-people from this film, presented in an order that won’t match your own logic. Most of them are rendered in individual styles and media, apropos of the first film’s painstaking design precedent, that help make them standouts even as their delineated borders clash. Also, each of their Earths have numbers assigned to them, but I deeply don’t care. On with the countdown!
10. Spider-Byte! Amandla Stenberg (a former youngster in Sleepy Hollow and the first Hunger Games) enters the game’s second half as the Hall of Spider-Justice’s resident tech-whiz, given mere seconds to demonstrate her necessity at a crucial plot juncture and have the wherewithal to make a critical choice. I like to think she’ll be even more essential in next year’s trilogy finale, Beyond the Spider-Verse. For now, I’m intrigued with her possibilities.
9. Scarlet Spider! SNL vet Andy Samberg spoofs the awfulness of the extreeeeeme grimdark ’90s with an amateurishly crosshatched, angsty-growly Ben Reilly who’s just there to narrate his overwrought bleakness and follow marching orders, which were also the job requirements of all the Spider-writers who contributed to the infamous Clone Saga. NEVER FORGET.
8. Jess Drew! Insecure creator/star Issa Rae wins all the style points as the Spider-biker/mama-to be, a high-ranking Spider-warrior who’s thanklessly assigned to crack down on the youngsters’ Spider-misbehavior, even though her swagger implies she oughta be down there in the mess with them, not lecturing or disciplining them. Absolutely no one asks her if her super-obstetrician (Reed Richards? Bill Foster?) condones all that free-wheeling superheroing while she’s pregnant, but I like to think she knows her limitations and presumably her irradiated Spider-blood makes for a hardier fetus who’ll be up and Spider-tricycling around in no time.
7. Fat Peter Parker, Now With New-Parent Action Accessories! Jurassic World‘s Jake Johnson is back! Miles’ first real mentor finally had some happier days back home and now he’s sporting a wee tyke in a Spider-baby-carrier whom he will never, ever stop photographing, not even while he’s endangering her life. This is the most accurate depiction of a superheroic new parent that I’ve ever seen, and her cute widdle assists to Spider-Daddy is more affirming evidence of the power of Spider-blood. My son demands to see li’l baby Mayday grow up to become one of his childhood faves, Spider-Girl from the bygone MC2 alt-timeline. She always gets shortest play at Spider-gatherings, if she’s even remembered at all.
6. Spider-Man 2099! Everyone super-loves Oscar Isaac, who starred in the Into end credits as the red-and-black-garbed Miguel O’Hara, but he sets aside his usually merry hero-self to inhabit one of the canonically grimmest Spider-Men around (more akin to his darker turns in The Card Counter and A Most Violent Year). As envisioned by co-creator Peter David, Miguel is a rare Spider-hero who’s quippy in his civilian identity yet taciturn in costume, captured well here along with Rick Leonardi’s pencils writ large. His authoritative gruffness made him the ideal candidate for chief antagonist here: he’s the head Spider in charge of appointing space-time Spider-continuum integrity (as opposed to the integrity of any non-Spider continua — don’t expect a fight with Loki or any glimpses of the MCU’s Time Variance Authority) and the man in charge throwing the loudest fit when the consequences of Miles’ actions keep spiraling outward and threatening Reality as everyone knows it.
5. Spider-Man India! At long last it’s Karan Soni’s turn to shine! Best known as put-upon cab driver Dopinder from Deadpool’s two movies, Soni is delightfully upbeat as Pavitr Prabhakar, beloved hero of amalgamated Mumbattan. His intricate alt-Earth, though featuring fewer musical numbers than I’d expect, is among the few new settings we’re invited to see in-depth, not unlike how Multiverse of Madness made time for touring one one-zillionth the breadth of said Multiverse. We meet him and his supporting cast, and peer inside their backstory and hearts to achieve Spider-sympathy surprisingly swiftly.
4. Miles Morales! Unfairly low, you say? Sure, but here’s my deep inner hang-up: as a kid I identified with scrawny bookworm Peter Parker, who did the best he could to survive high school by getting good grades and pretty much never misbehaving, but he got “othered” by his classmates anyway because they didn’t care about the sort of achievements that teachers or parents do, and teens can plainly suck. I was pudgy instead of scrawny, had too many comics instead of superpowers, and Grandma made pancakes for me rather than Aunt May’s wheatcakes, but otherwise Peter was me in a lot of ways. Sure, Peter was frequently forced into hard judgment calls that let down everyone he ever loved, but it was almost always because fate gave him no other choice. (Far as I recall, we never saw Peter serve detention, or a raging Aunt May ever threaten to spank him with a rolling pin.)
But Miles is not Peter. Nor should he be! He’s not a tracing of Peter colored Black. Even more so here than in his original Ultimate Spider-Man comics, Miles at the core is a realistic teen making teen-based choices, with his head spun in any number of directions and not always landing on What Would An Adult Do. And sometimes in this film I found myself screaming inside because as a parent it was infuriating to watch him do dumb things that would obviously disappoint and/or upset Mom and Dad (once again, Atlanta‘s Brian Tyree Henry and Luna Lauren Vélez — vastly better served here than as Transformers: Rise of the Beasts‘ fleeting Concerned Mom). In both films they are not standard movie idiot-parents enforcing strict rules under the arbitrary meanness of Because I Said So. Far as we see here, they know what they’re doing, even when Miles doesn’t get them.
Miles sees himself as living out heroism on his terms, but some of his choices this time around look more brash than smart, sometimes out of shortcut selfishness. I get how relatable that could be to youngsters half my age or less in an era that doesn’t feel any easier to live through than My Day was. And Miles is only 15; his story isn’t done yet. He’s still fascinating overall and still someone I’ll root for in battles as well as in the next sequel (and wow, does he come a long way in this film’s climactic marathon chase), but rewarding him with “favorite” points for all this 21st-century teenage realness was tough for me, especially with this film’s wildly hypercompetitive Spider-field.
3. Spider-Punk! I felt nothing about this guy beforehand except amusement at Marvel trying to make Spider-Punk comics happen. Then I caught him here, with his mumbly knee-jerk anarchic diatribes and his street-zine collage-bod, and realized he’s the epitome of Spider-backtalk, distilled through a Thatcher-era rebel-‘tude that transatlantically parallels Peter’s historically never-ending headbutting with every imaginable level of authority from beat cops up to empty political suits. Even more a loner than Spidey Classic, he works alongside the Spider-heads for the sake of mutual goals without fully submitting to their beliefs or space-time rules, so it’s a matter of moments before Miles’ clashes with his elders raise SP’s sneering eyebrow and his reflex loathing for The MAN. I couldn’t quite place the voice while watching, but suspected it’d be someone who’d multiply my interest as soon as they were named. Sure enough, it was Daniel Kaluuya in yet another rock-star performance, this time literally so.
2. Spider-Gwen! Among the many risks Across the Spider-Verse takes, its biggest is keeping main man Miles offscreen for its first 15 minutes or more in favor of spotlighting the sleekly suited, partly-buzzcut alt-timeline Gwen Stacy, the Best Gwen Ever. Into gave her space for an origin flashback same as all the other Spider-friends, but Across invests time and heart in accompanying her through a tough day post-Miles. Life on her Earth is a shambles: Spider-Gwen is wanted for murder, and her most fervent police pursuer is her own dad, Captain George Stacy (Agent Carter‘s Shea Whigham). He saw the misunderstood hero standing over the corpse of her timeline’s powerless Peter Parker, jumped to conclusions and nominated her for Public Enemy #1. (Spidey Classic would know her pain; that was his status quo throughout much of the ’70s.)
Rather than open any real talks with her dad and risk facing the harshest Take Your Daughter to Work Day ever, she throws herself into serving the Spider-Society, leaping at every chance to escape her mess and go save other heroes from theirs. In essence, she takes on assigned responsibilities to avoid any personal ones. Miles’ own heart-to-heart parent/kid chats in this film have their moments of toughlove and wracked nerves, but Gwen and Captain Stacy corner each other into even more painful places — candid, head-on and cliche-free, no matter how much they make us or each other gasp and wish dearly it hadn’t come to this. As fantastically fun as Hailee Steinfeld was in the MCU’s Hawkeye, her Spider-Gwen suffers far more hardship than her Kate Bishop did, by a wide margin.
1. Bombastic Bag-Man! I warned you up front my logic is not your own. I was 11 when Spidey’s black costume made its world premiere on newsstands with Amazing Spider-Man #252. I loved every beat of the story up to and including ASM #259, when Reed Richards’ tests reveal it’s an alien symbiote and he blasts it off Our Hero with a sonic cannon, leaving Peter nearly naked. Just so he can leave the Baxter Building, his prankster pal Johnny Storm lends him a spare FF costume, an Unknown Comic paper sack for his head (since the team never wears or needs masks), and, without Peter’s approval or knowledge, a “KICK ME” sign taped to his back — probably with a super-sticky tape Reed invented, ensuring it can’t simply fall off while he’s leaping building-to-building from the Baxter in Midtown to his Chelsea apartment. And thus was the legendary Bombastic Bag-Man born for the sake of a onetime gag!
The suit has recurred intermittently in the decades since then, most often as a playable skin in various Spider-video games. But lo, my aging yet occasionally perceptive eyes widened with joy as they spotted the Bombastic Bag-Man among the plethora of wall-crawlers tripping and climbing each other throughout the various crowd scenes and mob stampedes that ensue when things between Miles and Spidey 2099 begin heading south. My middle-aged self and the 11-year-old in me high-fived each other at the implication of this throwaway gag: somewhere out there amid the infinite Marvel Earths is a Parker who consciously chooses to fight crime as the Bombastic Bag-Man all the time. I have a hundred questions, starting with: Really? I mean, really? Has he been wearing this same suit since Uncle Ben’s death as a sort of hairshirt-approximate penance? Has anyone ever offered to make him a real costume? Does he have to keep begging Reed for replacement FF jumpsuits, or does he know how to sew tears and holes in unstable molecules? Or is it just that Across caught him on laundry day and all his other dozens of suits were filthy and carpeting his bachelor pad with sweat and stank? And how does he get the bag to stay on? Spirit gum in his hair? Chin strap? Spider-telekinesis? Or does he have a square head to perfectly match it?
So yeah, despite having no lines or actor bringing him to life, only some of the best animators of our time, it’s Bombastic Bag-Man for the win. Honorable mentions go to Lego Spider-Man, Spider-Man 2211, and the dinosauriffic Spider-Rex, whose recent appearance in Edge of Spider-Verse #1, written by Karla Pacheco, was a veritable hoot.
As you can imagine, infinite Spideys threaten to outnumber Miles to the point of crowding him out of his own sequel. That began happening to him so frequently in his own post-Ultimate comics — and he’d likewise go help do the same to his friends in their own titles — that I haven’t kept up with his print series. But here in Across the Spider-Verse, he and Gwen are conflicted, eminently valiant heroes in their own right, holding the Spider-banner aloft in the grand Spider-tradition on every conceivable level and inspiring a legion of animators to keep bringing next-level talent and ambition to the series and to whatever comes their way next. Other than the dreaded “TO BE CONTINUED” they warned us would be coming at the end (and even that is mitigated by ending on a high note), I have no complaints, 11/10, one of the Year’s Best Films as of the 2023 midpoint.
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Meanwhile in the customary MCC film breakdowns:
Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: Spider-voices who didn’t quite make the list (chiefly due to limited exposure — better luck next film) include Jack Quaid (Star Trek: Lower Decks, The Boys), Jharrel Jerome (Moonlight), Mike Rianda (Mitchells vs. the Machines), and several Spider-transmedia veterans. Other returning voices from Into include Greta Lee (Russian Doll) as Spider-Man 2099’s AI assistant Lyla and at least one huge spoiler-y surprise guest near the end.
Newcomers to the trilogy include (at long last!) J.K. Simmons’ J. Jonah Jameson; Ayo Edibiri (MVP of Hulu’s The Bear) as the Glory Grant of Gwen’s Earth (a character I thought was cool when I was a kid, who’s way too ignored in all of Spidey’s entire cinematic existence); ex-SNLer Rachel Dratch as Miles’ guidance counselor; and Jorma Taccone, he of the Lonely Island, as a da Vinci-esque Vulture scrawled on parchment paper yet nevertheless quite the winged terror for Our Heroes in the early segments.
I won’t go into the live-action surprises, most of which are merely clips from past Spider-works. Two Sony-‘verse veterans drop by for original cameos, one of whom has technically never appeared in a Spider-film per se. Both of them are among the most inspired choices on the lengthy invitee list.
How about those end credits? No, there’s no scene after the Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse end credits, which I imagine would’ve undercut the cliffhanger ending. They’re flipped through speedily as Scorsese-style static pages of names rather than a luxurious twelve-minute roll (good luck reading any of them in the theater), but at the end they pause for one special message: “Miles Morales will return…in Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse!” In case you were worried. Fortunately Miles’ big hero-jam isn’t a Netflix series you can cancel midstream.