My Review of "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse"

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse has come out in 2023. It's the hotly anticipated sequel to Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse that came out 5 years ago. Animation takes a lot of time and effort to create let alone the story and production of a movie. Frankly I'm surprised it came out 5 years later. What we got was that last movie but pushed up three levels higher.

The movie starts out a little while after the events of the first movie. Time has passed and our young heroes have grown up a bit. They're now full fledged teenagers. We start the story with Gwen's origin story. It's a story that was very quickly glossed over in the first movie but now it's more fleshed out.

We learn how she fell into her character and then goes into her feelings of Miles and the rest of the gang from the first movie. We then go into how she gets recruited for a Spider-Verse force of some sort. A rag tag of elite alternate versions of Spider-People that work together to save the universe.

Then we finally get to Miles' universe. Here he's fighting crime as usual but this time he has a new arch nemesis named Spot. This Spot character is an innocent enough villain that has an origin story linked to Miles. He's a bit of a joke character that becomes more and more dangerous as he learns more and more about his powers.

Fans of the first movie will be delighted because they have the same repetitive intro to start off stories as they did in the first movie. This is kind of a recurring theme throughout this series I guess. The art style for Gwen's universe almost feels like a watercolor painting. They somehow are able to make it still feel like the same aesthetics as the series while muting the background with monochromatic coloring to emphasize what's going on in the foreground. It's a very cool and interesting stylistic approach.

A lot of interesting stylistic approaches to the animation and art was added to this movie. Sometimes I think they added a little too much. I loved the fact that they were able to blend three dimensional objects with two dimensional objects seamlessly together. Everything seemed to meld quite nicely with one another.

The visual effects especially during the last half of the movie are spectacular. It builds into a jumble of things happening all at once but yet you're able to keep up with what's going on. That's a tough thing to do when you've got so many characters and things going on at the same time.

That's not always the case though. The start of the movie can be a little rough. It's like they tried to cram as much information to us as possible in a short period of time. Also the jittery animation from the first movie kind of worked but I hope they stop doing that. It can become quite nauseating especially when things are constantly moving in the beginning. I get why they're doing this. It's basically to keep the audience aware that our characters are still learning what's going on. Later in the movie it disappears when everyone knows what's going on and it becomes really good. Please stop with this type of movement it's cool for only a bit.

The first portion of the movie also throws in a bunch of comic panels so you have to focus on multiple frames of action at the same time with juddery animation. It is very uncomfortable and yes I understand it's supposed to be uncomfortable because that's what the character is dealing with. I for one don't want to go to a movie to feel uncomfortable to the point of a headache. To add to this deluge of sensory overload they add footnotes in the bottom panels for the audience to understand certain slang or language meanings. This is at a mile a minute by the way. It was just too much. Maybe with multiple viewings this might get better.

Everything gets better though. The story is quite well done. It's a story of belonging and responsibilities. They add elements of existentialism in there too debating whether our paths are determined or free for us to decide. We see more of a dichotomy between Gwen and Miles where they're like a yin and yang of each other. Two characters intertwined but destined to be with one another.

In essence, they added everything and the kitchen sink to this movie. Fortunately it is all comprehensive and flows very smoothly. The problem of this is that it feels like this should have been a TV series rather than a movie. That whole first portion of the movie would have been helped by slowing it down and letting it breathe. This movie isn't even over yet there's a second part that is waiting to come out. I don't know if this should have been a movie. It feels like it should have been a TV show instead. I feel like this is a problem with movies nowadays. They should really be made into shows. Instead they're becoming movie marathon length times.

Overall, what's most important is that I had a good time at this one. There was a really rough first portion of the movie. Not story-wise but more art and and direction-wise. This movie would have benefited from a little breathing room which it wasn't allowed due to runtime. I thought this would have been better off as a TV show. As a movie I would have to give this one an 7.5. This is only because I had to really fight my nausea in the beginning of this movie. The payoff was great but it is a bit much. I'm sure fans of this series will go watch and enjoy it no matter what anyone says.