The Doctor’s Diagnosis: C-
I should begin by acknowledging that I am seemingly the only person in the world that doesn’t like these movies. It’s not that I think Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and its predecessor are terrible films. It’s just that I really, really don’t care. I don’t care about the Miles Morales character, I don’t care about multiverses and I don’t care about cameos. Therefore, I simply can’t become the least bit invested in these things. I actually didn’t even plan to see this in a theater and review it, but a gap in the release schedule left me with nothing else to see this week and that leaves me struggling with coming up with something to say about this movie. I’ll say that the rest of the fairly-crowded theater seemed to love it. They laughed and cheered and applauded when it was over while I sat there with a blank stare on my face. So, yeah, I’m clearly not the audience for these things.
I don’t even remember what happened in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, so I’m not sure how this follows up on that film. But we return to Miles adapting to his role as Spider-Man. He encounters a villain called The Spot, who initially seems like a run-of-the mill villain (the film even refers to him as a villain-of-the-week). However, The Spot realizes that he has the power to travel throughout the multiverse and begins wreaking havoc through multiple worlds. Meanwhile, Gwen Stacy has joined a team of inter-universe Spider-People whose task is to prevent people from screwing up space and time. Miles eventually runs afoul of this group when he tries to alter a “cannon event,” which is an event (like Uncle Ben dying) that occurs in every universe and can’t be altered. I literally just heard this same exact concept in The Flash and I’m still not interested.
I’m really regretting seeing this right after The Flash because it has left me with even less to say than I would otherwise. As with The Flash, I wish we had a smaller, contained story as an introduction to Miles as Spider-Man. I would still be indifferent to the character because I don’t care about a Spider-Man that isn’t Peter Parker, but at least that would provide a more grounded basis for the character. Instead we again get an epic tale of the multiverse and, as you know if you read my review of The Flash, I abhor multiverse stories. It’s just exhausting now that every superhero movie has to be about saving not only the universe, but thousands of universes. Can’t he just fight Sandman or Dr. Octopus or something? The unrelenting grandiosity of these plots ironically just makes me want to take a nap. I also couldn’t give less of a shit about the incessant cameos and Spider-Man variations. Great, there’s a dinosaur Spider-Man. What’s the point of that? What does that add to anything?
I want to acknowledge the efforts of all the artists that created this movie because a lot of this animation is excellent on a technical level. I want to be clear on that before I state the following: I also don’t particularly care for the art style in these movies. While it was clearly made by some amazingly talented people, the design is overly complicated and sometimes distracting. The differing art styles for the different universes makes the shot compositions needlessly busy and the entire film lacks visual focus (even if that was a conscious choice, that doesn’t mean I have to enjoy it). I’m also never clear on if the different art styles are diegetic or not (meaning if the characters in the film are supposed to be cognizant of it). For example, the film usually has a watercolor style when a scene is focusing on Gwen Stacy and the colors are usually running in the background, making it look like the walls are bleeding multiple colors. Are the characters seeing that? Is it normal for walls to bleed pastel blue in that universe? Or is it just a distracting visual choice for the audience? I’m still on clear on that.
If it sounds like I’m just nitpicking technical aspects of the movie, well, yeah, that happens when I have this little investment in the plot or characters. People seem to love these movies (my audience certainly did) and I can respect it on a technical level, but I just can’t muster up a single fuck to give about it. It also doesn’t help that the film runs an unmerciful 140 minutes and ends with a “To Be Continued” message, so we are getting another one of these movies next year. After seeing a multiverse movie two weeks in a row, at least this gap may give me time to come up with a new way to say that I don’t care.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider-Man%3A_Across_the_Spider-Verse#/media/File:Spider-Man-_Across_the_Spider-Verse_poster.jpg
