Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse

Review by Kapila Sichalwe

Synopsis

“Let’s do this one more time…for the longest I have been, the one and only spider-man.” Sound familiar? You don’t need a spoiler to know this statement couldn’t be furthest from the truth. It being a spider-verse movie exposes the viewer to a whole multitude of multiversal action exploring beautiful terrains of different earths beyond the realm of understanding and soaring above the plane of endless possibilities, all captured in a unique animation style that incorporates a variety of art styles.

WHAT TO LOOK FORWARD TO FROM THE MOVIE

Our protagonist comes from a world referred to as Earth-1610 where, if you’ve seen the into the spiderverse prequel, we will get to see how far our young hero has come two years later. In the interest of keeping this as spoiler free as humanly possible, the specifics of our Puerto Rican, Afro-Latino 16 year old spider-man, Miles Gonzalo Morales, will be left out for the most part.

Aside from the slick new suit modification, we get a larger scope of the multiverse and what holds it all together, a new roaster of spider-men that are partially explored along with some familiar rogues and of course, all accompanied with a killer soundtrack and clean animation.

WHAT MAKES THIS SPIDER-MAN MOVIE SPECIAL

With spiderverse movies in general, in spite of such a large cast, each member is easily distinctive. You can tell or at least have an idea of a person’s background just from the way they hold conversations, their mannerisms and just them existing. The creators did a really good job at giving each character, main or support, a story with or without them uttering a single line.

The movie owns its animation and art styles, which are exceptionally unique and implemented in ways never seen before or rather rarely seen on the big screen. The struggle of breaking a common narrative, breaking off from “fulfilling your role and nothing more” and finding your place in the world. This admittedly sounds like something we’ve all heard before but this film does it in a way like no other(again, you’ve probably heard that before so I’ll leave that part up to you to decide if this is done differently in this film).

EASTER EGGS

We all know by now that Marvel does not slack when it comes to Easter eggs, this movie took that and went plus ultra!!! If your spider-man love is half as much as mine is, you won’t be able to stay still in your seat. It was a cameo overflow, some being plain for the eyes to see and others that you can only see if you know where to look. We’re talking past movies(live action inclusive), video games, TV-shows and comics references.

I’ll end my review here lest I start spoiling, so my overall rating would be an 8/10. I know I’m nit-picking here but I wouldn’t call it a 10/10 because it had flaws being the noticeable CGI of some of the spider-people and the management of cameos and pacing was a bit much and clunky, but other than that it’s a great movie!!

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD – DON’ T READ IF YOU HAVEN’T WATCHED THE MOVIE!

For this segment I want to take the time to appreciate a little more about the film from the perspective of someone who’s already watched it. Speaking of post credits, how could they leave us on a cliff hanger like that and give us no post credit scene(s)? It’s funny that entering the cinema versus exiting, I noticed one small change in detail to the poster art that I swear wasn’t there before and it blew my mind!

Attack on titan, eat your heart out cause what?! It was only part one out of Lord knows how many.

I must appreciate the way Marvel writes action and according to my research, they can spend a little over six months dedicated to designing the movements, fighting styles and so on, of each specific character which shows how much they commit to paying attention to detail. And I’m thankful for it because those were some insane chase and fight scenes. Did I mention the VFX?? That was beautifully done too.

That’s all from me heroes and heroines of all ages, til we meet again.