Across the Spider-Verse is an electric marvel.

The animation and an Easter egg-laden multiverse dazzles, but it's the writing that thwips the film into the stratosphere.

The Short Take: 

With layered storytelling as balletic and as synchronized as a Spidey swing, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse ups the ante without diluting what made its predecessor so exceptional. Astounding, arresting animation. A screenplay with powerful themes that raises the bar for superhero films yet again.

[The FIRST HALF of this review will be SPOILER FREE. I will issue a spoiler warning when I need to shift gears and discuss the events of the film in more detail.]

Image Credit: IndieWire

The Long Take:

All right, let’s do this one more time. 

My name is Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. I was created by Phil Lord and Chris Miller in 2018. My poly-stylistic animation catapulted the art form forward. I showed everyone what multiversal storytelling could really do. I introduced Miles Morales, an Afro-Latinx Spider-Man, to the big screen, and made many fans care about him as much as Peter Parker. I’m pretty sure you know the rest. I became a crazy hit no one saw coming. I won an Oscar for Best Animated Feature. Some critics called me the best superhero film of all time. 

I have a sequel, called Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. It’s as good as me. Maybe even better.

Usually, I’m one to acknowledge and respect everyone’s individual preferences. Going to the theater opening weekend or waiting for a movie to show up on a streaming service? It’s all good. Everyone has a different relationship with what they watch. Different lifestyles. Different values. This movie, though. THIS movie is the one for which I’m willing to stick my neck out. If you can get to a theater, I would strongly encourage you to see this film on the big screen. It’s that good. It’s visually transcendent, with vibrant colors and fast-paced animation that never loses momentum. It’s funny, and heartfelt. All the characters have believable, deep conflicts with themselves and others. All of that makes for a great night at the movies. 

I managed my expectations fairly well when I first arrived at my local theater; Into the Spider-Verse is among my favorite Marvel movies, and ranks high on my list of best comic book movies of all time. But this was a sequel. Sequels for highly successful films often fail to live up to the glory of the original installment. And with Into the Spider-Verse being SO fresh, innovative, and emotionally robust, how could this new film possibly top that? 

I couldn’t believe it, but it did.

And not for the reasons you’d think. This film, as many other reviews, YouTube videos, and listicles will surely discuss, explodes with references to wide-reaching corners of Spider-Man canon, much more than its predecessor. If there’s a version of the friendly neighborhood web-shooter you’ve seen, they’re likely in this film somewhere. It’s like No Way Home on steroids in it’s “oh, wouldn’t it be fun to see all these different Spider-Heroes (Spider-Ham is a pig and not a person, right?) interact with one another” approach. It’s Easter eggy, and in a way that feels genuine and with purpose rather than pure fan service. For me, however, this was not this film’s most notable quality. 

Image Credit: Polygon

As I’ll discuss in more depth in the spoiler section later, all the storylines and character arcs form, for lack of a better metaphor, a web with the intricacy of an embroidered tapestry and the tensile strength of steel cable. I was blown away because at every turn, I could see how a bit dialogue over here or a dramatically composed frame over there would immediately feed into the larger themes of the film: belonging, exclusion, expectations, and when to challenge the status quo to determine your own fate.

This is going to seem like a long walk, but bear with me. It’s the only way I can really get into how the themes of this film — the clear and poignant through lines — resonated with me. 

Many years ago now, pretty early in my post-Ph.D. or “grown-up” teaching career, a student who was the recipient of a scholarship from USC’s Norman Topping Student Aid Fund invited me to a faculty luncheon. The Fund would host one every semester, and the idea was that students benefiting from the scholarship — first-generation college students, students from households with high financial need, and/or students from immigrant families — wouldn’t have other people in their family to help them navigate higher ed, and might feel intimidated by visiting a professor’s office hours. This luncheon gives them a chance to get to know a professor better and ask them for advice over a salad and some roast chicken.

Listening to the students at our table and the various presenters at the front of the room, it became clear that even though we all came from different places, grew up with different families, and checked a wide-range of demographic boxes, we had all, at one point or another, felt like like an outsider in college. Our parents had prioritized our educations and told us to study hard, but beyond that they had no idea “how school worked.” We had all entered the academy without their guidance. Memories of arguing with everyone in my family about why writing wasn’t just a “hobby,” or sliding a term paper under a professor’s door because I was too scared to knock — all the insecurities I had during my undergraduate career came flooding back. It was nice to know I wasn’t alone. It was even nicer to know that perhaps I could help these students not feel as alone, and to give them the social capital that I never had.

A few years later, I gave the keynote at one of these luncheons. I first chronicled my father’s experience as a student from Thailand struggling to get by at an American junior college. I then explained the pressure to excel that I felt as an undergraduate at a prestigious research university, the pressure to take full advantage of all the opportunities he did not have. 

My hands shaking and my voice wavering ever so slightly, I felt very vulnerable up at that podium, hoping that what I was sharing would connect. I admitted that I felt like everyone else knew what they were doing more than I did. That I felt like I had no one in my support system to prepare me for life at a “fancy school.” When I sat down, the director thanked me and said “that was exactly what every student in this room needed to hear right now.” In that moment, I had shared an epiphany with them: we are not alone. 

I felt this same sense of kinship with Miles Morales as I watched Across the Spider-Verse.

[I’m going to be extra sensitive about spoilers for this film, because I think the fresher you can go into it, the more electric your experience will be. So…SPOILER ALERT. If you want to see how this all could possibly relate to Spider-Man, watch the film and come back to continue reading.]

Image Credit: LA Times

The web fluid that sticks to everything and sticks everything in this film together is Miles feeling like he is alone, on the outside of all the institutions in his life. It’s happening everywhere in the film. His high school is an elite academy he had to win a lottery to attend. His top choice for college, Princeton, is among the most elite universities in the country. His family at home doesn’t know that he’s Spider-Man and therefore doesn’t understand his behavior. None of his other-dimensional friends came to visit him, even after they gained the ability to do so. Miguel O’Hara doesn’t want him anywhere near his Citadel of Spideys task force, or the “Spider Society,” an “elite crew with all the best Spider-people in it,” as they say in the film. Even in the vast multiverse, Miles is the most anomalous of anomalies, bitten by a Spider from another dimension, never meant for him.  

Image Credit: Sony Pictures Animation

To go one step further, if I go beyond the bounds of the narrative and think about Miles Morales as a comic book character in real-life, there has certainly been enough resistance to Marvel characters whose identities do not match up with the original versions of their characters — enough for me to say that Miles faces meta-exclusion too. Miguel calling narrative touchstones like the death of an uncle “canon events” begs meta-commentary about comic book canon. The conflict between Miguel, who claims that upholding key events in every Spider-Hero’s life is necessary to protect the universe, and Miles, who argues for free will, raises the question of what makes a Spider-Man a Spider-Man, and where to draw the line between variation and adherence to tradition. What should we reasonably consider to be a “defining feature,” universal across all versions of an iconic comic book character? At what point does preserving a canon event or a canonized attribute become detrimental to future storytelling? As a literary scholar, I know the notion of canon has historically been exclusionary. Teachers today are still trying to introduce female authors and authors of color into curricula. 

We’ve already seen this outsider feeling that Miles harbors, albeit to a lesser degree, in the first film. Jeff completely embarrasses him when he drops him off for his first day at Brooklyn Visions Academy. He calls the school elitist and actively tries to fail tests so he’ll get kicked out, only his math teacher points out that in order to get a zero on a test, he has to know the right answers to be able to put the wrong ones. He’s clearly feeling the pressure when he’s assigned to read Great Expectations (social mobility! prospects! so many parallels to Pip!) and instead creates a stunning graffiti mural that says, “No Expectations.”

He feels like he doesn’t fit in because he’s an awkward teenager (which is classic Spider-Man), but he also feels like he doesn’t fit in because he has imposter syndrome. He says he just got lucky getting into Visions Academy and his father has to interject by saying, “You passed the entry test just like everyone else.“ It helps that my students now have the term imposter syndrome and the language with which to openly acknowledge that they feel it and know that they’re not the only ones who do. At the same time, imposter syndrome is so powerful that it never really goes away, even after you’ve “made it.”

In Across the Spider-Verse, Miles’ imposter syndrome takes on epic proportions, beyond his life as a student, because all of his Spider friends in the first film betrayed him by knowing he wasn’t allowed in the Spider Society and neglecting to tell him. They’re literally all leaving him out. And, in a big reveal, we learn that our Miles was never supposed to be Spider-Man in his universe. A radioactive Spider meant for a different Miles Morales on Earth 42 ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Peter Parker who dies at the beginning of the first film was never meant to die on his/our Earth. Earth 42 never got a Spider-Man at all, which lead to its Miles Morales becoming a villain, The Prowler, instead. So even though he has worked towards becoming his own Spider-Man and has arguably earned that mantle through his actions, everything and everyone in the multiverse makes him doubt that.

All of these instances of exclusion and loneliness fit together so cohesively in Across the Spider-Verse because key scenes and pieces of dialogue highlight that the problems of Miles Morales the student and son, Miles Morales the superhero, and Miles Morales the Marvel comics character all have this underlying theme in common.

Miles’ refusal to let his father die despite Miguel’s orders is a fight for the Miles Morales story. What choices he’s able to make as a Spider-Man and how his life will or won’t play out. Will he write his own story with his own actions or will he be forced to relent and accept the story that Miguel is trying to write for him? The crazy, epic, rollicking chase sequence isn’t purely action spectacle; it has huge stakes because it’s a battle for Miles’ agency. 

And again, this battle ripples through every aspect of Miles’ life, and that’s what makes this film a masterpiece. Even his guidance counselor is trying to write his story for him. The scene in which Miles sits down with his parents to talk to the counselor about his college prospects made me think of my own experience and my experience with USC’s Topping students the most. No one in that room understands him, and he feels that intensely. But then the guidance counselor ghoulishly (though I’m sure she means well) tries to craft a good narrative for his college application, and she comes up with a story about his “struggling” parents of color and his own struggles as a result. Rio and Jeff look confused and protest, saying that as a successful nurse and police officer, they’re not actually struggling. But the counselor ignores them and goes on to pigeonhole and oversimplify them all for the sake of what she thinks will play well with the admissions board. (This, by the way, reminded me a lot of debates we used to have when reading applications for the Topping Fund. We used to say that our selection process wasn’t merely “the suffering Olympics.” There had to be more nuance and complexity in our decision than that.)

Image Credit: Sony Pictures Animation

I mentioned earlier that there were pieces of dialogue or scenes that allow the many facets of this film fit together. More specifically, I think the monologue from Rio, Miles Morales’ mother, is the centripetal force of the film. When she realizes Miles wants to go after Gwen, she says,

“Sorry, it's just hard to see my little man not be my little boy all the time. For years, I've been taking care of this little boy. Making sure he is loved. That he feels like he belongs wherever he wants to be. He wants to go on to the world and do great big things. Wherever you go from here, you have to promise to take care of that little boy for me. Make sure he never forgets where he came from. And he never doubts that he's loved. And he never lets anyone tell him that he doesn't belong there.”

This was not only the point at which I teared up the most, but it was when all the threads and how they had been woven together came into sharp focus. The idea that Rio is specifically concerned with Miles feeling like “he belongs wherever he wants to be” implies that she knows that there will be places that will make him feel like he does not belong. She doesn’t have a clue about his life as a Spider-Man and has no idea that not only all of his friends but a whole legion of other Spider-Heroes will try to make him feel like he doesn’t belong. Her words here imbue all that we as the audience know and see with meaning, and therefore simultaneously create meaning on multiple levels. 

Image Credit: Mashable

Rio’s monologue sets up the most devastating turn: that the other characters we know from the earlier film are willing to stand by and let Miles feel like he does not belong anywhere. To me, this reflects the power of institutions and social systems more broadly. Peter B. Parker, who claims to be on Miles’ side, simply says, “This is just how it is.” For me, that shot of Gwen and Peter standing behind Miguel, looking forlornly and helplessly at Miles struck me as the tragic image of privileged allies who say they support someone, but ultimately do not stick up for them because they feel as though they have to follow the rules of the system or maintain the status quo. (This is why Spider-Punk is the best, by the way. His comments about respecting anarchy and going against the authority cracked me up.)

Loneliness, of course, isn’t specific to Miles Morales, who he is, and where he comes from. One of the hallmarks of a classic Spider-Man story is the tension between dealing with problems both world-ending and mundane. Mending the multiverse but also passing an algebra test and being late for home room. Leading a double life that leaves you alone. The idea that superhero life is isolating and prevents the formation of meaningful relationships is as classic a trope as superheroes wearing capes or villains having an evil laugh.

That’s why the romantic plot between Miles and Gwen works so well and supports the larger story. Miles feels like no one else understands him and where he’s coming from — except for Gwen because she has become alienated from her own father and has no friends too. 

In general, I was delighted that Gwen got so much screen time here. At times the film feels like a two-hander between her and Miles rather than just Miles’ story. That’s even truer if we consider where the plot is likely going to go in Beyond the Spider-Verse (slated for March 2024). Gwen will lead her own “band” of Spider-Man variants to rescue Miles from Earth 42, trying to make amends for her betrayal and redeem herself in the process.  

Image Credit: New York Times

While this entire film is a visual feast, one shot in particular got to me most. Miles and Gwen stick themselves to the underside of a ledge, and then the camera rotates so that they look like they’re sitting up as they converse rather than hanging down. This makes the cityscape, however, look upside down.

There’s so much to read into here, and all of it connects back to the thematic threads upon which I have been pulling. Most obviously, it shows that they both understand each other and share a connection that they do not have with anyone else. For both of them, up is down and down is up. They feel less alone when they are together.

But it’s also, I think, a nod at the idea that they will, together, challenge the status quo. They will literally and figuratively turn the multiverse upside down and challenge the way things are. They will break a system that was never built for them. They will break the mold, just as this film, Across the Spider-Verse, has done so spectacularly.