Review: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers & Justin K. Thompson, 2023)

True to the promise of its title, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers and Justin K. Thompson, 2023) is an exhilarating and emotional journey that continues to blaze the narrative and visual trail started by its predecessor. Made by Sony Pictures Animation in association with Marvel, the film does not open with the previous film’s Spider-Man, Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) as one might expect. Instead, it shifts the focus to Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld), also known as Spider-Woman, as she finds herself embroiled in the multiversal machinations of the taciturn, pragmatic Spider-Man 2099, Miguel O’Hara (Oscar Isaac), and his spider society. This brings her back into contact with Miles one year after their separation at the end of the previous film. Their reunion forces the two to confront their complex feelings for each other and their diverging ideas of what it means to wear the mask of a spider-person. They then embark on a journey together that connects to almost every iteration of Spider-Man in the myriad mediums he inhabits. (Fig. 1)

Fig. 1 - The fully expanded poster art for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023), displaying the scale of its web-slinging cast.

Despite this spectacular scope, the film spins an intricate web between its influences without ever feeling unfocused. Most excitingly of all, the filmmakers borrow from the stylistic flourishes and super-heroic stories of the original Marvel comics, and then dare to challenge those foundational texts, thus honouring the source material whilst striving to offer their audience something new. In other words, though this is the tenth Spider-Man movie in 21 years, Across the Spider-Verse is the most aware – and takes full advantage – of his origins on the comics page.

This ambition is made plain from the very first line. The first film of the animated series, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey and Rodney Rothman, 2018), opens with its hero delivering the soon to be familiar refrain: “Alright, let’s do this one last time.” This line is peppered throughout the movie whenever one of its many spider-people introduces themselves to the audience and, like a lot of the elements of Phil Lord and Rodney Rothman’s script, works on a number of levels. It is a cue for a speedy recap of Spider-Man’s origin story, in whatever permutation it presents itself this time; it is a running gag, wherein ‘one last time’ soon becomes two, three and four last times; and it is a cheeky acknowledgement to the audience that they have seen this bit before in numerous blockbusters, cartoons and comics. You know all this, the film says, but here is a fresh spin. Let’s see how far we can stretch what this story can be. Let’s make it inclusive, let’s make it about community and shared grief, and let’s present it to you in as many sensational, innovative animation styles as we can.

Fig. 2 - An emotional moment for Gwen and her father (Shea Whigham) illuminating the darkness of her room.

Across the Spider-Verse, on the other hand, starts with a new assertion: this time, Gwen tells us, we are doing something different. In lieu of the action-packed gagfest that follows Peter’s opening quip in Into the Spider-Verse, co-writers Lord and Christopher Miller and David Callaham opted to set the tone for the sequel with an impressionistic musical montage, an exploration of Gwen’s inner life set to her playing an escalating drum solo. This is all set in Gwen’s universe of Earth-65, a world glimpsed in the previous movie but now gloriously realised in full. True to the art style of the original Spider-Gwen comics drawn by Robbi Rodriguez and coloured by Rico Renzi, her world is awash with white and neon watercolour splashes that shift in tone and depth depending on Gwen’s mood (Fig. 2). It spells out an opening sequence rich with both spectacle and character, dazzling with its animation without ever missing a beat of its kinetic action or losing track of the struggles of our co-lead, and setting a skyscraper high bar for everything that follows.

And that is only our first stop. If the first film primarily focused on bringing a single comic universe to the screen, then this one brings the whole spinner rack. It follows through on the promise of characters like Peni Parker, Spider-Man Noir and Spider-Ham by building fully realised worlds with similarly distinct aesthetics, nimbly leaping from universe to universe, art style to art style, genre to genre, without pausing for breath. Even the visual cues, sound effects and emanata we grew accustomed to in Into the Spider-Verse adapt to the various dimensions we glimpse throughout its sequel. That is not to say the new characters do not continue to impress with their stylistic flair, the highlight being Hobie Brown (Daniel Kaluuya), the Spider-Punk. Scene-to-scene his silhouette spikes, his colours are inverted, and collaged newsprint masks his rig, leaving the archetypal anti-conformist fizzing with anarchic energy. Moreover, when another character starts to share his doubts, they begin to adopt his distinct animation style, embracing punk as an ethos and a visual motif.

In this way, the 1000-strong production team (a number offered by Lord and Miller in Cinemacon 2022 according to Deadline) have taken advantage of comics’ affordances, or what they offer the creators and audiences who engage with them simply by the virtue of being as they are. The result is perhaps the most successful, and certainly the most ambitious, example of stylistic remediation ever put to screen. A term coined by Drew Morton in his book Panel to the Screen, stylistic remediation is “the representation of formal or stylistic characteristics commonly attributed to one medium within another” (2016, 7). Morton draws upon live action productions which remediate comics art, panels and symbols on-screen, such as Dick Tracy (Warren Beatty, 1990), Hulk (Ang Lee, 2003) and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (Edgar Wright, 2010), to demonstrate the potential of bringing the affordances of comics to film. In the book’s final chapter he concedes that, with the financial and/or critical failures of those projects, the future of stylistic remediation within the industry looked “bleak” (2016, 79). Two years after its publication, however, Into the Spider-Verse released, and inspired a new wave of movies which stylistically remediate, particularly in animation.

Across the Spider-Verse rides this momentum, drawing heavily on not only the material affordances of the comics medium for its aesthetics, remediating the impact lines, panel borders and various art styles we see throughout, but also its social affordances, associations that come naturally to comics due to their history and social context. An excellent example of this earlier in the movie is the use of an editorial asterisk and caption box to explain the meaning of the term “Hammer Space”, thrown out by Miguel midway through the opening fight. No dialogue is wasted in exposition, and the term is never brought up again. Instead, the box precisely serves the function it does in a monthly comic book: to give its audience context without intruding on the main narrative.

Fig. 3 - An example of burst card frames used to emphasise Spider-Man 2099 tearing webs in mid-air, as drawn by Kat Tsai (@Chuwenjie).

Remediation is always an act of compromise. A film screen is not a printed page, and so the affordances of comics can only be represented, not recreated. Clear examples of such a compromise are the burst cards used throughout Into the Spider-Verse and carried over into its sequel, moments wherein bright colour and stylised graphics take over the screen, slowing the action down to emphasise an image for the audience (Fig. 3). While they never linger for long, the way burst cards encourage us to hold onto key frames is akin to the deployment of a panel or splash page in a comic for maximum effect.

What Across the Spider-Verse does so brilliantly is turn its compromises to its advantage, optimising the stylistic elements it remediates for the new medium they find themselves in. The running paint of Gwen’s world now actually runs, trickling down the screen, giving further texture to the designs of Rodriguez and Renzi. When Miles meets the Spider-Society helpful caption boxes flood the screen as they might in an introductory double page spread, informing us of their names, superhero monikers and Earths of origin. A comic book reader could take as much time as they like to absorb this surplus of information, and flip back to it whenever they like to clarify what was said. In the scant seconds of screentime available to the viewer here, however, there is no chance to take it all in. What was helpful on the page becomes disorienting on the screen. It takes us from the privileged position of a reader and putting us squarely in Miles’ sneakers instead, overwhelming us just as he is being overwhelmed. In this way, the filmmakers have taken advantage of what both film and comics offer their audiences, demonstrating the potential of bringing them together.

Where the film most keenly challenges its source material, however, is Miguel’s championing of the ‘canon.’ In the context of the movie, this is a cosmic balance that cannot be disrupted by spider-people crossing into each other’s universes without risking catastrophe, even if that means letting tragedies unfold by refusing to act. Seen from the perspective of the audience, it becomes the idea that a Spider-Man story must play out a certain way or risk destabilising everything around it, effectively setting a limit on what kind of narratives creators working with the character can tell. The term canon is extremely loaded for comic book fans, who take umbrage with stories set within superhero universes contradicting or retconning (retroactively changing continuity) past adventures, and who bridle at adaptations changing what the original story depicted. Miles’ rejection of the canon, and by extension the spider-society’s rejection of him, feels like an attempt to escape such limitations and discover what Spider-Man could be. The fact the film frames this by engaging with the character’s history so directly is a masterstroke, allowing it to critique its comic book DNA even as it embraces it.

Fig. 4 - Miles runs from the spider-society, smashing through a fellow Spider-Man’s therapy session.

With that in mind, it is apt that Lord, Miller and Callaham tackle familiar themes of their source narrative in novel ways. As pointed out by Douglas Wolk in his book All of the Marvels, a central preoccupation of Spider-Man stories from the beginning is the absence of his father figure, and the rogue’s gallery of terrible surrogate fathers that besiege both sides of his double life as a man and a superhero. (Wolk, 79-105) Miles and Gwen’s fathers are not absent, at least not as totally as Peter’s Uncle Ben in the comics. However, their familial relationships are at the heart of the story. Miles has difficulty communicating with his mother Rio (Luna Lauren Vélez) and both young spider-people struggle with the dilemma of revealing their identities to their parents. They are also drawn to the flawed, surrogate fathers of Miguel and Peter, both of whom are dealing with parental baggage of their own.

Keeping our heroes and their families front and centre expertly balances the story’s stakes between the intimate and the epic, escalating into a multiversal spider-stampede (Fig. 4) replete with eye-popping action and fan pleasing cameos, one of which will be particularly resonant for fans of the character in animation, then returning to quieter and more personal themes before the credits roll. This is a superhero movie which proves things do not always have to end with a splashy final battle and does so with such a light touch that audiences may not even notice.

Across the Spider-Verse, then, is about finding new ways to tell old tales. It is about breaking rules and doing the unexpected, and that informs how it plays with its medium as well as its narrative. It says: look at all these Spider-Men! Aren’t they amazing? Aren’t they spectacular? Now, let’s do something different. After so many stories over so many years of comics, animation, films, video games and everything else making up the web of life and destiny, that is exciting. Now, can the super-team of Lord, Miller, Santos, Powers and Thompson stick the landing a third time, and raise the bar for the genre and stylistic remediations yet again? As many a caption box after many a cliff-hanger has read, to be continued…

**Article published: June 16, 2023**

References

Morton, Drew. 2016. Panel to the Screen: Style, American Film, and Comic Books During the Blockbuster Era. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

Wolk, Douglas. 2021. All of the Marvels. London: Profile Books.

Biography

Jonathan Macho (he/him) is a PhD candidate studying Creative Writing at Cardiff University, with a particular interest in stylistically remediating comics into his prose writing. He is the author of the children’s book Lucy Wilson and the Serpent’s Tongue and the easy reader Lucy Wilson and the Ballad of the Borad, both of which are set in the world of Doctor Who and are available now from Candy Jar Books. His short stories have appeared in AHOY comics, 404 INK’s literary magazine, To Hull and Back humour anthologies and Kaiju Ramen magazine. In 2017, 2018 and 2019, his work was selected as part of the Terry Hetherington Young Welsh Writers competition and included in the Cheval 10, 12 and 13 anthologies. He also co-hosted the Writers on Reading Podcast between 2020 and 2022, where he promoted a wealth of talented British comics writers and artists. This is his first film review.