Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse Boldly Pushes the Boundaries of Art and Storytelling

In Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, the supercomputer Deep Thought postulated 42 as the answer to the Ultimate Question after seven and a half million years. It’s an interesting number, with some curious mathematical properties, such as being the sum of the first two nonzero integer powers of six (6¹ + 6² = 42) or the sum of the first three odd powers of two ( 2¹ + 2³ + 2⁵ = 42). In the binary number system, it’s written as 101010, which is kind of cool. The first book off the Gutenberg press was a Bible that had 42 lines per page, and rainbows are visible through raindrops in the air that’s 42° away from the spot in the sky opposite the Sun.

In the Spider-Verse, through Alchemax and the Kingpin’s messing with multiversal travel, a spider from Earth-42 found its way to Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) and gave us Spider-Man. According to Deep Thought, forty-two is the answer to life, the universe, and everything. It also kind of explains the beautiful, tangled, wibbly wobbly multiversey stuff in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, the improbably superior sequel to 2018’s game-changing, if not life-changing, animation.

The jury is still out until the release of Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse next year, but if it’s half as good as its predecessor, the Spider-Verse trilogy will go down in history as one of the most beautifully told stories ever told on film. If you haven’t seen it yet, reserve tickets, buy some popcorn, and treat yourself to an exultation of color and sound. As difficult as it is to imagine, Across the Spider-Verse is a sequel that’s even better and cooler than the original.

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That’s a really high bar to clear, considering that even the MCU’s Spider-Man himself, Tom Holland, has said that Into the Spider-Verse is the “best Spider-Man movie that’s ever been made.” It’s been called transformative, influential, and game-changing. Across the Spider-Verse is all that and one Spider-Punk more. It not only clears that high bar but Spidey-vaults over it, with better, even more mind-blowing animation, a more engaging and higher stakes storyline, and more Spider-persons than you can imagine. Describing the experience of watching the Spider-Verse films to anyone who hasn’t seen it is like trying to describe the rainbow to the blind.

Photo by Columbia Pictures.

The second chapter leans even more into multiverses, with a multitude of art styles and a story that unravels at such a brisk, frenetic pace that it’s crazy to think that there’s still more to tell even with a runtime of two hours and twenty minutes, the longest ever for an American animated feature. Set a few years after the events of Into the Spider-Verse, Miles has grown a few inches and settled into the role of Spider-Man. He misses his friends, specially Gwen (Hailee Steinfeld), whose narration opens the film the same way Peter Parker’s (Jake Johnson) opens the first.

Gwen dances, literally and figuratively, to the beat of her own drum, unable to fit in with the world and her peers just like every other Spider-Man in every other universe. This is canon. As much as things are different across the multitude of universes, some things never change, a hard lesson driven home by unavoidable, inevitable tragedies that touch the life of every iteration of Spider-Man. These canon events must happen or else reality breaks.

Enter Spider-Man 2099, Miguel O’Hara (Oscar Isaac), who appeared in the post-credits of the first film. Miguel leads a team of Spider-beings from different universes tasked to protect the multiverse. Their headquarters is basically a giant Spider-clubhouse with amenities like a gym, cafeteria, and in-house therapists. Some of the funniest sequences happen in Miguel’s universe, which is kind of ironic because Spider-Man 2099 also happens to be the only Spider-Man who doesn’t have a sense of humor.

Photo by Columbia Pictures.

But that’s why it works so well. Across the Spider-Verse knows exactly when to crack a joke and when to pull back, effortlessly balancing lightheartedness with austerity. Even when the story is punctuated by a visual gag like a web-spitting Spider-cat, the stakes are always clear. It isn’t the only film to put the fate of the universe, or multiverse, in jeopardy but it’s definitely one that makes such impossibly high stakes so personal.

Spider-Man is personal. When Stan Lee wrote Spider-Man in 1962, he wanted a truly relatable hero who had the same problems and made the same mistakes as everyone else. Peter Parker wasn’t a billionaire playboy philanthropist (he’s a genius, though) nor an Asgardian god. He was a regular dude who took care of his aunt and needed a real job. In the Spider-Verse, he’s married to Mary Jane and has a kid. Miles, Gwen, and even Miguel have their own, everyday struggles.

While the half-Latino, half-black Miles Morales is a win for representation, the Spider-Verse makes Spider-Man exponentially relatable, with diversity and inclusivity baked into the very idea of a multiverse. Among the new Spider-Men introduced in Across the Spider-Verse is Pavitr Prabhakar (Karan Soni) aka the Spider-Man of Mumbattan, a futuristic mashup of Mumbai and Manhattan, a crowded, colorful, overpopulated, and stunning world that blends ancient Indian traditions with visions of the future. And then there’s Spider-Punk, Hobie Brown (Daniel Kaluuya), who hails from a dystopian Britain ruled by a totalitarian regime. Spider-Punk epitomizes the struggle against authority and looks like a mashup of Jimi Hendrix and Joe Strummer with a little bit of radioactive spider thrown in the mix. The film not only showcases variety but glorifies it.

Photo by Columbia Pictures.

It’s inspiring. The Internet is bustling with Spider personas or Spidersonas — people, artists, have been sharing their versions of Spider-Man and a quick perusal of the #Spidersona over on Twitter or Instagram yield a veritable multiverse of Spider-People, a kaleidoscope of personality and color. Spider-Man isn’t merely relatable … he’s us. In the Spider-Verse, we can be and are all Spider-Man.

Across the Spider-Verse incorporates this idea at a core level, with one sequence animated by Preston Mutanga, a 14-year-old who recreated the trailer in Lego form using the 3D software Blender. The film’s writers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who also wrote The Lego Movie, were so impressed that Mutanga eventually ended up animating a hilarious sequence for the film.

Notable moments in film history have marked shifts in the landscape of cinema. From industry-changing moments such as the introduction of sound-on-film in the 1920s to smaller, yet seminal instances like the Wachowskis use of bullet time in the Matrix. Sony Animation’s Spider-Verse trilogy is a game-changing piece of storytelling, blending CGI and 2D animation in new and vibrant, unexpected ways. Even the bad guy, Spot (Jason Schwartzman), is rendered in an ink bleed style that lends itself so well to a representation of nothingness.

Photo by Columbia Pictures.

For 140 minutes, Across the Spider-Verse transports us to worlds never before imagined, boldly pushing the boundaries of art and storytelling, giving audiences a bigger bite of the multiverse that audiences barely got a taste of in the first chapter. There have never been any films quite like it, but the Spider-Verse has already influenced a wave of new animation, such as the upcoming TMNT Mutant Mayhem.

The Spider-Verse is life, the universe, and everything in a nutshell. We can dissect it from opening frame to the end credits, but ultimately, what makes Across the Spider-Verse so great is that it can’t be summed up in words. Not even a thousand and three hundred of them. It’s transformative, one of the rare cinematic experiences that linger in your consciousness long after you’ve walked out of the theater. Similar to last year’s Everything, Everywhere All At Once, Across the Spider-Verse helps us understand our place in the universe. It’s a small piece of a much, much bigger picture that we only get to glimpse, reminding us that we are all as different as we are the same.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is now in cinemas nationwide.