Directed by: Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K. Thompson
Starring: Shameik Moore, Hailee Steinfeld, Jason Schwartzmann, Oscar Isaac
Rated PG, 140 minutes
The multiverse is nothing new. Think of “The Matrix,” bringing the idea of parallel worlds to the mainstream back in 1999. Or, if you go way back, there was “The Wizard of Oz” and its technicolor-versus-sepia exploration of the alternate realities waiting quietly beneath our own. And why stop there? “Don Quixote,” Miguel de Cervantes’ 17th-century tale of a bumbling knight errant, traverses several layers of reality, laying the groundwork for all the metafictional narratives of the past four centuries.
One possible catalyst for the recent surge in popularity of fictional multiverses was “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,” the 2018 animated film whose sequel, “Across the Spider-Verse,” has just landed. Certainly Marvel has made much of the multiverse trope of late, from its genre-hopping TV series “WandaVision” to the Doctor Strange sub-series of films, whose latest installment, “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” brought this central conceit right into the title. Even more prominent than anything Marvel has said on the subject was last year’s indie juggernaut “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” which filtered a relatively simple family drama through a gauntlet of alternate realities, lifting the multiverse to a height of critical and popular acclaim.
It’s easy to see why the multiverse has such appeal. There’s the usual escapism, the temptation to daydream about different realities when the news in our own is bad. We also live in an entertainment economy that has given us endless options in every conceivable genre, which means a story that tackles only one subject or one premise makes us feel like we must be missing out on something elsewhere. Enter the multiverse: if you can have everything in one sitting, you’ll never have to feel like you’re missing anything. Of course, the trade-off with these stories of the multiverse is that they have no attention span, no patience for settling into a groove. They must be expanding ever outward, stretching thinner and thinner.
“Across the Spider-Verse” is both emblematic of this fracturing of storytelling and an example of how to avoid falling apart. Following Miles Morales (voiced by Shameik Moore, reprising his role from “Into the Spider-Verse”) and hundreds of other Spider-Men as they skip through universes in hot pursuit of the supervillain Spot (Jason Schwartzmann, “The French Dispatch”), “Across the Spider-Verse” is visually explosive, every frame filled with eye-catching bursts of color. It’s hard to pinpoint the film’s animation style, because it varies so readily and so frequently, from comic book sound effect balloons to Lego stop-motion, from neatly shaded 3D models to bold-lined 2D cartoons. It’s a busier movie than its predecessor, and a more entertaining one, all snappily paced and exquisitely choreographed action alongside artwork and music that punctuate the story like so many exclamation points.
It’s not without its flaws. The second movie in a planned trilogy, “Across the Spider-Verse” inevitably sets up a climactic confrontation that we won’t get to see until the next sequel, which makes the movie’s final moments underwhelming. (Maybe if we’d spent less time dimension-hopping, we would’ve had time to wrap things up.) Even more head-scratching is a midmovie scene in which one Spider-Man, a brooding and bitter type, explains to Miles that certain “canon events” in the life of a superhero are not to be altered, lest those alterations destroy the universe and spread their chaos to other universes. One has to wonder if the multiverse has finally tripped over itself; if characters have become so self-aware that they can analyze their own canon (with the help of a sentient algorithm, no less), then is it even a story anymore, or are we just running a simulation?
It’s easy to forgive these trespasses, so vibrant are the images and sounds of this hyperactive feature, so skillfully executed its every inflection point. Yet I left “Across the Spider-Verse” feeling wary, as if all this prismatic spectacle is a deflection from the responsibility of telling a focused, substantial story. Consider that Spider-Man’s nemesis here is a mad scientist whose superpower is the ability to create spatial voids. It’s a telling villain for multiversal fiction. There is nothing more evil, we’re told, nothing more disastrous than subtraction. Such is the hazard underlying the goofy, unbridled maximalism of the multiverse: it makes us hoarders, clinging to our stuff, choosing the presence of everything over the absence of anything.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 6/9/23.