According to the statistics of “The Box Office”, the top three top-grossing movies of this summer are “Barbie”, “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse”, and “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3”. Honestly, considering the Barbie/Oppenheimer conflict I mentioned in the last review, Oppenheimer not being in top three was a huge surprise for me. Also, I didn’t expect “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” to be in the top 3. I’m not a huge fan of action movies or Marvel, so I mostly had no idea which movies were released in the “action films” category this summer, but I expected to at least hear about a movie if it was going to be in the “Top 3 Grossing”.
But, unlike “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3”, I heard A LOT about “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse”. When it was first released, I heard about it everywhere. While talking with my friends, scrolling through Instagram, looking for some inspiration for a painting on Pinterest… It was literally everywhere! But I didn’t get a chance to go and watch it when it was released, and like what happened with the Barbie movie, I was exposed to tons of spoilers. I even painted a cardboard bag inspired by the movie before I watched it! (You can check it out on my Instagram art account, @an_unknownn_artist)
Lately, I had some time to watch some movies, so I decided to watch “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse”. Before I get to the actual “reviewing” part, I want to mention that I’m not a fan of superhero movies or the “Spiderman” movies in general, my main goal while watching this movie was to get inspired for my paintings and have one more topic in common to talk about with my friends. Therefore, there may be a lot of things I didn’t know about the movie while watching. Also, one more reason that made me watch the movie was that I liked the art style used while animating the movie. And the review part is my personal thoughts, that’s why it’s a review and not a summary. As expected, there are a lot of spoilers ahead. Enjoy!
The movie begins with a very cool intro, the logos of the studios that associated and distributed the movie glitching as a reference to the continuing scenes of the movie. We first see a character, Gwen Stacy, having struggles with her personal life and trying to join a band to (as she says) “not talk about her feelings, hit her feelings with sticks”. She fails to join the band, and then we (as the audience) see her main struggles. Years prior, she (being the spider-woman of Earth-65), accidentally causes the death of her best friend Peter, because he appears as “the Lizard” and causes chaos. After their fight is over, Gwen realizes that “the Lizard” is Peter, who tried to become a beast to attack his bullies. But sadly, Peter dies in her arms. Then, Gwen’s father, Police Captain George Stacy, and his colleagues start looking for her everywhere to charge her for killing Peter. George Stacy becomes extremely meticulous about finding Spider-woman since she technically “killed” his daughter’s best friend. Her father looking for her as a criminal and the weight of causing the death of her best friend becomes too heavy for her and she starts looking for a band to join and fails.
Later, she comes across a version of the Vulture from an Italian Renaissance-themed alternate universe. Honestly, I think that Vulture was an extremely underrated villain. I really like Italian Renaissance as a theme in movies and therefore, I would’ve loved to see Vulture having more screen time. Since Vulture is too strong for one person to deactivate by herself/himself, Miguel O'Hara and Jess Drew (Spider-people from other dimensions) arrive using portal-generating watches. I want to share a few thoughts about these two characters, I really liked Miguel O'Hara as a character in the movie. He was animated and voiced perfectly, the audience could clearly see the anxiety that his past traumas caused him and that he was trying his hardest to save everyone. We could tell that he was extremely careful with Mayday (Peter’s [another Spiderman from another dimension] daughter) but he didn’t want to show sympathy, since that would make him remember his daughter who died because of him. But unfortunately, I didn’t like Jess Drew as much. She was animated much cooler in the comics and her attitude to Gwen was just annoying. Also, still fighting while she’s pregnant was extremely unrealistic, and weird. Not being sexist, I found Peter bringing his kid Mayday to fights weird as well. There’s a reason why there aren’t any toddler spider-kids around in the Spider Society.
After the fight, Gwen’s father finds her as the Spider-woman and attempts to arrest her. Therefore, she has no other option than to reveal her identity. After she reveals her identity, her father still tries to arrest her, and she escapes to Spider-Society.
In Brooklyn (Earth-1610), a teenage boy called Miles Morales who’s the Spiderman of that dimension, fights “the Spot”, a scientist whose body was infused with spots opening to portals during the destruction of Alchemax collider. Spot is also the scientist who transported a spider from another dimension, the spider that bit Miles and made him Spiderman. Their fight ends when the Spot accidentally kicks himself from his “back” and transports into the void, where he can basically teleport anywhere. The Spot being super powerful but kicking himself in the back and losing a fight was one of the funniest scenes in the movie.
After Gwen joins the Spider Society, she goes to Earth-1610 to track Spot and keep him from opening another portal to another dimension. Also, she sees Miles and she tells him about Spider Society. This was one of the reasons I didn’t like Gwen that much. She knew that Miles was an anomaly and that his dad was supposed to die, and therefore he couldn’t join the society, but still told him about the society and made him feel curious and ambitious to join anyway. When she’s about to return to Earth-50101, Miles turns invisible and follows her. They go to the native Pavitr Prabhakar’s country and Miles accidentally ruins a canon event* by saving a police captain from dying.
(*A canon event is an event that needs to happen in order to keep every dimension's destiny as it should be) Honestly, Pavitr was my favorite character, before and after watching the film. Before watching it, I was amazed by the costume design and the perfect voice, also I saw the “Chai Tea” scene beforehand and that scene made me laugh a lot. After watching it, and hearing the way he expressed himself, I was 100% sure that he was one of the two superior characters. The second superior character was (this is an opinion) Hobie Brown, the Spiderman from England. His voice was also perfect, and they designed him perfectly. And (this is probably intentional and mentioned in the first film which I didn’t watch) the colors used while designing him were bad. He was like a ghost (which, like I said, was probably intentional) and I expected his design to be a little more colorful. And we could’ve seen his “anarchist” side way more and it would’ve been perfect to view his political ideologies more. Also, I’d have loved to see their friendship have more screen time.
These events all happen in the first hour of the movie. I’ll be completely honest, I had extremely high hopes about this movie. I thought I would love it and even recommend people to watch it. But, although I liked the character designs, voices, etc., the plot in the first half was super boring. Movies need live plots to keep the audience awake and watching. This movie was weak considering it needed to draw the audience’s attention. The second hour was slightly better, but just because of the small plot twists.
When Gwen, Miles, Pavitr, and Hobie return to society, Miguel is of course furious. Then, Miles learns that his father dying is a canon event and wants to stop it. But Miguel, calmly explains to him that he cannot stop him from dying, because he should keep the balance with canon events and that he doesn’t want one more dimension to deal with. He also mentions that he tried to do it before, but it only caused his daughter to die in his arms. But Miles doesn’t listen and runs away anyway. I think this was supposed to be a twist in the plot, but they made the audience wait for too long for one, twists should be in the earlier plot. Finally, the chase starts and Miguel and the others try to catch Miles. But Miles runs away anyway, then understands that he wasn’t supposed to be Spiderman and that the spider turning him into Spiderman was from another dimension, and therefore him becoming Spiderman made the other dimension change.
Meanwhile, Gwen returns home and faces her father, only to find out that he quit his job because he couldn’t turn his daughter over. This is when she understands that canon events can be safely averted. She tries to find Miles but then finds out that he is in the wrong dimension, a dimension in which his father dies instead of his uncle, and he becomes a villain with his uncle, and there’s no Spiderman. They capture him and then a writing appears on the screen, “To Be Continued…” This was another reason to dislike this movie. I wouldn’t have spent two hours and twenty minutes on this movie if I knew it’d end with a cliffhanger.
And I want to mention two more positive aspects of the movie. The first one is humor. The Spidermen pointing at each other meme, the Spidercat, and so many others honestly made me laugh. And the second one is the soundtrack. The artist “Metro Boomin” did an awesome job and honestly, was the perfect artist for this movie. Also, seeing Donald Glover in the movie made it better.
The movie currently has 8.8 IMDb points, I would’ve given it a maximum of 5.8 points. As I said before, the designs and animations were perfect, but the plot made it really hard to watch. So if you haven’t watched it, I would say there are better movies but you can watch them and decide for yourself, considering these are just my opinions and the movie is subjective...