Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is an incomplete triumph

Can anyone actually do that and make it work? Since Across the Spider-Verse is the first part of a two-part sequel (with the conclusion, Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse, slated for next March), the full extent of their success is up in the air. Pretty much every other trilogy I can think of that’s tried the split-story sequel approach (Back to the Future, The Matrix, Pirates of the Caribbean) has come up short in the end. Still, if anyone can pull it off, it’s probably Lord and Miller.

No two realms of the Spider-Verse are exactly the same. The universe of Hailee Steinfeld’s white-cowled Spider-Gwen (she calls herself Spider-Woman, but she’s not the only one) is brighter and more painterly than that of Miles Morales (Shameik Moore), with an overtly watercolor look incorporating both impressionist abstraction and expressionist color. It makes quite a contrast when a supervillain pops up who not only is inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s engineering designs, but literally looks like a parchment illustration. A buoyant new Indian Spider-Man, Pavitr Prabhakar (Karan Soni), lives in a Mumbai/New York mashup city of “Mumbattan” (a cross-cultural conceit like the “San Fransokyo” of Big Hero 6) blending pastel colors with sketchy linework. Both worlds combine 3D and 2D with startling boldness and beauty.

If Into the Spider-Verse was about connection, one thing that Across the Spider-Verse is about is isolation and alienation: about knowing that there are other people out there who are like you, but having no access to them, and being surrounded by people who are on a different wavelength. It’s about the particular kind of loneliness characteristic of the digital era. It’s been over a year since a multiversal accident brought a number of Spider-folks into Miles’s life — and since he sent them all back home. Over a year since Miles has felt that “You’re like me” connection with anyone. “There’s Peter,” Miles tries to tell his parents when they ask him about his friends, “but he moved away. And Gwanda…she moved away too.” If it sounds like he’s making them up (and, indeed, “Gwanda” is a silly pseudonym from the first film), he might as well be for all the difference it makes. In her own universe, Gwen’s in a similar predicament. I’m reminded of a line from an old Calvin & Hobbes: “Sometimes I think all my friends have been imaginary.”

Across the Spider-Verse doesn’t keep on being about loneliness, obviously, but the inevitable moment from the trailers in which Miles takes his first steps into a larger multiverse is postponed quite a bit longer than you might think. For Miles, (double) life goes on: He’s got classes; he’s got a guidance counselor meeting with his parents — but first there’s the nuisance of neutralizing an oddball villain of the week named the Spot (Jason Schwartzman, best known to me as Jesper from Klaus and ideally cast here). The Spot’s struggles to break into a life of crime echo Miles’s early awkwardness with his powers, but he’s already got a complicated relationship with Spider-Miles vaguely recalling Syndrome’s grievance against Mr. Incredible and the Joker–Batman relationship from the original Tim Burton film.

Across the Spider-Verse is also about the toll taken on relationships from keeping secrets. A crucial scene in the first film turned on a one-sided exchange between Miles and his dad; here his mother Rio (Luna Lauren Vélez), a nurse, has the standout exchange — but Miles’s secret hangs over both scenes. Then there’s Gwen’s father George (Shea Whigham), a by-the-book cop like Miles’s Dad Jeff (Brian Tyree Henry). Obviously neither spider-teen is about to tell their dad about their masked alter ego. For what it’s worth, Gwen Stacy in the comics has always been a police captain’s daughter — even the original, non-spider-powered Gwen killed by the Green Goblin back in 1973. The original Captain Stacy was a shrewd Spider-Man supporter until his accidental death in 1970 shielding a boy from falling debris during a Spidey battle. (None of this is a spoiler, but also I’m not mentioning it for no reason.) Spider-Gwen’s father doesn’t have the kind of working relationship with his friendly neighborhood Spider-peep that the original had — or that Miles’s dad now has with his Brooklyn’s new Spidey. This Captain Stacy is out to arrest Spider-Woman, whom he wrongly blames for the death of their world’s Peter Parker. Kind of like how in Into the Spider-Verse Miles’s dad briefly blamed Spider-Man for the death of his brother, Miles’s Uncle Aaron (Mahershala Ali), aka the Prowler.

All those recurring patterns! Is tragedy necessary to ground any Spider-Man — to impress upon him the defining lesson of power and responsibility? Is the new Indian Spider-Man’s cheery optimism evidence that he has yet to suffer a defining loss? In the first movie, after Uncle Aaron is killed, Miles’s spider-pals commiserate. “We’ve all been there,” janky hobo Peter B. Parker (Jake Johnson) assures him. And they have. All of them. Across the Spider-Verse looks deeply at these convergences and asks how deep the rabbit hole goes — in the process raising some issues overlapping with recent multiverse storytelling in Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe.

This is where I must acknowledge some apprehension. Among early new faces are an intimidating “ninja vampire Spider-Man” named Miguel O’Hara (Oscar Isaac), aka Spider-Man 2099, and a very pregnant Spider-Woman (Issa Rae) on a motorcycle. (This Spider-Woman shares the name Jessica Drew with Marvel Comics’ first Spider-Woman — though the original Jessica Drew was White and this one is Black, with an enormous Afro like the small-screen Black Spider-Woman of The Electric Company’s “Spidey Super Stories,” aka Valerie the Librarian. Sorry, this time I am mentioning this for no reason — I can’t help it! This movie is so geeky even I’m probably getting only about a third of it, and I remember the Spot’s 1984 debut in the comics.) Later we meet (among many, many, many, many, many other iterations) the ultimate punk-rock Spidey, an anarchic Black Londoner named Hobie Brown (Daniel Kaluyya) with a Camden-ish accent, widely described as looking like he stepped off a Sex Pistols album cover, though the effect is actually more like a punk zine layout.

All of these exotic Spideys belong to an elite Spider-Society aiming to prevent or clean up interdimensional Spider-Verse anomalies — and while they were no help in the crisis of the last movie, they’re well aware of it. All of this raises questions so huge I hardly know where to begin. Why only anomalies relating to spider-folks? What about other types of anomalies? Miguel is aware of some version of Doctor Strange (and among the many forklift loads of Easter eggs are references to a number of Spidey-related live-action series). Does this mean everything that happened in Into the Spider-Verse was permitted by the MCU’s Time Variance Authority? Were humans on Miles Morales’s Earth created by a Celestial named Arishem? I know the references are just Easter eggs, but the MCU juggernaut is what it is, and when you plug into it, you get what you get. I don’t want the MCU’s cosmic nihilism bleeding to the Spider-Verse.

Happily, once the story moves past the Spider-Society, human-scaled issues and concerns come to the fore again. However powerful and dangerous Miles’s unexpected nemesis may become, the stakes that matters most to Miles are personal. The Spider-Verse contains quirks and aberrations almost beyond cataloguing (almost all with some basis in the comics, believe it or not), but the variations that matter most are those that hit close to home. This is what I’m here for — this, and whatever happens next. Like Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, this essay ends on a cliffhanger. SDG will return.