This movie is doing a handful of things at once and pulls off most of them. My biggest criticisms almost all stem from this being part one of a two-part story and the question this raises is kind of philosophical: is it ok to release a movie into theaters that, from a story and character perspective, just isn’t finished? It’s better to be upfront about it at least, letting people know going in that there’s going to be unresolved business when the credits roll, so props for that, I guess. That’s not the part that stuck with me the most as I walked to the parking lot, though.
Let’s get some good things and my complaints out of the way first to get to the parts I’m really interested in. The animation is amazing and apparently very stressful to produce, based on the new stories on the working conditions for the film. It incorporates different art styles for each Spider variant that informs the audience about them well (Spider-Punk is basically an exercise in how design and animation can tell you everything you need to know about a character).
It does that great thing where they take a minor supervillain and really interrogate their power set to see where it could logically go. Because ongoing comic book lines are functionally static, they have to artificially restrict characters so their powers don’t end the world or change society on such a level that it becomes unrecognizable (Planetary kind of ruined a lot of comics for me). One easy example is Reed Richards, Dr. Strange, and the rest of the Marvel scientific and magical world suddenly being unable to save Aunt May from a bullet wound. The Spider-Verse movies are more self-contained (although they do tie into overall MCU continuity, which I’m not happy about), and so they can actually think hard about what a villain like The Spot would be able to do if he really tried.
They also were very clear that everything in this movie was set up in the previous one. I doubt that they always knew that bagel-guy was going to become The Spot, but they made very sure to have the spider that bit Miles all big on screen when it glitched out, so they did know they were going to do something with that. The ending teaser of the original introduced Miguel and while the characterization seems off compared to the version in the sequel it was the first time he jumped dimensions and a whole lot happened after that.
The team clearly had a blast coming up with as many Spider-variants as they could think of, a lot were references to comics continuity but plenty weren’t. In addition to the quality of the animation there’s also the sheer impact of that many moving characters on screen at once, and I feel for the interns who were in charge of tracking continuity from shot to shot. This amount of detail in animation has really only been feasible for a relatively short amount of time, and it’s very impressive.
Most of my complaints are relatively minor, as such things go. I’m not big on all of the fan-service, a certain amount of it is fine but looping in all of the live-action and animated versions eventually just exhausted me, and it means that all of my concerns about the state of the MCU get imported over to this film series. We all like Andrew Garfield's Spider-Man now, doesn’t mean I need to see his face again.
There are a bunch of narrative inconsistencies that I’m frustrated by because they may well be explained perfectly well in the sequel, so I won’t know if my complaints are justified or not until I’ve seen the second half. The movie was great and flowed well while I was watching it but the second I started to think back about it a number of things didn’t make sense. After Miguel’s impassioned tirade about Mile’s status as the original anomaly on the Moon Train I tried to make sense of the timeline as this movie establishes it and it doesn’t entirely make sense. If it’s been roughly a year and a half since Miles was bitten, and he was the original anomaly, that means that everything Miguel experienced and the creation and expansion of an entire Spider society took place in that time. Maybe time in different dimensions flows at different speeds, that would explain the various old-timey and future versions of Spider-Man, but that doesn’t explain how Miguel specifically knows that Miles was bitten by a spider from another dimension. Lots of universes have multiple Spider-People, Miles having powers by itself doesn’t establish that. Hell, Miles didn’t even know his spider was from another dimension, he had to be told by The Spot. Mind you, it doesn’t explain how The Spot knew that either, but apparently never mind.
Spider-Punk also doesn’t make a whole lot of sense as presented, though again this can be revised by revelations in part two. He’s introduced as a rebellious anti-fascist who’s very cool, which is all well and good, but if that’s the case why in the world did he ever agree to join the Spider Society and help out Miguel? He spends the entire movie sneering at the actions of basically every organization he runs across and after helping Miles escape instantly quits and goes home.
The reason these frustrate me so much is that there are very good ways to make both of these issues make sense, and I have no idea if the sequel is even going to address any of it. The easiest way to make this all go away would be to make it so Miguel’s lying about everything, that Canon Events have nothing to do with universal collapse, it’s something he’s causing and is just blaming Miles. Spider-Punk maybe caught wind of this and stuck around to investigate, which would explain what he was doing.
Much more interesting would be if Miguel is right, he’s telling the truth, that Miles’ dad in fact does have to die or else the universe will collapse. That really would be an ethical dilemma, put our characters under stress, and force some kind of resolution that isn’t just a big, impressive final fight. Since that’s not going to happen we either have Miguel lying and getting exposed, or being convinced he was wrong and they have to team up to fight I guess The Spot as the final boss? They introduce ideas that I know corporate oversight will not allow to be fully investigated, is my point.
And that finally gets to what I couldn’t help but being struck by: the fact that this is another Lord / Miller project that’s really about how we tell stories in a capitalist system. That’s what the Lego movies were about, it’s what the entire ending gag of ’22 Jump Street’ was about. Some of their non-meta projects have adapted existing IP (‘Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs,’ ‘Solo’), and their big break came with “Clone High,” about taking historical characters and seeing how they’d react to the modern world. They’ve been involved in “Community,” “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” and “The Afterparty,” all shows that dabble in meta-commentary at times.
I’m as sick of metaverse stories as much as anyone by this point, but at least Lord and Miller understand that alternate universe stories are, in the end, about storytellers exploring their relationships with the stories they’re telling.
Producing creative works is all about making choices. The character does this, not that. The event happens this way, not that way. Stories only have one end. Unless you start making variations on those stories, where you can change the actions, the events, the ending. Which can only happen so many times before it starts to eat away at any importance placed on the original version. It’s the logical extension of death in comic books: if death just going to be undone why bother caring? If this story happened differently a thousand other times, why does this version matter?
Reboots and re-imaginings are happening faster and faster. Hell, we’re getting different live-action Spider-Men and Batmen every few years at this point, and with this multiverse nonsense they’re starting to interact with each other. Whatever notions of suspension of disbelief have totally been thrown out in the name of making sure audience members are able to point at and recognize what’s on screen.
With all that said, one of the only ways left to do some kind of interesting version of a multiverse story is to start interrogating the idea of IP getting recycled again and again within the narrative of the work itself. One of the reasons that I chafe at the concept of The Canon in this movie is that it’s so obviously an analogue to the inevitable result of corporations tinkering with existing intellectual property to continue to sell the same old thing to the same old people. The impulse to do little ‘What If’ variations on classic stories is all well and good, and can even be fascinating, but when it gets to the point where a character variant from a TV show is making a cameo in another movie that’s a sequel to another entry in an ongoing multi-film narrative, I have to ask what exactly it is we think we’re doing here.
There is actually a reason so many Spider-Man variants have a lot of the same story beats: dead relative, police captain dying, some version of Gwen Stacy / Mary Jane Watson. It’s because the writers of those stories were fans of the original when they grew up and that’s the kind of stories they dreamed of telling when they were kids. You also need to include those details so people buying the comics will recognize the story as a Spider-Man story. Make it too radically different and you’re just slapping the brand name on an unrelated book.
So by making this the central conceit of the movie, that the Canon “has” to happen or everything breaks down, Lord and Miller are basically setting up continuity nerds as the real bad guys. Miguel cannot end up being right about how The Canon affects the stability of the multiverse because it would be a real bummer if that’s the case. Therefore, the antagonists are those that insist that the story has to happen a certain way.
Which is a clever way of criticizing fan culture while making a movie that couldn’t exist without that fan culture in the first place.
What this movie kind of does, and frankly should have done more of, is focus more on how this idea about The Canon affects what it says about the character of Gwen Stacy. It brushes against this a bit, with the line about how Gwen Stacy almost always falls for a Spider-Person and it never works out, but then they move past it. Considering that the original character is one of the Ur-examples of Women in Fridges, and that in many ways the popularity of Spider-Gwen (I wish Ghost Spider was a better name) is a direct response to how people feel about how women characters have traditionally been portrayed in comics, there was a huge opportunity to directly address that. I was waiting the entire movie for a reveal that there was just as big an organization made up of variations on a Gwen Stacy who’d been bitten by a radioactive spider.
She does get a decent character arc over the course of the movie, admittedly, having her issues with her father be mostly resolved by the end and setting her up to be much more confident in the second movie, but I feel they could have done more. Her character’s existence is just as much a commentary on the original version of Spider-Man as Miles is.
If I sound down about the movie it’s because the more I think about it the more it kind of curdles in my memory. The swerve at the end, with evil Prowler Miles, was set up just fine earlier in the movie and is a strong hook for the sequel, and I’m hoping that it digs into where Mile’s head is at at the end of the movie, because I wasn’t sure I was following his emotional development by that point. The way he was proudly talking to his not-mom about beating all of the other Spider-Variants had my hackles up a little bit, along with everyone always telling him how great he was. I’m assuming this is all going to be addressed in the sequel, so I can’t really complain about any of it yet, which doesn’t help with how I feel about the movie. Not knowing if my complaints are valid or not leaves the movie in this kind of suspended quantum state where it won’t resolve into good or bad until a few years from now when I can finally watch ‘Beyond the Spider-Verse’ and collapse the wave form.
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