No superhero has enjoyed as many 21st-century screen incarnations as Spider-Man – a testament, perhaps, to the studio machine in cynically regenerative overdrive, but also to the universal, anyone-can-be-a-hero appeal of the teenage web-slinger, the most enduring comic book movie icon this side of Batman.
Spidey's elastic appeal was best captured in 2018's Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, the Oscar-winning animated hit that added Spider-women, spider-pigs and even more Spider-men to an already crowded mix, all while unleashing the reality-bending possibilities of the Multiverse – a concept that quickly became a stock device driving Marvel's lucrative fan service (with diminishing creative returns).
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, the first of two sequels to that film, is a reminder of what a comic book movie can be at its best, delivering the platonic ideal of the hero — in all their mutable forms — who is accessible to everyone.
It serves up more variations on the character than a spider-man could point his finger at, including spider-babies, spider-avatars and, in one of its many inspired gags, a spider-saur.
Yet the movie is more than simply eager to please. Within its galaxy of cameos, easter eggs and other fan treats, the movie is essentially wrestling with a threat to the very canon to which it belongs – an existential crisis that emerges when long-established franchise mythology is disrupted, almost by chance.
It's a movie caught in a paradox of its own design; a buttered cat spinning somewhere between boundless creativity and honouring the IP of its corporate masters.
"Let's do things differently this time – so differently, " announces Gwen Stacy, aka Multiverse Spider-Woman (voiced by Hailee Steinfeld), her asymmetrical mood-ring hair, aquamarine Chuck Taylors and no-nonsense voiceover setting the tone.
She's doing battle with winged Renaissance-era menace Vulture (Jorma Taccone) when Miguel O'Hara (Oscar Isaac), a luchador-like Spidey variant, and Jessica Drew (Issa Rae), a pregnant Spider-Woman astride a motorcycle, arrive from the Spider-Society – the official headquarters of all the spider-folk in the multiverse – to intervene. Something's very wrong with the fabric of space and time. It needs to be fixed, and fast.
Although he's yet to realise it, everything will pivot on Miles Morales (Shameik Moore), the 15-year-old hero who's busy enjoying his new-found status as Brooklyn's number-one Spider-Man (and the fact that his wispy moustaches, along with multiple product endorsement deals, are coming in nicely).
Miles has his webbed hands full concealing his identity from his concerned parents (Brian Tyree Henry and Luna Lauren Vélez), managing his all-consuming crush on Gwen, and playing inter-dimensional whack-a-mole with The Spot (Jason Schwartzman), a recently arrived villain with a bad case of black-hole skin breakouts, and a grudge to bear against our friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man.
Looking like a cross between a Dalmatian and Watchmen's Rorschach, The Spot is in a constant, comedic state of freefall as he zips through Multiverse potholes (one lands him in the live-action world of Venom), eventually folding in upon himself and disappearing into his own body. ("I think he kicked his own ass," quips Miles.)
It's an innovative, and equally hilarious, moment that's typical of the movie's breathless stylistic verve. Like its predecessor, Across the Spider-Verse is endlessly inventive as it shapeshifts through a dizzying array of comic book styles, from Impressionist watercolours and old-school newspaper comic-strip art to futurist landscapes inspired by designer and Blade Runner "visual futurist" Syd Mead.
In the colourful, mash-up metropolis Mumbattan, there's an impossibly dreamy Indian Spider-Man (Karan Soni), while a cartoonishly grimy British world yields a Cockney rhyming Spider-Punk (Daniel Kaluuya), who moves like jagged, DIY collage animation and spits cringey lines like, "It's a metaphor for capitalism." (He is, admittedly, very hot, so he gets away with them.)
Working from a screenplay co-written by Phil Lord and Chris Miller (The Lego Movie), directors Joaquim Dos Santos, Justin K. Thompson and Kemp Powers (Soul) evoke the experience of complete immersion in a comic book – that intimate connection between reader and text – where each frame is guided by the emotion of the moment. Environments will often glitch with a sense of inter-dimensional unease, or appear as if seen in 3D cinema minus the viewing glasses. One character is styled as a Leonardo da Vinci sketch; another seems comprised entirely of Ben-Day dots.
There might be more evocative imagery in any single frame than in all of the Marvel Cinematic Universe put together – and you sometimes have to wonder whether the filmmakers know as much.
It's not a stretch to see Miles, whose spider-powers are the result of an anomaly in the Multiverse, as an analogy for this series of films, which are produced by Sony Pictures Animation but have started to move under the aegis of Marvel.
He's the aberrant hero who's a threat to the established order of the Multiverse, with the potential to seize his own destiny rather than fall in line with predetermined fate, or the rules of a franchise.
"So, we're just supposed to let people die because some algorithm says to make it happen," Miles says at one point, questioning the need for the canonical death of Peter Parker's Uncle Ben – a core component in Spider-Man lore, without which there would be no hero. At least, not a hero according to tradition.
It's this thinking that terrifies the Spider-Society's resident cop-turned-antagonist Miguel. To paraphrase the Beatles song on which the film's title riffs: nothing's gonna change his world – not some teenager from Brooklyn, and especially not, by extension, an animated series playing fast and loose with their franchise's legacy.
What if anyone could be bitten by a radioactive spider and become a hero? What if anyone could get their hands on comic book IP and tell this story their own way?
Even with the movie's alternate-universe cliffhanger, it remains to be seen whether this series, with its third instalment ready to roll and even more spin-offs on the horizon, can inch away from the safety of corporate strategy.
Across the Spider-Verse is an infectious blast of highwire studio filmmaking, but its creators aren't about to bite the brand that feeds them.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is in cinemas now.
