There’s plenty to be said for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, the sequel to the superhero picture that put itself a cut above the great spandex deluge by inventively, faithfully emulating the whiz-bang excitement of reading actual comic books as a kid. Like its 2018 predecessor, the newly released follow-up genuflects to its splashy source medium as it pushes the boundaries of animation, mashing up styles and textures into a free-associative, hyperkinetic torrent of psychedelic lines and color. The everything-at-once maximalist aesthetic befits a premise that explodes the wall between text and metatext with its setting in a multiverse of overlapping narratives, a pileup of Marvel-branded continuities.
And yet for all its cleverness in conception and design, the overall quotient of pound-for-pound entertainment has slipped in a difficult-to-pinpoint way. Where the last installment slingshotted its audience through a taut, rewarding and complete remix of Spidey mythology, this one – which clocks in well past the two-hour mark – lags behind its own allegro rhythm, sluggish as Miles Morales weightlessly web-slings through a bustling Manhattan.
Going by the classical architecture of the screenplay construction books, the first act lasts several beats longer than prescribed, with a hazy, indefinite transition from the second to the third that leaves a sense of sprawling middle with no end. But these schematics were established to be broken, meant to offer a template that the best movies defy as they harmonize form with content. During the web-head’s latest cartoon adventure, however, one gets the inkling of happy immoderation, the same inability or unwillingness to part with any of the good stuff that elongated John Wick: Chapter 4 past the point of wearing out its welcome. In the case of our latest outing in the Spider-Verse, a conclusive explanation presents itself with the final title card: we’ve only seen the first half of the movie. The dimension-hopping gang will be back next spring in Beyond the Spider-Verse. Until then, true believers, stay tuned!
The feeling that we’ve spent an entire run time waiting for all the stuff to happen is spreading like an epidemic, traceable back to the scourge of the two-part franchise picture. The initial instinct might be to blame Lord of the Rings, a series that ended its first installment with the official beginning of its main quest, but Peter Jackson gave each piece of his trilogy enough rising and falling action to hold up as a freestanding work. The issue began in earnest with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which stretched its source material’s seventh book into an eighth movie for the stated reason of “creative imperative”, a euphemism for not wanting to excise any detail from a doorstopper of a novel. The rationale of giving the fans all the canon they want and deserve was trotted out once more when The Hunger Games divvied up Mockingjay, though the comparative thinness of those two films gave the impression of a studio realizing they could charge loyalist moviegoers twice instead of once.
Rather than condense sprawling hunks of literature, the likes of It and Dune (both Warner Bros productions; surely there have been meetings about this new doctrine) spread their narrative across as wide a canvas as needed, and hopefully find a logical, satisfying point to break them up along the way. This proved particularly problematic in the case of Dune, a feature-length wall of exposition that had devotees of Frank Herbert’s prose assuring friends that things will really pick up in the second movie. Accommodating an overstuffed quality became a self-imposed challenge with the Avengers content line, with Infinity War leaving so many unresolved plotlines among its gargantuan ensemble that it required three more hours of Endgame to tie it all up. The biggest baffler of all will come in 2024, as the stage musical Wicked endeavors to prove why an experience that has already fit itself into the space of two hours and 45 minutes – and that’s with a 15-minute intermission – deserves so much more of our time in cinematic form.
If this all sounds like complaining born of impatience, consider how often the work of adaptation entails addition by subtraction, winnowing down the core nature of the printed word (expansive and discursive, its passage under the reader’s control) to suit that of the moving image (linear and temporal, taking exactly as long as it takes). The desire for more story can weaken the one at hand, resulting in misshapen movies with no knack for placing the peaks and valleys of their rollercoaster thrills. The common-use diss for today’s serialization-obsessed Hollywood charges them with trying to turn features into TV, but even that characterization short-changes the small screen, which models a balance of sustained storytelling and contained arcs at its best. These bisected boondoggles are merely long, reducing their unyielding stream of spectacles to a dulled plod.
