Spider-Man 2099, a hulking, vampiric, self-serious anti-hero whose races across rooftops are scored to a shit-hot synth-and-guitar musical theme. Chief among them is Miguel O'Hara (Oscar Isaac), a.k.a. Across the Spider-Verse, in fact, blurs those distinctions with a plot that naturally opens up into a whole, yes, Spider-Verse of masked, web-slinging variants. Of course, there's much more going on here than a traditional clash of good and bad. (Like Miles, he's got an inferiority complex.) The Spot's powers, opening portals across space-and eventually realities-allow for some inspired action and comedy, two essential ingredients of the Spider-Verse cocktail. Perfectly voiced by Jason Schwartzman, he's introduced as a punchline-a pathetic bodega burglar who Miles dubs a "villain of the week"-before the movie connects his origins to the hero's, reinventing him as a classic mirror-image-of-the-hero Spider-Man villain. The ostensible villain this time is The Spot, a mistake of science with a body pockmarked by Dalmation-like wormholes punch him, and you might end up hitting someone else across the room. Lose your grip on the outlandish logistics, and you can still marvel at the painterly beauty of Gwen's universe, where background smears of color reflect the intense emotions of her family drama. There's a lot of exposition to get through, but directors Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Spider-Woman, whose own parental woes come to a head just as she's being pulled into the misadventures of a reality-hopping task force of fellow webheads. He shows up only after a prologue longer than your average Saturday morning cartoon, filling in the origin story of the teen's one-time, cross-dimension teammate and crush, Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld), a.k.a. It takes a while to get to Miles and his "work"-life balance troubles. Miles, now 15 and bristling under the supervision of his helicopter parents (Luna Lauren VĂ©lez and Brian Tyree Henry), remains very likable in his adolescent decency and insecurity he's been deepened, vocally and temperamentally, by returning star Shameik Moore. Or some one, rather: Like its predecessor, Across the Spider-Verse smartly grounds its dense comic-book mythology in the growing pains of one Miles Morales, an Afro-Latino kid left to fill the void of neighborhood wall-crawling opened up by the death of his dimension's original Spider-Man. There's something rubberband-like about the dramatic experience of these movies, too: No matter how far they stray into gag-heavy, dimension-hopping lunacy, they always snap back to something relatable. It abides by what cartoonist Matt Groening once called "rubber-band reality:" One minute the action is tilting into anime-adjacent abstraction, all hero poses at supersonic speed the next it's knocking you out with a strikingly legible image, like the one where two Spider-people sit upside down at the summit of a skyscraper, the towering skyline topography of Manhattan impossibly looming above them. The plus-sized Across pushes that high-tech artisanal look-that pop-art eye candy-to new velocities and spectrums of color. Those who caught the last entry in this burgeoning superhero franchise, Into the Spider-Verse, will roughly recognize the aesthetic, even if they lack the language to describe it: an adventurous style of computer animation that often mimics the jittery motion of a more traditional, hand drawn variety. Beyond the laws of physical reality, the cape stuff really soars. Watching it, you have to wonder why more superhero spectaculars don't ditch their nominally live-action shooting strategies for the full expressive freedom of animation. This movie is a ray of psychedelic light in a wasteland of muddy, gray-slate CGI battle sequences. No Hollywood blockbuster this year is likely to offer anything close to the sheer visual splendor on display in just about every scene of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse Sony Pictures
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