Steinfeld’s Gwen, a fan fave, thankfully gets more spotlight in this film, which delves deeper into her tragic back story and her feelings of displacement in her world, particularly in her own home. She gets a driving pop-punk theme — part of a killer soundtrack raging with rock, hip-hop and reggaeton — and a stunning color-streaked aesthetic, with soft pinks and lavenders and heavy brushstrokes, creating an almost immersive comic book experience.
The directing team, Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers and Justin K. Thompson, builds a beautifully realistic, multicultural New York through details: a wheelchair basketball game in full swing on a nearby court, or a shelf of beef patties displayed in a Jamaican bodega.
Both “Spider-Verse” films, in what will be a trilogy, create dimension in these kinds of details, and I don’t just mean the animation. (Though, to be fair, the infinite reach of the city skyline, as viewed upside down from Gwen and Miles’s purview, is a satisfying visual callback to the first film and its own illustrative feat.) The dimension is in the thrust of the story itself.
This isn’t just another multiverse slogfest but a bildungsroman. Because what else is adolescence but a confrontation with the various possibilities in life, the infinite selves you can be? It’s about figuring out one’s identity — superhero or otherwise — and finding a place to belong. The fact that Miles and Gwen also shoot webs and swing around skyscrapers is incidental to their emotional arcs in the film.
“Spider-Verse” also asks intriguing questions about the limitations of the canon, and whether tragedy is a prerequisite for a Spider-Man origin story — the death of an Uncle Ben or Aunt May or Uncle Aaron. And whether trauma completely defines these heroes — and, if so, if they can find kinship in that.
The most disappointing part of “Spider-Verse” is the merciless cliffhanger of an ending, ushering the film into a tradition of two-parters with too much story and too little time to tell it. But “Across the Spider-Verse” is never dull, nor precious with its characters and comedy. Which I suppose just proves that when it comes to a Spidey census, two’s a team, three’s a party and hundreds is a multiverse crawling with opportunities.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Rated PG. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes. In theaters.