Take any 10-15 minute segment of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and you have part of an impressive movie. But taken as a whole it is both too long and incomplete. It suffers from a bad case of evil producer strategy, whereupon the failures of the movie have less to do with the creators themselves but from certain dictates from on high that force bad decisions in terms of length and content.
A very prominent version of this can be seen in the adaptation of The Hobbit. The evil producers had it in their mind to replicate the success of The Lord of the Rings trilogy and so they set out to make the new movies exactly the same in length and release strategy. The problem of course was that the source material was a novella, not three books of hundreds of pages each. And the content of the novella didn’t have the action set pieces that the trilogy of tomes had. So, in the end, The Hobbit trilogy was way too long and stuffed with a bunch of blockbuster action sequences that were boring as all hell because they weren’t in the book at all. Why this was done is obvious, the evil producers wanted to market the movies as big events, so they needed to be epic (see long) and there needed to be at least three of them so they could have three big opening weekends. I hope they liked how much money they made immediately because no one in their right mind would ever see those movies again, or for the first time, now. I didn’t bother to watch the third. (In that one, they take a single chapter and draw it out for three hours).
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse has this same sort of problem. It is a sequel to the well thought out and executed 2019 standalone feature Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, but unlike that movie, it starts with a marketing strategy and then tries to fit a story to it, not the other way around. At 2 hours twenty minutes it is way too long and then it ends on a cliffhanger because apparently it wasn't long enough.
Again, take any ten or fifteen minute segment of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and you have what could be part of a good movie. The animation in particular is striking and impressive in its attention to detail and multitude of forms. Like the original (and now live-action Spider-Man too), the spider-people live in a concurrent multi-verse. These multi-verse each have their own art style. The main version, wherein Miles Morales (aka Black Spider-Man) is our hero, is curated in Brooklyn neo-realism. Another version, with Gwen Stacy (aka Spider Woman) is curated in impressionistic pastels. A villain named the Vulture seems to pop out of a universe styled in the writings of Leonardo Da Vinci. Spider-Punk is made out of british paper-mache.
All of these are good artistic ideas that are well done. It’s just that there is too much of it and not enough actual plot. Action sequences go on too long. Even when the movie is out of an action sequence and it's just normal exposition, there is still a lot of action. In one scene with plenty of background exposition, the characters are actually webbing their way through the city at great speed. The thing is, this occurs right after an overlong action sequence, so we are going from action sequence to action sequence to action sequence. Even word-play jokes are set against a scene of blockbuster action. Did you know that Chai is Indian for Tea? And that when you say Chai Tea you are actually saying Tea Tea? You are not laughing, is it because you are distracted by that skyscraper falling/crashing into the Brooklyn Bridge. The action sequences would have felt more exciting if the movie wasn’t wall to wall with them. And certain dramatic moments would have worked better without all this sound and fury. A big reveal involving the emotions of several main characters takes place during a chase and fight on a bullet train racing up a space elevator. Why? Why do it like that?
When the movie does slow down, it slows down a lot, and in repetitive fashion. How many scenes do we really need of a teenager trying to talk to their parents and getting frustrated. I would be happy with one scene per teenager and set of parents. In this movie, there must be at least 5-10 scenes of that kind of thing.
The thing is, these overlong action sequences and all these frustrating scenes where teenagers are not able to communicate with their parents are the same thing: the movie stalling for time, trying to get to an EPIC length and the cliffhanger to set up the next movie. I for one will not be seeing the next movie. I don’t need to see it to know that they could have combined its story into this one resulting in one good movie instead of two way too long bad ones. (I do not understand why evil producers have this strategy. You can always make more movies. Just look at the James Bond franchise.)
This movie doesn’t even have Spider-Ham in it. What a disappointment.
