BEFORE: Well, I watched "The Flash" first because I was afraid it was going to disappear from theaters, it got labeled as a disappointment for Warner Bros, it "only" made $225 million or so. My next trip to the theaters on a Discount Tuesday brought me in for the new "Spider-Man" animated movie. There are two more films I want to see in theaters before they go away, I think I have to hurry with "Asteroid City" now, and then of course there's Indiana Jones. I'm not planning to review those films until September, so there are alternate ways I could watch them if they disappear, but I don't want to take any chances. I also want to get to "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3" before the summer is over - they haven't released the official streaming date, but the rumors are for mid-August. If that's not accurate and they release it on Disney Plus in September instead, well, I could always buy the BluRay from Amazon, so at least I'm covered there.
Karan Soni carries over from "Unicorn Store". I'm caught up on DC Comics movies, now I've got three Marvel movies to watch this summer, starting with this one.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse" (Movie #3,176)
THE PLOT: Miles Morales catapults across the Multiverse, where he encounters a team of Spider-People charged with protecting its very existence. When the heroes clash on how to handle a new threat, Miles must redefine what it means to be a hero.
AFTER: OK, I told you we would get here, even if I couldn't come directly here from "The Flash". There were probably a dozen other ways to get here, because this film has such a HUGE voice cast, and some of these actors have been popping up recently - it turns out there was one movie that could have connected this film with "The Flash", but that movie was called "Dope" and I just hid it between two Forest Whitaker movies, because I didn't realize I needed it. Hindsight is 20/20, but if I had just dropped "Dope" from that chain and moved it AFTER "The Flash", with Kiersey Clemons carrying over, I could have gotten here sooner - but then I wouldn't have need to find "The Bubble", so come on, who's to say? Maybe things happen for a reason, and there are no mistakes, just happy accidents.
I do read Spider-Man comics still, but not the Miles Morales ones - I never read the books set in the "Ultimate" universe that he was created for, before that universe somehow ended and he moved over to the main Marvel Comic Universe (Earth-616) - honestly, I still don't know how he made the transition and the other Ultimate heroes didn't, but I think this summer there's another crossover planned, and the rest of them are coming. Also, in the past few months they've been doing another "Spider-Verse" storyline in one of the Spider-Man books, and it's an obvious cheap way to tie-in with this movie and maybe sell some more copies. Marvel called this one "End of Spider-Verse" but that's highly unlikely if the multiverse stuff sells comics.
Everything's a multiverse now, the dam burst and there's a flood of multiverse stuff, going back to "Spider-Man: No Way Home" and "Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness", which then got followed by "Everything Everywhere All at Once" and "The Flash". Did this all start with "Into the Spider-Verse"? That movie did win the Oscar for Best Animated Feature, so naturally you would expect a bunch of similar movies to follow in its footsteps. But of course, I had my issues with all of them, because the multiverse only works however the screenwriters want it to work, and we've got no proof of parallel dimensions or realities other than our own. Also, I kind of like the reality where there's one Spider-Man, his name is Peter Parker, and I know most of his villains - why is that suddenly not enough for people? Shouldn't one universe have enough space in it for all the stories that the writers want to tell? Back in the early days of Marvel, they used to have a comic book called "What If?" where they told the alternate stories, like "What If Spider-Man Joined the Fantastic Four" or "What If The Spider Had Bitten Someone Else?" but nowadays it seems like every story that COULD happen does happen, just in a different dimension. And, umm, how is it exactly that people can move between the dimensions?
Plus, what is the nature of time/dimension travel in the Marvel Multiverse? Are the timelines like strands of spaghetti in a bowl, like in the "Flash" movie? Or are there a billion possible futures for each moment, and the key events are juncture points for the timelines? A key figure in "Across the Spider-Verse" is Spider-Man 2099, Miguel O'Hara, who is a version of Spider-Man in the future. Whose future? Is he from the future of Earth-616 or from a different one? They never say - but since he's not a version of Peter Parker, there should also be dozens of versions of Miguel O'Hara, too. Right? There are so many Spider-heroes seen here that there should also be multiple Spider-Gwens and Spider-Mileses, in addition to the Jess Drew Spider-Woman, the Hobie Brown Spider-Punk and Pavitr Prabhakar as Spider-Man India and Peni Parker as SP//dr, and so on. Why is there only one of each of these, when there are many takes on Peter Parker?
(The first film introduced some weird takes on Spider-Man, like Spider-Man Noir, and then of course there was Spider-HAM, who comes from a world without humans, where cartoon animals are super-heroes and villains. It gets much worse here, with Spider-UK, a cowboy version called Web-Slinger, then Lego Spider-Man gets in the mix, Spider-Byte from a VR world, and there's even a sentient car that looks like the old Spider-Mobile, only his name is Peter Parkedcar. Ugh, because we needed more Dad jokes in the Spider-Verse.)
The first film also introduced "Spider-Gwen" (officially she's "Spider-Woman" here, but the comics have used the other name) and sure, Miles misses her after she goes back to her proper reality - the first 20 minutes of the "Across the Spider-Verse" focus on her, as she has a falling out with her father (who blames her for Peter Parker's death) and decides to accept the invitation to join the elite group of dimension-hopping Spider-People who face off against threats to the fabric of the multiverse. Spider-Man 2099 seems to be in charge of the efforts, or at least a version of Spider-Man 2099 from Earth-928, and I guess this makes sense because he's so far in the future that everything to him is in the past, and I guess he can just look back into the timeline and see what needs to be fixed? But again, time travel and dimension travel are two different things, and the fact that the Vulture here came from a Renaissance-like present should confirm that. (The comics just had the heroes in the Savage Avengers go time-traveling, and they visited the year 2099, so does that mean that they went into THEIR timeline's exact future, or did their time travel create an alternate one? Again, it's very unclear.)
What's even weirder is the fact that apparently people can cross over between the animated Spider-verse and the live-action Spider-movies. We see the efforts of the Spider-Society to capture dimension-hoppers and return them to their proper realities, one of them is a live-action Prowler played by Donald Glover, and at other times the Spider-Society uses images from the Maguire & Garfield films to illustrate points. OK, so in an animated multiverse, they don't think it's weird to interact with a live-action reality? They're 2-D and the other reality is 3-D, so how does that all function? I have a feeling that if I could go to a 4-D reality, I wouldn't know which way is up, so this is all very weird. THANK GOD that every single universe has a J. Jonah Jameson who is played by J.K. Simmons! He must be the anchor point in the multiverse.
Also, I've got a problem with Spider-Man 2099 talking about "canon events", like there's a point in every Spider-hero's life where somebody important to them dies, and this puts them on the path to being the hero they need to be. In one way it's like saying "Into every life a little rain must fall", but at the same time, it comes a little too close to characters being self-aware that they ARE characters in a story. Sure, the Flash learned this the hard way in his movie, that he wasn't able to prevent his mother's death and anyway, he shouldn't have even tried, because that's the event that made him want to be a hero. So it's kind of the same thing here, only it's so much more blatant and it means the characters know too much about how their universe works.
Thankfully, they remembered to put in a villain - you might be surprised how many superhero films forget this, especially when they've got so much else going on. (The first "Suicide Squad" film forgot, and for a while it looked like the second one was going to, too...). The use of The Spot, a for-sure B-level Spider-Man villain, is a bit of genius here, they just amped up his powers a bit and gave him the ability to teleport between the realities, even the live-action ones. But they left us kind of hanging here, as The Spot seeks out more "holes" to really become powerful, but now we'll all have to wait until the next "Spider-Verse" movie to find out if Miles can get his act together and work out his own problems in time to rally the team and defeat the evil power.
(Voice casting for The Spot was also quite brilliant, dare I say "Spot on"?)
NITPICK POINT: Same as in the first film, Miles Morales attends a specialty NYC high school, but also lives in a dorm. Nope, NYC high schools still do NOT have dorms, and even if they did, they wouldn't offer one to a student whose parents have an apartment within the city limits, he would be asked to commute. Obviously the writers needed a place for Miles to live where he could change clothes, and not always be sneaking out of his parent's building, but it still doesn't make sense for a high-schooler to live on campus.
NITPICK POINT 2: Disrupting a "canon event" can cause a whole universe to collapse? Why? How could the death of any one person be so important that the whole reality implodes, especially when there are universes where Peter Parker has died, yet the whole world keeps on turning? Plus, it's a minor character at best, that person may be important to that hero, but why does the universe care so much about one person not dying that it just gives up? WTF?
One thing that IS very interesting is the animation styles used here - in many cases the different Spider-heroes are animated differently, some move at different frame-rates and others seem to be backed up with changing swatches of color, and this is quite a clever way to depict that they all come from different universes. I can't name another animated feature where the characters sharing the screen at the same time were all created with different processes. The animation staff was HUGE, obviously, and so this all became like one big ani-jam, maybe with each character drawn by a different person or team. It's enormously vibrant, but perhaps also a little bit distracting?
I've got jury duty starting tomorrow morning, so no movie tonight/tomorrow - this works to my advantage, since I'm trying to space my movies out. Back in a couple days.
Also starring the voices of Shameik Moore (last seen in "Dope"), Hailee Steinfeld (last seen in "Barely Lethal"), Brian Tyree Henry (last seen in "Bullet Train"), Luna Lauren Velez (last seen in "Swallow"), Jake Johnson (last seen in "Paper Heart"), Oscar Isaac (last seen in "The Promise"), Jason Schwartzman (last heard in "Sing 2"), Issa Rae (last seen in "The Hate U Give"), Daniel Kaluuya (last seen in "Judas and the Black Messiah"), Shea Whigham (last seen in "The Gray Man"), Greta Lee (last seen in "Hello I Must Be Going"), Mahershala Ali (last seen in "Swan Song"), Amandla Stenberg (last seen in "Colombiana"), Jharrel Jerome (last seen in "Concrete Cowboy"), Andy Samberg (last seen in "That's My Boy"), Rachel Dratch (ditto), Jack Quaid (last seen in "Just Before I Go"), Ziggy Marley, Jorma Taccone (last seen in "Weird: The Al Yankovic Story"), J.K. Simmons (last seen in "The Tomorrow War"), Elizabeth Perkins (last seen in "28 Days"), Kathryn Hahn (last seen in "Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!"), Ayo Edebiri (last seen in "How It Ends"), Nicole Delaney, Nina Lentini, Atsuko Okatsuka, Peter Sohn (last heard in "Lightyear"), Melissa Sturm (last heard in "Hotel Transylvania 4: Transformania"), Lorraine Velez, Nic Novicki, Taran Killam (last seen in "My Best Friend's Girl"), Metro Boomin, Josh Keaton, Sofia Barclay, Danielle Perez, Yuri Lowenthal (last heard in "Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Part 2"), Mike Rianda (last heard in "The Mitchells vs the Machines"), Kimiko Glenn (last seen in "Like Father"),
with cameos from Donald Glover (last heard in "The Lion King" (2019)), Peggy Lu (last seen in "Venom: Let There Be Carnage")
and archive footage of Tobey Maguire (last seen in "The Good German"), Andrew Garfield (last seen in "The Eyes of Tammy Faye"), Cliff Robertson (last seen in "Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind"), Denis Leary (last heard in "Ice Age: Collision Course")
RATING: 8 out of 10 Jeff Koons balloon dogs
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