Saw Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. It was good, but it's annoyingly a part one of two-er, so I feel a little cheated of a full story. Comic book movies, like comic books themselves are frustrating in that they all aspire to be the story that never ends. Oh well, whatever. This film was a lot of fun. I definitely cheated myself by not seeing it in theaters. It's an eye-popping, eye-searing film that leaps off the screen, jittering and swooping, tons of fun! It also did that annoying thing where they mutter important plot points between raucous soundtrack blasts. Either that or I'm getting old.
The film's plot sees Spider-Man introduced to a Citadel of Ricks-style hangout of spier-persons from across the multiverse. Indeed, I'm calling it now: where the 2010s had young-adult dystopia, the 2020s have multiverses: Dr Strange from The Avengers, Everything Everywhere All at Once, all that talk in 2016 about having gone down the wrong time-line, and now the Spiderverse. But this franchise is so well-suited to a multiverse, it's perfect synergy. If I've got the story straight, it seems Marvel sold the rights to Spiderman to Sony, but on the condition that if they didn't make a spiderman property every 5 or 6 years, the rights revert back to Marvel. Thus, there's an ever-increasing number of reboots and spinoffs and retries at the spiderman story. With a multiverse, we get to embrace all of those versions. Yes the Toby Maguire spiderman, but also the Andrew Garfield and Tom Holland ones, and the Lego spidermen too why not?
This one was good fun, however I liked the first film better. This one has a lot of action and a lot of visual creativity, but the story ends half-way. Also, I feel like the story of gaining and mastering super-powers is always going to be more fun than a story about growing up and finding your place in a lonely world (even though the latter story is sadly the one with more utility, if I'm being realistic.) So, the film didn't hit me quite as hard as the first film, but it was still a lot of beautiful fun.
