“Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” in the cinema: Where quantum physics and pop art combine

Thanks to its eternally expandable folds in space and time, the multiverse is not only the narrative recipe for success in today’s franchise cinema. It has also become the pop culture cipher of our time, for the fragmentation of societal realities and the desire for a higher force to bring order and unity to our current chaos. The idea of ​​the multiverse is therefore at its core more totalitarian than anarchistic: in the end, the cosmic order is always preserved.

How many Spider-Men fit in a universe?

So it’s no coincidence that outside of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), the wildest and freest implementation of this narrative principle to date has succeeded. The animated films “Spider-Man: A New Universe”, which won the Oscar in 2020, and the new sequel “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” about the Afro-Hispanic “Spidey” Miles Morales actually have more to do with the comic magazines, from which they also constantly quote visually, than with the recently increasingly unimaginative Avengers adventures. Marvel already stole the idea for “Spider-Man: No Way Home” from 2021 with the three actors Tom Holland, Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire from “A New Universe”.

“Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” pushes the crazy love of storytelling of the predecessor – even if that hardly seemed possible – to the extreme; it is, so to speak, the lowest common denominator of quantum physics and pop art. The images seem to constantly implode and explode in fountains of color at the same time, digital glitches create interference with other dimensions, portals open unexpectedly into other, photo-realistic worlds – and then into them, for example a Donald Glover sitting around.

More original than the real films

The plot is layered in a similarly intricate way as overlays of various animation techniques, but it takes even a Metaverse-trained Marvel connoisseur a while to comprehend the insane twists and turns. Fortunately, the fun lasts 141 minutes.

The introduction of Miles Morales, who took over from Peter Parker in the 2014 comics, to the expanded superhero universe was more than a cultural climate choice by producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (“Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs”, “Lego Movie”). The fact that their mind-expanding imagination is not Disney-compatible was clear at the latest when the duo was withdrawn from directing the almost wacky “Solo: A Star Wars Story” in 2017. They then spoke of an “unbridgeable gulf” between their vision and that of Disney’s “Star Wars” rights holders. Sony, which still owns the rights to the Marvel character Spider-Man, is a bit more open.

In Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Miles faces The Spot, a cowhide-patterned villain who can shift dimensions through the black spots on his skin – or even accidentally kick himself in the butt kicks. He is joined again by Spider-Woman Gwen Stacy plus an inspired troupe of arachnids, the “Spider Society”, who are still busy repairing the collateral damage to the space/time continuum from the first film. Including the heavily pregnant Jessica Drew, who never travels the universe without her motorbike, the guitar-wielding spider-punk (with a Cockney accent) and a Bollywood spider-man they pick up in an alternative Mumbai.

This hand-drawn comic Mumbai alone would be worth a film of its own. It’s also an early indication of how far the various animation techniques fan out in “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse”: T-Rex spiders, Lego spiders, punk spiders – just to name a few. The stopover in India only serves as a transition into the Spiderverse, in which Miguel O’Hara, the “Ninja Vampire”, commands an extremely humorless regime over the various Spider-Man narratives.

The death of Peter Parker’s uncle Ben on Earth number 616 – or the equivalent characters in the mirror worlds – is the central event in the Spider-Man mythos that maintains order in the multiverse. For Miles, this means he can save his father by foiling The Spot’s plan, triggering a cosmic reset.

problems with the legal guardians

“Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” is also about children and their parents, but more fundamentally: The relationship with the legal guardians has always been the emotional core of the Spider-Man story. Lord and Miller now ask what happens when this canon of superhero narrative rebels against the canon itself. In one universe, Gwen’s father blames his daughter for the death of her boyfriend Peter Parker.

In the other, the gifted but recalcitrant teenager Miles, who is constantly trying to save people, is grounded because immigrant children always have to be a little better than everyone else in life. These problems can only be solved in the multiverse with its various storylines and biographies. And against an opponent who not only wants to be “villain of the week” – or the villain in a universe – but in everyone universes.

How these plot threads can be connected to form a universal solution, so to speak, will only be answered in the coming year’s sequel “Beyond the Spider-Verse”. Cliffhangers are currently the order of the day in franchise cinema, but this breathing space is well deserved. “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” manages the rare feat of feeling familiar while remaining narratively and visually surprising: a fantastical kaleidoscope of colors and mirror narratives. The MCU, on the other hand, is looking pretty old right now.