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2023 is the summer of the set-up. All season long, blockbuster franchises like “Fast & Furious” and “Mission: Impossible” are releasing prologue films to lay the foundation for final chapters next year. The biggest flaw with “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” the second installment in a planned trilogy, is that it is one of these films. But between the film’s awe-inspiring animation and the nonstop adrenaline of its action scenes, it’s often hard to notice.

“Across the Spider-Verse” catches up with Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) a year and a half into his career as Spider-Man. He’s had a growth spurt, started high school and become confident in his superhero persona. But he can’t quite balance his academic and social obligations with his superhero duties. In other words, it’s the typical Spider-Man situation, complete with grief over the death of his uncle in the first movie.

But the story starts away from Miles. Instead, this film begins with the origin story of Gwen Stacey (Hailee Steinfeld), also known as Spider-Woman, Miles’ best friend from another dimension.

Gwen’s backstory centers around an inventive fight scene that pits her against a sepia-toned version of Vulture, a perennial Spider-Man villain. He comes from a dimension where everyone is animated to look like a Da Vinci sketch, an early glimpse into the film’s design philosophy: madcap mixing of styles with practically every character animated in a unique way.

After taking down the Renaissance-era Vulture, Gwen is recruited by Spider-Man from universe 2099, a futuristic version of the hero, to become a member of an interdimensional team of Spider-People. She sets out on a mission to repair glitches in the space-time continuum, which brings her back into contact with Miles.

If sitting through another multiverse movie in 2023 sounds like cruel and unusual punishment, don’t worry — this film’s joys have little to do with its central plot device, and it uses the multiverse in a surprisingly thoughtful way. The movie is overloaded with Marvel properties, but each one represents an opportunity for the animators to bring a new style to the film, blending 3D animation with elements of collage, live-action, watercolor, comic books, 2D cartoons, 8-bit sprites and Lego.

“Across the Spider-Verse” creates a multiverse of stunning and varied colors and styles, fulfilling the promise of anarchic crossover that so many other dimension-hopping stories fail to live up to. It is not only a crossover of characters but also of methods used to bring them to life.

Sometimes the creativity of the film’s blended styles is held back by the restrictions of a computer-generated world. Its ambitious effects, textures and lighting tend to chafe against the plasticky limitations of 3D character models and locations. “Across the Spider-Verse” could be better off as a traditionally animated 2D film, with fewer restrictions on its ability to incorporate diverse modes of animation. But it’s so rare that any blockbuster is as ambitious as this one that it should be celebrated for raising these issues at all.

The film also uses its multiverse backdrop to examine the fundamental properties that define a Spider-Man story. The hero’s many variants, no matter how different they look on the surface, have experienced the same basic life events that have been part of Spider-Man mythology since the 1960s. Whether they’re a cowboy Spider-Man, a vampire Spider-Man or a humvee Spider-Man named Peter Parkedcar, they all share a familiar backstory.

By pointing out the standard pieces of the Marvel hero’s history, “Across the Spider-Verse” makes its deviances from that formula seem more meaningful. It breathes new life into one of Hollywood’s most-adapted characters, who has been the subject of four feature-length origin stories in the past three decades.

Spider-Man 2099 (Oscar Issac), Gwen’s brooding mentor who serves as one of the film’s antagonists, believes that these played-out tragedies are necessary to the existence of any web-slinging hero. No previous superhero film has taken such a critical look at the deficiencies of the genre’s storytelling, going as far as to make that template part of the villain’s scheme.

However, this fascinating deconstruction of the genre runs into a brick wall in the last 30 minutes. In the last forty minutes, the film’s own story is put on pause in order to set up the grand finale next spring, ending on a groan-worthy “To Be Continued…” message. There is no satisfying, self-contained conclusion. “Across the Spider-Verse” is the first half of a potentially great story, but doesn’t feel complete outside of that context.

Ultimately, a clunky ending is forgivable because the real draw here isn’t the story. “Across the Spider-Verse” is special because of the obvious passion and excitement that bleeds through every frame of its boundary-pushing animation. Its action sequences have a certain energy and finesse unmatched by the series’ many imitators, reinforcing the original film’s style while enriching it with even bolder choices.

There are so many moments that will make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, so many gleefully unexpected excursions with the animation, that “Across the Spider-Verse” can’t be missed no matter how you feel about Marvel or multiverses. From those empty wells, it draws fresh water and delivers one of the most exciting theatrical experiences in years.

Published on June 9, 2023 at 12:04 am