Spider-Man: Across the Spider-verse

Whenever There's a Gang-Up/You'll Find the Spider-Man/Woman/Thing/Concept

or

Every Spider-Thing Everywhere All at Once

At the end of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-verse, I imagined a camera floating up to the theater-rafters, while I looked heavenward, my hands gripped into fists and screaming: "Noooooooooooo!"

It didn't come out of nowhere. During the last 45 minutes of the film (it's 2 hours, 20 minutes), I felt a mild panic coming on; the movie didn't feel like it was rounding third and starting to wrap things up—if anything, it was getting MORE complicated without any impending resolution. The reason? There isn't one. The movie ends with a terrible situation for hero Miles Morales (Shameik Moore), who's left beside himself, and the formation of a new Spider-group to save the day—led by Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld)—and another group—led by Spider-man 2099 (Oscar Isaac) hunting him with the intent to...well, I don't know what their intent is, but the very presence of Miles Morales and the events from the previous film put everything (and I mean everything) in danger. 

 

Then there's a "To Be Continued" graphic.

DAMN!

My absolute love for the previous film, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse, is readily apparent to anyone who read that review. I still maintain that it's the best Spider-Man movie brought to the screen*, and (unfortunately) I still do.

Oh, not that this new one is bad. It still has the verve and the audacity of its eclectic visual style, its almost brilliant vision of blending-in classic comic-book traditions in its story-telling, as well as exceptional voice-acting, and at a slightly quicker pace than its predecessor (as we've come to expect the visual tricks that are second-nature in this new one). It also is very smart, thinking outside the box-frames, while also slightly dismissive of standard super-hero tropes and jabbing (lightly) at them. It knows that you can't have a Spider-man film without the shadow of soap opera looming over it and that tragedy is attracted to the character, like, well, like goofy super-villains.

So, what is the tangled web of Across the Spider-verse? It starts out with a challenging thesis statement: "Let's do things differently this time. So differently." It's Gwen Stacy, the Spider-Woman/Ghost-Spider/Spider-Gwen of alternate Earth-65, contemplating her back-story of her gifted life being over-turned by being bitten by a radio-active spider giving her spider-powers, shouldering "great responsibility," vilified by the press and the police (one of whom is her father) and how her crime-fighting career led to the death of her best friend, the brilliant student Peter Parker (Earth-65's Peter Parker). Parallel universes have pretty narrow parallels. While fighting an alternate-Universe version of the Vulture at her New York's Guggenheim Museum, she is aided by two other spider-heroes: Miquel O'Hara (Isaac)—Spider-man 2099 of Earth-928 and Jessica Drew (Issa Rae), the Spider-woman of Earth-616. O'Hara is in charge of an elite corps, the "Spider-society" whose mandate is to keep a stable multi-verse. With me so far? Good, let's go to Earth-1610.

Earth-1610 is where "The Ultimate" Spider-man, Miles Morales, lives. It's been a year since the events of Into the Spider-verse, and the experience has changed him. He's an established Spider-man in his New York—even the police (including Miles' father) like him. He is the epitome of a friendly, neighborhood Spider-man, but his folks—despite his high grades at school—think he's a bit of a flake and are worried about him and his future. For example, he's late for everything, his attendance in class is kind of spotty despite the high grades, and they're really thinking about whether he should move home rather than applying for that big fancy New Jersey college to learn about particle physics. They want him to be more "grounded"—and he does get grounded in ever-increasing amounts throughout the movie.

And speaking of "spotty" there's a weird new super-villain in town. He's Dr. Jonathon Ohnn (Jason Schwartzman), who got caught up in the big particle accelerator/collider explosion of Into the Spider-verse and has turned into a being who can create holes—or "spots"—in space in order to transport himself to other locations on Earth-1610. Spidey encounters him trying to transport an ATM from a convenience store while on his way to his college evaluation with his folks and leads Miles on a "holey" confusing and disorienting fight throughout New York-1610 before making one trip to many and transporting him self to a "void"—let's call it "The Holy Sea" like in Yellow Submarine—where he plots his escape by using another collider to increase his powers across space...and other dimensions.

Such a being can be quite a disruption to the fabric of time and space, so the "Spider-Society" recruits Spider-Gwen to travel to Earth-1610 to track this "Spot" guy and capture him before he can do any significant damage. Gwen (rather unwisely) shirks her duties as "spot-remover" to set up some automatic detector-gizmo, and instead goes to see the neighborhood Spider-man, whom she knows is "friendly." As Miles and Gwen have feelings for each other that haven't been awkwardly expressed yet, it's a "best of/worst of both worlds" parallel universe situation.

Well, Gwen's negligence causes an emergency and Jessica Drew contacts her to get her spider-self to Earth-50101—and the island of Mumbattan—where Spider-man Pavitr Prabhakar (Karan Soni) and the Spider-Punk Hobie Brown (Daniel Kaluuya) have their hands full while The Spot successfully increases his powers with that Earth's particle accelerator. Unbeknownst to Gwen, Miles hitches a ride on her dimensional transport.

So, how are you doing so far? Head hurt a little? Getting a little tough to tell Spider-person from Spider-person and Earth from Earth? Okay, I'm going easy on you, because here's where it gets really difficult to parse: Miles' transport-hitching causes an anomaly, as he saves an important personage who would have died if he wasn't there, and that created something called a "Canon Alert" (which I found hysterical) over at Earth-928 with the "Spider-League".

Miles disrupted a key event that's supposed to happen to every Spider-man—a personal loss that will define their character—and poor Spider-India is set on a parallel track that is essential for every Spider-man story (and apparently they can't just go rogue and kill Pavitr's Aunt Maalai (or whatever) in order to set the trajectory right. This is not good, and it gets worse...and more complicated.

But, I'll spare you, and not spoil anything else. Believe me, there are a load of surprises in Across the Spider-verse from cameos and funny details to just the whole concept of the thing that takes a lot of Into the Spider-verse and re-weaves its web into something quite beyond the standard Spider-fare...although I do suspect that Miles is going to have a "Spider-man No More" moment (but against his will this time). I mean...it's "canon!"

That whole "Canon Alert" concept is just mind-bogglingly funny (even if it's treated so seriously). There are certain comic-book stories and ideas that creators just don't touch because they are "canon"—Krypton exploded (you can't bring it back), Bruce Wayne's parents were shot in an alley (you can't say "just a flesh wound"), and Uncle Ben and Gwen Stacy have to die...and stay dead. Oh, they can be "cloned" (when the comic publishers get desperate), but you can't have Peter Parker (or what-Spider-ever) wake up one day, hold his aching head and go "it was all just a horrible dream" and go have a breakfast of Uncle Ben's converted rice. After all, these things take place in Manhattan, not "Dallas."

But, as you can tell, this thing is complicated. In fact, it's so complicated, it's almost an assault, and when you add in the creators' visual dynamism, their tendency to throw a joke into every dead space, and general pace of the thing, your brain could approach synaptic anarchy. It might have to contain a warning—not the "flashing lights" one, but the "do not see while pregnant" "may cause seizures" "do not see if allergic to spiders" warnings on TV (or movie, for that matter) pharmaceutical commercials.

I'm just saying that the experience is in-to-the-tense, and not for the faint of heart or the faint of sight. It is a certainty that one is going to miss a lot on the first viewing in a theater, and although it sounds heretical for me to say, I think that both Across the Spider-verse and its predecessor are more intended (by their creators) for repeat-viewing by disc or streaming than in the theater (although one can't discount the level of detail that can one can appreciate in the massive viewing experience**). I say that reluctantly, as I think the theater experience for watching a film can't be topped, despite noisy neighbors, restless kids, and rattling food-wrappers.***

So...I say "go." Guardedly. Just don't come back in the comments section blaming me for the migraine or PTS-ADHD or the adrenal jitters—or your "spidey-sense" on over-tingle—as a result of seeing this (my reaction was to crave a hamburger). Blame it on the tangled web woven by Spider-Man: Across the Spider-verse.

 

 As usual, with these animated sorts of things, I just have to share some frames from the film 

that just stuck out at me as particularly beautiful and that I didn't have room for in the text.

*...and one of the best super-hero movies ever.

 

** I saw it in XD, which was impressive, especially if one is appreciating things like the weave in Miles' Spidey-mask, or the half-tone shading of colors simulating the look of old comic-books.

*** Oh. And Maria Menounos. She really annoys me.

Eternals

You Don't Know Jack

or

The Marvelization of Chloé Zhao!!

 

Jack Kirby was "The King" of comics. That's what Stan Lee called him, anyway—and the two had their disagreements over the years. But, Kirby's influence in the funny-books from the 40's on towards infinity was immense, preceding anything Lee did. Marvel Comics, as we know it, flowed from Kirby's drawing table and legitimately his draftsmanship could be called the "soul" of that comics line, becoming its "house style". I could list the comics series and characters he created, but the list is long and there are other places you could find that information, and this is about a movie version of one of his creations, rather than some obligatory mention of its origins (which I seem to be doing, anyway). 

 

So...briefly...this is that. In the 1970's Kirby left Marvel to go over to the DC comics line—Superman, Batman—and wrote and drew "The New Gods", a series of books joined by a singular history that had nothing to do with Krypton or anything associated with DC's previous output.* The books were canceled at some point (but the characters retained) and Kirby went back to Marvel and did something somewhat similar for them, writing and drawing "The Eternals."

Marvel Studios has now made a film of the Kirby creation, Eternals, and it has a hard duty to fulfill. Kirby basically took the 2001 story-line—he did a comics adaptation of the film that same year—of an extra-terrestrial "god"—called "The Celestials"—who create two off-shoots of primitive life on Earth, homo immortalis ("The Eternals") and homo descendus ("Deviants"). The Eternals defend the nascent humans from the Deviants in order that humanity evolves into a kinder, gentler race where everybody just gets along. It's going to be a long wait, but The Eternals, borrowing Starfleet's Prime Directive, are beholden to not interfering with human history and just defending us mere mortals. That's the gist. The mythos has expanded and gotten wildly complicated since the series debut in 1976.

Eternals doesn't make it any less complicated, but they do put a different spin on it, giving it a couple of Mobius twists that have less to do with the comics and more with basic cosmology and energy equations. That comes up later, but the main thing for movie-viewers to know is that in the year 5000 B.C. ten Eternals come to Earth at the behest of the Celestial Arishem (The Judge) to fight Deviants to protect human evolution. They are (bear with me): Ajak (Salma Hayek) a healer, Ikarus (Richard Madden), with super-strength and heat-vision, Sersi (Gemma Chan) a matter-manipulator, Thena (Angelina Jolie) a warrior who can make any weapon out of cosmic energy, Kingo (Kumail Nanjiani) who can project energy projectiles, Gilgamesh (Don Lee) the strongest fighter, Druig (Barry Keoghan) who can manipulate minds, Sprite (Lia McHugh) a projectionist, Makkari (Lauren Ridloff) who's fast, and Phastos (Bryan Tyree Henry) a weapons and technology expert.

That's a lot of people to introduce in 2 hours, 37 minutes and one can look at them and go "Well, he's Superman and she's Wonder Woman and she's the Flash" and the rest have a lot of left-over powers—in fact, this Marvel movie pays lip-service to Batman's butler and Clark Kent, which is odd (I mean, they're so daaaark!)—but the basics are that over seven millennia they build up a lot of resentment towards the slow evolutionary process of mankind and they have a tendency to rebel and go their own ways. As the movie shows, that's not necessarily a bad thing, and given the proclivity of meat-puppets to do stupid stuff, one could hardly blame an eternal for self-imposed exile or discretionary mind-control.

Now, Eternals writer-director Chloé Zhao just won the Best Director Oscar for Nomadland (deservedly, I thought), and the nuance of that film, the story-telling through images, the lived-in feeling of the performances...and pretty much absent in this movie. Okay, there is some location shooting with battles out in the open instead of a disguised green-screen, but we've seen this before as the Marvel movies have been moving out of the standard New York locations since the second Iron Man movie. Performances are fine, but run the gamut of slipping dialects to "I've-got-to-take-this-garbage-very-seriously" earnestness. One gets the impression that there might be a four to five hour version of the thing because some of the transitions and montage sequences seem a bit disjointed. One says this advisedly as one realizes that the bar for audience satisfaction for these things is an action sequence every ten minutes.

For all the effort, and the obvious attempt to extend the scope of the Marvel Studio output and to make it a more inclusive film—despite stepping on some embarrassing tropes along the way—one has to say that it is considerably less than an involving experience. For all the cosmology bandied about (and it's about 5% of the "woo-woo" Kirby was capable of conveying) it comes down to trying to sell the concept that our Pale Blue Dot amounts to a hill of beans in a limitless, roiling expanse of space-time. I wasn't buying it, even if I was supposed to be rooting for Our Team. The motivations are too random and unearned...or even very well articulated. Given what has happened previously in the MCEU, I suspect that this is all some positioning of structural rebar for a bigger story to be revealed later throughout "Phase IV" of the studio's game-plan. But, at this point, I'm searching for a reason to care and I simply don't.

* Kirby's ink-stained fingerprints are all over comic-based movies—I mean, Thor, Hulk, Cap'—but the first time one of his wholly creator-acknowledged creations was realized on-screen was the character Steppenwolf in Justice League (and also Darkseid, DeSaad and Granny Goodness in Zack Snyder's Justice League).

Godzilla vs. Kong (2021)

We're Off to See The Lizard, the Marvelized Version of Kong

or

Four-Walling in the Time of Covid

Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures have been making their own version of superhero movies for the past few years, starting with Godzilla in 2014, followed by Kong:Skull Island, and Godzilla: King of Monsters. The last movie teased a battle between the two movie-title monsters, now in the "Monarch" Monsterverse, referred to as "Titans" who usually hang out in the Hollow Earth, until we do something stupid to bring 'em out in the open. 

Personally, I think what brought out these movies was Guillermo del Toro's 2013 film of Pacific Rim, where he channeled his love of big monsters duking it out in big modern—vulnerable—cities. The filmed from a cell-phone version of Cloverfield (2008) might have had something to that...inspired as it is by Bong Joon Ho's The Host (2006) and Peter Jackson's remake of King Kong (2005). All that chance to use modern computer graphics and psuedo-technology to make a movie about big monsters fighting appeals to the child (and WWF fan) in all of us. If they didn't make money, they'd disappear into the sea with the setting sun— like Godzilla, but without the buzz-headache from hitting electrical lines.

So, here comes Godzilla vs. Kong, the mash-up of the two tent-poles in the "Monarch" Monsterverse, and "The Top of the Ticket" if one were to see this as an evening of boxing. It is a goofy affair, mixing up traditions of the earlier Toho films (with a much larger scale), a little Jules Verne mixed in for exotica, and a little "zhuzh" from the Marvel Universe to add merchandisable personality, and to keep the fights from seeming like endless slugfests. It also leeches any identifiable humanity out of its story, and, for that matter, The Earth, relegating people to "slow natives" status, and "chutes and ladders" to connect the big fights (of which there are four).

The film has four primary locations: Skull Island—home of King Kong—which is now encircled by a force-field enclosing the "King of the Beasts" from wandering into people's neighborhoods and eating their houses; Pensacola, Florida, where the APEX corporation is engineering A.I. technology with advanced robotics; the Antarctic, where a Monarch research station has made a foray into the "Hollow Earth" deep in the Earth (but wouldn't Skull Island be a more logical entryway, since that's where these beasties have come from?); and Hong Kong, where APEX has a vast engineering facility. With me so far? Good, because you'll get lost soon enough.

At Skull Island, Kong is being studied by Dr. Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall), the so-called "Kong Whisperer" who's a bit like Dian Fossey, except that her studies of The Big Guy are facilitated with the help of a native Iwi girl named Jia (Kaylee Hottle), a deaf-mute who can communicate with Kong. She is (evidently) the last Iwi tribesperson, her parents and everybody else being reduced to Skull-walker fodder or Kong toe-jam. Dr. Andrews has adopted the girl, and, as such, the whole movie would make damning evidence at a Child Welfare hearing.

She is approached by Dr. Nathan Lind (Alexander Skarsgård), a former Monarch scientist, and developer of the "Hollow Earth" theory (which conjectures that the Earth doesn't have a core so much as a hollow center, like a chocolate bunny, from whence all the "Titans" have emerged, and evidently has never heard of the term "lava". As we get to witness (sort of) Godzilla has gone "rogue" and attacked the APEX facility in Pensacola, and Lind asks Andrews to use Kong to get a powerful energy source that emanates from the Hollow Earth to use as a weapon against The Lizard, should he ever show up and attack again. "Sounds nuts, Nathan. Even for you," she counters and then agrees to take Kong and Jia, and shackle him to a transport for a trip to Antarctica. "I regret this already," she rehearses for her trial. But, not as much as she's gonna regret it.

What caused Godzilla to attack the APEX plant is unknown to the public, but it might have something to do with a power source that is being developed there under the jurisdiction of its CEO, the laughably hissable Walter Simmons (Demián Bechir), and it is he who has recruited Lind to find and contain the "Hollow Earth" "life force" because A) they can use it against Godzilla unless he wants to exert his "cancel culture" privileges on APEX, and B) he can use it to (dare I say it?) RULE THE WORLD. Elon Musk would have started a travel agency to "Hollow Earth" but, no, Simmons wants all the power he can, and he's not going to stop at voter suppression.

This is all suspected by wackadoodle conspiracy pod-caster (and former APEX employee) Bernie Hayes (Bryan Tyree Henry) who was stealing APEX secrets at the time of Godzilla's attack, and he has a big fan in Madison Russell (Millie Bobby Brown) who has seen Godzilla up-close (in King of the Monsters) and happens to have a Dad (Kyle Chandler) who's a research scientist—he invented the ORCA device in King of the Monsters—and a Mom who was killed by Godzilla in the same movie. But, she doesn't hold a grudge; she and school-pal Josh Valentine (Julian Dennison) steal his brother's van and seek out Bernie to help him in his investigations, looking for clues in the rubble of APEX. What they find is that APEX has another site in Hong Kong and faster than you can say "convenient plot contrivance" they find a convenient plot conveyance to get them to Hong Kong.

The doctors manage to get Kong to Antarctica, but not before the first of the battles between Kong and Godzilla, this time using Navy ships as both weapons and foot-falls, and to avoid any more meetings—Andrews keeps coming up with these little factoids ("Kong bows to no one," There can't be two Alpha Titans," "They have an ancient rivalry") like she was simultaneously Kong's promoter and ring-announcer, even though, she has as much knowledge (or psychological understanding) as the crazy podcaster does. They helicopter a sleeping Kong to Antarctica—Helicopters aren't all that good at high-altitude, cold mountain rescues, and their flights are under heavy restrictions in Antarctica, but, by this time, I've already thrown away any high expectations as dubious and abandoned my skepticism. It couldn't have come at a better time, as at that point, Kong, the docs and the kid with a bunch of APEX merc's all take a trip down the biggest rabbit-hole in the world and arrive at Hollow Earth...no molten core, no crushing pressure...it's a prehistoric paradise with a rocky ceiling for a sky.

And that's about where my "sense of wonder" died. The "Godzilla" have a rich history of fantasy, quirkiness and camp kitsch, evolving from a fantastical cautionary tale of messing with the ecological balance of Nature into forays of adolescent giddiness. This one is in the latter camp. The monster battles are CGI wonders—if one doesn't wonder about casualties—and even have their own humor imagining these behemoths planting haymakers like pugilists and slamming skulls into buildings like overgrown children doing battle in a room full of furniture. It's semi-amusing, even when one questions why the CGI department hedged on putting an atmospheric haze on distant objects, making the cityscapes look like actual models—of the type the Toho studios used to throw around their guys in rubber suits—and simultaneously paying homage to the past, while compromising their attempts at photorealism.

They're the "draw" of the movie, certainly the uninspired script isn't, with its undeserved aphorisms and its pointless reaction-jolts ("Oh, this doesn't look good!"), its transitions that happen just because they have to (how does Chandler's Dr. Russell get from Florida to Hong Kong so fast?) and techno-schtick without even an attempt at trying to explain what the hell is happening and why (besides "this is a science beyond our understanding"). What would be the point? One more haymaker or body-slam and it concusses right out of your mind.

And they give Kong a big glowing axe. Any reason besides Thor-identification? I couldn't see any. Godzilla can atomic breath a hole through the Earth's crust into Hollow World? News to me. And I'm still trying to wrap my mind around there being sunlight in "Hollow World" in the center of the Earth. But, the biggest question I have is...in the midst of a pandemic, THIS is the movie Warner Brothers decided to "four-wall" on multiple-plex screens? Whoever thought that up has cajones bigger than Kong's!

The actors are brave, saying their lines and keeping straight faces. But, they're completely unnecessary to this enterprise, as worthless as story-logic, and regarded just as less. They're mere grout—no, less than that, spackle to cover up holes in the fight-fest. They might as well be Ring girls holding up "Round" signs, filling up time between bells. The lack of character motivation except the cartoon variety indicates that in our entertainment, the beasts have won. With all the ruckus and rumble, who needs human beings?