journal features

movie review - Spider-Man Across The Spider-Verse

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Kokubunji, 2023.09.18

One complaint I have with these Spider-Man movies is that the titles are so similar that you can't tell which is which. What differentiates "Far From Home", "Homecoming", and "No Way Home"? What differentiates "Across the Spider-Verse" from "Into the Spider-Verse"?

Anyway, we watched this "Across the Spider-Verse". I think I'll be keeping this one short because when I noticed that a) we'd lost track of the villain for forty minutes and b) that there were only ten minutes left I also noticed that c) they weren't going to complete the story in the remaining run time and that d) I had largely stopped caring. This movie is quite a mess. There are three completing plot lines that are connected in only jumbled ways that see characters veering from one plot to another with confusing changes in motivation. The tone keeps screeching from save-the-world urgency to coming-of-age struggles to an Avengers-like struggle with fascism to - and this is literally introduced in the final minutes - an identity struggle as the main character runs into himself in another dimension. It all feels like one of those endless Japanese anime sequence where they draw out so man plot-lines over so much time that you can't possibly keep up.

Not recommended.

rand()m quote

On the endless saga of Rob Ford, mayor of Toronto; "It shouldn't have had to come to this. I'm so tired of getting up every morning and wondering, 'What will it be today?' I'm so tired of giving the benefit of the doubt again and again, only to be let down again and again.... Somewhere a responsible adult has to appear, draw a bright moral line, tell the truth and say unequivocally what won't be tolerated. Somebody has to do the right thing."

—Denzil Minnan-Wong