Across The Spider-verse

After my glowing review of “Into The Spiderverse” I was very much looking forward to the sequel.

Movie Showcase: Into The Spider-verse

The rating on IMDb was high—it’s currently 8.8—but I should have remembered that this is usually the case for “blockbuster” films, and actually read some reviews. Oh dear.

The Good

The amazing visual style of the first movie is back—and even a little improved. The story hops between “dimensions”, giving the artists a chance to play; and in some segments they are spectacularly successful.

The one criticism I have in this department is that the device of dropping incidental text into the frame—comic book style—is not used as much as in the first movie. That’s a shame; I like it. It still works well when it is used.

The Bad

The movie is not, actually, a story: it’s the first part of a story, and does not have enough plot to support the run time. That completely kills the pacing. The first hour of the movie is boring; it gets interesting in the last hour, then it just stops.

I highly recommend waiting for the next movie to be released before deciding whether to watch.

The Ugly

“Across The Spiderverse” suffers from a common “hero sequel” problem: having concluded the “zero to hero” arc in the first movie, how do you get the audience interested again? How do you create tension?

It recalls, and I really hate to say this, the second Matrix movie. Having established Neo as a superpower to be reckoned with in the first movie, the second movie started by showing him as fallible and confused, and ended up simply making him unlikable and confusing.

We get the same here: our protagonist, Miles Morales, is shown being a not-so-great superhero. Are we supposed to care? It’s not clear why.

Wrapup

There are some great plot points, even if they take too long to land; if the sequel is good it could be a good story, and the two movies edited together to fix the pacing could be a great movie.

Avoid for now.

IMDb Rant

Once again it seems most of the world can’t tell a good movie from a bad one.

I rewatched “Reservoir Dogs” recently. Now there is a movie that shows what the medium is capable of: every second of every scene is gripping, exciting, relevant, drives the characters.

I’m not saying every movie needs to be exactly that—but in a simple movie designed to entertain, an action movie or super hero movie, there is really no excuse for boring the audience.

Or maybe if most of the audience can’t tell, it doesn’t matter? Hmm.

Anyway, as for how to get the most out of the IMDb, I’ve found it works pretty well to scroll past the “ten out of ten” reviews until you get to the first few mixed reviews. That’ll tell you what you want to know.

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