Review: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Dan Slevin reviews the long awaited sequel to the animated smash hit superhero film from 2018.Some 21 years ago, Sam Raimi invented the 21st century superhero movie with Spider-Man, starring Tobey Maguire.I recall enjoying it at the time - for the most part - but feeling very disconcerted about the way the aerial scenes of Spidey web-slinging himself around Manhattan looked.I was old fashioned enough, even then, to think that the camera - even if there's no such things as a camera in a digitally created image like that - that the camera should be in a position that is vaguely physically plausible.In Raimi's Spider-Man, the camera swooped around the skies as much as Spidey himself, beautiful arcs through the spaces between buildings or across elevated train tracks, but I struggled with the lack of an anchor point - a point of view. I felt a little bit motion sick, to be honest, especially if I was close to the screen.I couldn't have imagined how 21 years on, the world would have changed.Compared with Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers and Justin K. Thompson's Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Raimi's version feels as a sedate as the Strauss Waltz sequence in 2001.I don't know if I'd call it the best movie of the year, but I would definitely describe it as the 'most' movie of the year. There's so much going on in every frame and in every bit of overlapping wisecracking dialogue.It's fun but exhausting.Five years ago, in Into the Spider-Verse, we were introduced to Brooklyn teenager Miles Morales (voiced by Shameik Moore), bitten by a radioactive spider and given strange powers - great power and great responsibility and all that.By the end of that film, Miles and the audience were aware of the infinite number of universes and the infinite number of pitfalls they present but the machine that allowed for travel between them had been destroyed and, now, Miles' only problem is keeping his superhero status secret from his doting parents.In the new film, Across the Spider-Verse, we open on a different version of Spider-Man, known in the comics as Spider-Gwen (with the voice of Hailee Steinfield).Gwen Stacy - Peter Parker's girlfriend in most of the stories - has been bitten by her own radioactive spider and been given all the powers.Wracked with guilt after failing to save the mortal Peter Parker in her universe - and struggling with that annoying inability to tell her father the truth of her identity - she takes up an offer to leave her universe and join the universe cops, all versions of Spider-Man dedicated to preserving the fabric of the multiverse…Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details