Across the Spider-Verse is a cinematic miracle that is breathless in its intensity.

I saw Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse on Monday evening with friends. The entire time I watched it, I was kind of flabbergasted that this thing had a script...that writers put all of this together and managed to make it a cohesive story. Before I get to deep into the details though, here is your one and only Spoiler Warning.

There's so much pause worthy stuff in Across the Spider-Verse, that it is honestly difficult to describe. For example, there are thousands of Spider-Man alts in HQ, a world where the primary Spider-Man is a technological and really muscular future version that is probably based on the 2099 Spider-Man comic book. Or it may just be the animation style that makes adult men bigger and bulkier, so that teen "Miles Morales" can be seen as sveldt and gangly. It's also easy to miss lines in this feature as there is so much animation and the dialogue pretty much never stops.

Spider Gwen's world looks as if colored by pastels...kinda like one that was envisioned by Monet (famous watercolor artist). At times you can even see the paint running downward on the walls (or what looks like paint). Miles Morales's world looks kinda claymation-like. You also see a Lego world and spend some time there. And then there are papery worlds where the heroes look like they are drawn on newspaper and the others are interacting with them as if this was just fine. The HQ world looked (to me) heavily inspired by Alex Ross if not outright drawn by him. That just looked pretty darn amazing. But in the world clearly inspired by Indian culture, we did not get a Bollywood dance number...so that was my one vocal disappointment that I expressed to my friends who attended the movie with me.

What else can I say about this film? This is a film where you can get easily distracted. By the time it finished with its "to be continued" comic book panel, I had this dream-like feeling because I felt a bit overwhelmed. How they (Sony) pulled this off and pulled it off in such a spectacular manner is pure cinematic wizardry. However, I do have a few complaints.

The first is that it is utterly relentless at points that it just becomes a sensory overload. It's difficult to suss out exactly why certain moments are important until they are literally explained to you in HQ, and the whole plot begins to make sense. But that sensory overload lasts for quite a while, and it made me (at least) very cognizant of this shows incredible runtime (which is I think something near 150 minutes). This is a long time to stay seated in an animated feature (any film really). And then my second complaint is that (despite this huge runtime), it is not a finished story. It only barely gets started on its huge plot...to basically prevent the annihilation of Miles's world as a result of his meddling with what is called "a Canon point" in the Spider-Verse timeline. But Miles himself is an anomaly (I guess), so maybe the rules might end up being different for him as he rebels against what he's being instructed to do (allow his dad to just die). I honestly have no idea how this thing is going to end, but I guess I'm invested now.

In some ways, this show feels a lot like the Matrix 2 and the Matrix 3 where we got so much more content than was in the original movie, and it just comes at you at a hundred miles per hour. Unlike those Matrix sequels, the animation and the story are better, but it still feels like the plot just grew into this enormous spectacle which (I guess) is necessary in order to tell a story that involves dozens of different versions of Earth and its spider people. 

So here's my question to you: anyone else see this thing? If so, what did you think?