Overrated, Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse embodies what Marvel does worst in cinema

Before going to see Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, we tried to believe it with all our might. We had good reason for doing so: released in 2019, the dazzling, fantastic, moving first feature foreshadowed a second film as excellent, if not better, both Next Generation Spider-Man had opened exciting aesthetic and dramatic paths.

Instead, we were faced with sort of indigestible clip of 2h20, which embodies all that Marvel does worst in cinema.

More and more at the same time, faster and faster…at the expense of the characters and the script

We read this absolutely everywhere: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse East a visual and aesthetic bomb. The drawings, the animation, the choreography are great. This is undeniable. The film will delight anyone who wishes to delve into the visuals and design in larger quantities of all in Google Images. However, in a clip or trailer, this quality is enough to produce a memorable video. But it’s not enough to make a movie.

The formula is radical, yet. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse it almost seems the opposite of what a film should be. In theory, when you make a movie, we write a script and then we direct it. Which is to say that as a director we make choices aesthetics, plans, framing, editing, writing, dialogues, direct the actors… all these tools, these means of expression that cinema makes available to us tell a story.

However, it seems that Spiderman it works on one principle inversion. The film gives the impression that it was made by a team whose only criterion was contain in a short time a maximum of characters, visual universes, editing effects, music, jokes… whatever the cost. It’s like the script was improvised as a last step, try to give meaning and consistency to all this visual, aural and dramatic escalation… in vain.

More and more, at the same time, faster and faster. More than an adventure, the exploration of a world or the discovery of characters, this is what we remember after these 2h20. Indeed, the film continues short-circuit himself. How to successfully follow up on a story when there’s no plan does not exceed five seconds ? How to bond with characters when they do all the same jokesdeposit word streams discontinued and everything ends up disappearing quickly in favor of newcomers?

There where Spider-Man: New Generation brilliantly exploited his extraordinary talent entertainers and its artists take the Spider-Man franchise to a new world, younger, more popular, more multiverse-oriented, Through the Spider-Verse drowns in an escalation of artificial effects and prevents itselffinally, to say anything.

The first to drown in this avalanche of jokes and aesthetic effects are the characters

We would have liked this imbalance between the care of aesthetics and that dedicated to writing to be compensated for by the good characters. Unfortunately, once again, the movie is rolling indigestible cacophony. characters you have no time for anything : neither to be funny, nor to be moving.

As with virtually every Marvel film, the locks never stop, even when I’m not Not fun. All are required to add to comment to everything that happens, even in the most epic or tragic moments. This is so obvious that in many scenes, we don’t even know who pulled the prank. Sometimes even more characters make jokes at the same timeso that we don’t hear them.

At different points in the film we find a comic spring more significant than it seems. A character appears, it begins to show up as epic or haunting music plays – but he is immediately interrupted by another character who essentially answers him “Be brief, in fact, we are not interested. » A priori, we could see in these scenes a parody of those films in which the superhero or super-villain appears reciting his biography in a monologue, announcing how he will save (or destroy) the world.

But in this case, that motif says less about superhero movies than it does about the inability to Spiderman presume to create your own characters. If you’re a character: bring a new aesthetic to the film, make a joke, kick or two and Start as soon as you arrived. These seem to be the buzzwords at Marvel Studios.

As such, the villain alone sums up all the flaws of the film. “The Task” is both tragic but funny, grotesque but frightening, serious but unconvincing… so many contradictory aspects that in the end the character has no consistency. The mess is immense: with his deformed, moving body, white as a blank sheet and covered with holes that cause anxiety, there was an avenue to make “La Tâche” charismatic.

As for the issue of inclusiveness, we will come back to that as well. Of course, in addition to Miles Morales and his Afro-descendant and Latino family, in the film there is a pregnant black woman, a British and anti-capitalist black man, an Indian spider-man… but what’s the point of scrolling through a gallery of characters with different identities in the plural when they suffer from the same writing flaws as everyone else? On paper, it sounds inclusive. For a movie, it’s not.

A strong visual identity… for a film without prejudice

Paradoxically, Spiderman seems to bombard us with prejudice strong images and techniques, with a diversity of aesthetics that is renewed every five seconds… And yet, the film makes absolutely no choices.

In each scene, each attempt is stopped as quickly as it is proposed. A joke ? Let’s delete it by immediately adding a reference to a tragic element of the past. A dramatic and emotional moment? Let’s short it right away with a tube… ugly as that is.

Definitely, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse it’s perfect for finding out what you can do with computers and graphics tablets. But dive into the world of better than superheroesa gripping and rich story, villains that keep us up at night for years… we’ll just review the saga of Sam Raimi.

Do you like our articles? You will love our newsletters! Sign up for free on this page.