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 to do so: released in 2019, the dazzling, fantastic, ultra-touching first opus foreshadowed a second film that was just as excellent, if not better, both Spider-Man Next Generation had opened exciting aesthetic and dramatic paths.

But instead, we found ourselves in front of a kind of indigestible clip of 2h20, which embodies all that Marvel does worst in cinema.

Always moreever faster… at the expense of the characters and the scenario

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

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

However, it seems that Spiderman works on a principle reverse. The film gives the impression of having been made by a team whose only criterion was to hold in a reduced time a maximum of characters, visual universes, editing effects, music, jokes… whatever the cost. It’s as if the script had been improvised as the very last step, to try to give meaning and consistency to this visual, sonic and dramatic escalation… in vain.

Always more, at the same time, always faster. More than an adventure, the exploration of a world or the discovery of characters, this is what we remember after these 2h20. In fact, the film keeps to short-circuit himself. How to Successfully Follow a Story When No Plan does not exceed five seconds ? How to bond with characters when they do all the same jokespour out streams of speech interrupted and all end up quickly disappearing in favor of newcomers?

There where Spider-Man: Next Generation brilliantly exploited the extraordinary talent of his animators and his artists to take the Spider-Man franchise to a new world, younger, more popular, more multiverse-oriented, Across The Spider-Verse drowns in an escalation of artificial effects and prevents himselffinally, to tell 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 given to aesthetics and that devoted to writing to be compensated by good characters. Unfortunately, again, the film is running indigestible cacophony. Characters don’t have time for anything : neither to be funny, nor to be touching.

As in virtually every Marvel movie, the floodgates never stop, even when they are not not funny. Everyone is required to add a 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 made the joke. Sometimes even several characters make jokes at the same timeso that we do not hear them.

At several places in the film, we find a comic spring more significant than it seems. A character appears, begins to introduce oneself while epic or eerie music blares – but immediately he is interrupted by another character who responds to him, in essence “Keep it short, in fact, we don’t care. » A priori, we could see in these scenes a parody of those films in which the superhero or the supervillain appears declaiming his biography in a monologue, announcing how he is going to save (or destroy) the world.

But in this case, this motif says less about superhero movies than about the inability to Spiderman to assume to create its own characters. Bringing a new aesthetic to the film, cracking as many jokes as possible, kicking or kicking and to share out as fast as we arrived: these seem to be the watchwords for a character in 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 her deformed, moving body, white as a blank sheet and covered with anxiety-provoking holes, there was a boulevard to make “La Tâche” charismatic.

As for the question of inclusiveness, there too, we will come back. Certainly, in addition to Miles Morales and his Afro-descendant and Latino family, there is in the film a pregnant black woman, a British and anti-capitalist black man, an Indian Spider-Man… but what is the point of scrolling through a gallery of characters with different identities? plural when they suffer from the same writing faults as everyone else? On paper, it looks inclusive. For a film, it is not.

A strong visual identity… for a film without any bias

Paradoxically, Spiderman seems to bombard us with bias strong visuals and techniques, with a diversity of aesthetics renewing itself every five seconds… Yet, the film makes absolutely no choice.

In each scene, each attempt is aborted as quickly as it is proposed. A joke ? Let’s cancel it by immediately adding a reference to a tragic element of the past. A dramatic and emotional moment? Let’s short-circuit it right away with a valve… as bad as it is.

Ultimately, Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse is perfect for discovering what can be done with computers and graphics tablets. But to dive into the world of best of superheroesa captivating and rich story, villains who keep us up at night for years… we will just re-watch the Sam Raimi saga.

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