Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

 2018's Spider-man: Into the Spider-Verse set a high bar for any follow-up to clear. In purely aesthetical terms, its habit of smashing completely different artistic styles into each other with reckless abandon while still achieving a very distinct visual style has become extremely influential  (most notably in The Mitchells vs. The Machines or last year's Puss In Boots movie.)

 How could a sequel top that? Well... rather easily, as it turns out.

 As Spider-Woman/Gwen Stacey (Hailee Stanfeld) does the standard origins narration which the first film employed repeatedly with such great effect, she plays a drum solo. While the threads of her narration weave in and out between past events and the themes of the current movie, the imagery ranges far and wide with a ridiculous amount of invention and energy; it's an animation solo to accompany Stacey's playing, and a virtuoso one. And the good news is that this energy and level of invention never really lets up.

 The movie looks sumptuous. Production values, rhythms, technical execution, originality, everything;

Even as the storytelling starts following our characters - first Stacey, then Miles Morales (Shameik Moore), our actual protagonist, and the narrative gets a little more traditional, the film continues throwing curveballs and asides. It's DENSE: visual gags in the background, all sorts of inventive uses of superpowers, and an incredibly expressive use of the medium to communicate moods in magical surrealist ways where, say, the background can start looking like a Matisse painting while the characters have a heart-to-heart. Even when nothing crazy is going on, you still get very striking compositions and cool framing tricks.

 It looks good, is what I'm saying. Extremely so; The visuals, design and technical accomplishment are worth the price of admission alone, and is bound to reward multiple viewings.

 Gwen's prologue includes a (very funny!) confrontation with a renaissance-style Vulture (Jorma Taccone) who's been pulled in from a different dimension. It turns out that the exploding collider from the climax of the first film left some dimensional instabilities throughout the multiverse. Gwen is joined during the fight by another couple of Spider-people; Their leader Miguel (Oscar Isaac) has put together a sort of inter-dimensional police force, and begrudgingly accepts Gwen into the group.

 We then pick up things with Miles Morales pretty much where the previous movie left us: It's been a year, in which Miles has become the friendly neighborhood spiderman, his secret superhero life keeps getting him in hot water with his family (#Spider-person problems), and he misses his Spider-Friends. He has a confrontation with a rather hapless villain called, uh, Spot (Jason Schwartzman, very recognizable and very funny) whose power is basically throwing portals around, and blames Miles for his villainification - this whole thing may or may not be important later, you never know.

 Things start looking up for Miles for a while when Gwen comes calling. But she's actually there on business- to keep tabs on Spot, whom the interdimensional police consider a threat. Her quarry escapes while she's distracted hanging out with Miles, and when things inevitably escalate, Miles is dragged into all sorts of multiversal adventures.

 It's very much worth noting that it ends on a cliffhanger. It'll be completed with a third movie, hopefully within the next couple of years; This wouldn't be too bad - to be honest, it's got so much going on it feels justified - except that just this installment runs for almost two hours and a third. It doesn't feel interminable like some other recent superhero 'epics' -thanks to the mind-blowing visuals and a very busy script, mostly- but it does feel very flabby in a way the first one never did.

 That's not helped at all by the fact that its story is... it's just ok. It's a very modern superhero plot, by which I mean that in conventional terms it's kind of bad but pretty complex, and engages in all sorts of metatextual mindfuckery (a main plot point revolves around the fact that a certain type of heroic tragedy follows all Spider-people like a bad stink; They're playfully called Canon Points). I suspect the story will mostly resonate with comic nerds who have this shit internalized; It left me, as a nerd of a non-superhero denomination, pretty much cold.
It especially suffers in comparison to its prequel, which had a perfectly self-contained and much better crafted plot.

 Overall it succeeds, on a writing level, because the characters are still great and their emotional beats are fun and (mostly) feel true to them; And the script is full of constant laugh-out-loud gags, lines and situations, and facilitates great action set-pieces. There's a ton of cleverness and wit on display everywhere, and most importantly, it keeps the first movie's fundamental sweetness and good nature.

 As in with Spider-Man: No Way Home, sometimes that's enough. It doesn't completely dispel the sense, though, that it's all smoke and mirrors to distract us from the problems with its navel-gazing narrative.