SPIDER-MAN: Across the Spider-Verse (2023) is a disappointing sequel to Into the Multiverse, partly because it’s way longer than it needs to be: almost two and a half hours, and even then it’s continued in a part two (which I did not expect, having carefully avoided spoilers). We open with Spider-Gwen struggling with her guilt over Peter’s death and her cop father’s determination to bring in the Spider-Woman. Then she’s recruited by Miguel O’Hara, the Spider-Man of 2099 (as you can see from the Rick Leonardi cover, a real comics character, from when Marvel tried a bunch of future-set books in the 1990s) who maintains a legion of multiversal spider-people struggling to keep the destiny of all their counterparts from going off the rails.
Then we have Miles Morales as the “Brooklyn Spider-Man,” still missing Gwen and dealing with the Spot, a dimension-warping villain who insists he’s Miles’ nemesis. Needless to say, Miles soon meets up with the multiversals (including a black, pregnant version of the Jessica Drew Spider-Woman) but things go increasingly off the rails: Miguel is convinced every Spider-Hero has to endure a tragedy and preventing that will lead to entire worlds falling apart. If Miles refuses to let the Spot kill his father well, Miguel’s going to restrain him until it happens (in a side-note, Peter’s tragedy is the death of Gwen’s father Captain Stacey rather than Uncle Ben)!
Visually and in the array of spider-counterparts, this was nowhere near as good as the first film. The opening with Gwen feels padded with backstory, which is more annoying given the running time. And the ending feels really off — it seems they could wrap everything up in 40 minutes or so, not another movie. I still had fun, but it’s flawed fun.“In every other universe, Gwen Stacey falls for Spider-Man — and in every other universe, it doesn’t end well.”
Howard Hawks’ THE CROWD ROARS (1932) stars Jimmy Cagney as an ace race-car driver, Eric Linden as the brother who follows him into the sport, Ann Dvorak as the woman who can’t stop loving that no good man of hers and Joan Blondell breaking up the brothers when Cagney can’t accept that she’s good enough for Linden. This suffers from Linden, who’s too much the Aw Shucks innocent to keep up with the others; it’s also hurt by missing about 15 minutes of footage, so that Cagney helping Linden win the race at the climax seems to come out of nowhere.
STALKER (1979) is the tormented guide who leads a scientist and a writer into the mysterious Zone in Andrei Tarkovsky’s three-hour drama, with the end goal a mysterious Room where your deepest desire will be made manifest (reminding me a lot of Brackett’s “The Moon That Vanished.”). This has occasional striking visuals due to the Zone’s reality warping (a narrow, flooded tunnel for one guy becomes a wide, sand-piled chamber for the next) and some clever ideas (“It’s impossible to use the Room to reorder society — that’s not about desire but about your understanding of complex systems.”). Unfortunately it ends up being ultra talky and pretentiously pessimistic as the travelers declare there is no point to attempting to achieve their fondest wish — very Russian, sure, but also very much a Twilight Zone episode stretched out to an absurd length. “I dig for the truth but while I do something happens to it.”
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