Review of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023) by Nkuk — 05 Jun 2023

After watching the movie twice, once in a Dolby cinema and the other IMAX I would rate the film a 9 overall. I thought the first movie was groundbreaking, inventive and tightly scripted. The first 20 minutes of the second movie is sublime, then the opening credits arrive and it's mostly more of the first movie dialed up to the max.

The pacing is a little uneven, the first film had a great flow but in this the pacing is overly slow in places and drawn out and frantic in others especially as it rushes to a cliffhanger ending. I wish they had finished the story in a single movie rather than going for the cash-grab route by kind of forcing people to watch the next movie to see the ending.

They could have finished the episode with better pacing, such as by chopping out the party scenes which were just repeating plot points that had already been made earlier. The sound in the IMAX screening was perfect, in the Dolby Atmos screening it was overly loud and caused some of the dialogue to be too be difficult to hear in places.

Full credit to the animators, they have created another visual masterpiece, with gorgeous design again elevating the medium to new levels, each world is unique yet they all feel cohesive. I rate the first film a perfect 10, this one with a tighter script and the whole story in a single film would have been a 10 again, but overall its not quite as good as the first.

I will definitely buy it on 4k UHD to watch at home again.