Spider-Man Across the Spider-Verse Part 1

The Annoyance of Cliff-hangers

E. O. Milne

IF THIS MOVIE COULD BE DESCRIBED IN A SINGLE WORD, IT WOULD BE ‘FORESHADOWING.’ From the beginning of this wild plot, there were so many moments where I noticed coincidences from the first Spider-Man movie. For example, the music in the movie; the Miles Morales theme has the repeated group of notes, but if you play them backward, they play the theme of the Prowler. The Prowler was one of the main villains in the first movie, but the importance of the character in this movie takes shape in Miles himself. We uncover that the spider that bit Miles was never meant to be in his universe. The spider that breached the Multiverse came from another universe. However, its arrival in our universe resulted in the Spider-Man from the universe it originated from never existing. Consequently, while Miles became Spider-Man in his own world after the previous Spider-Man’s demise, the universe where the spider originated remained without its hero. This left that world vulnerable and exposed to the forces of evil.

This ponders the question: Was the Miles we know meant to become the Prowler? 

Moving on from that, the plot of this movie was everything the audience wanted. It had all our favourite versions making their way to or back to the screen of the beloved character. As well as having the idea of a spider society, a place where all the spider people could meet and tackle the breaches in the multiverse.

With this concept, if you’re invited to this place, you are given a wristband that enables you to enter another universe at will, without experiencing any glitches during the transfer. This solution effectively resolves all the problems presented in the first movie and indicates the vast potential for numerous possibilities in this second instalment.

Now although the plot of this movie was mainly based around the internal wars of the Spider-Verse, they did set up a greater villain for the second part of the movie known as Spot. This is a man who was genetically modified to have many spots all over him which are portals.

At the beginning of the movie, this character seemed to be a ‘side villain’. Someone that Miles would defeat before moving on to a greater rival. But due to Mile’s dismissal of this character’s authority, the scientist begins to experiment. He realises he can not only teleport to various places in the universe, but he can move between all the universes with ease. This means that as the plot carried on, the villain slowly became more powerful, and now at the end of the movie, we were left with the one thing I loathe most, a cliff-hanger.

With so many different stories happening at once by the end of this movie, we were not given the slightest idea of which way the stories were going to go. The writers built the tension up with questions like, is Miles going to save his dad? Is Spider-Man 2099 going to stop Miles? Are the Spider-people going to stop the Dot? Is the Miles version of Prowler going to kill our Miles?

The questions go on for so long and at the end of the movie, as the credits played, the looks and cries of the audience were a representation of the pain we all felt. As annoying as the questions were, it most definitely means that the second part of this movie is going to be worth the wait. Or at least we hope.