By Jensen McKey, Epic Charter Schools
“Across the Spider-Verse” was a highly anticipated film, which caused many people to inflate their expectations, and ultimately be disappointed.
The movie had amazing characters, including a “spider society” where different versions of Spider-Man/woman all interacted, and worked together to keep the spider verse from collapsing. There are thousands of characters in this movie, but the most notable are “Team Miles” and “Team Miguel.”
Team Miles includes Miles Morales, Gwen Stacy, Hobie Brown, Pavitr Prabhakar, Penni Parker, Peter B Parker, Spider Noir (Peter Parker) and Spider-Ham.
Miles’ World is designed in the classic comic OK style, with speech bubbles, word boxes and style lines. Miles’s main motivation in the movie is taking back his narrative, everyone is telling him that his life has to go a certain way, he has to do these things, that his dad has to die. Miles wants to take back his autonomy, when everyone he knows is telling him he has to just let his father die because they lost someone important to them, he says no. He says that he is going to save his dad, he is going to rebel.
That is what connects him to Hobie Brown. Hobie’s first appearance is him breaking down a barrier, he is a fascist antagonizing, protest staging, label-hating rebel. Hobie spends most of the movie with Miles, talking to him, trying to get him to think about what he’s getting into, beyond just “the secret spider society.” And then when Miguel turns against Miles, Hobie stays on his side, signaling to him how to break the forcefield, and then not participating in the chase, instead just dumping his watch and leaving.
Miles and Hobie are introduced by Gwen Stacy, Spider-Woman. We meet Gwen in the first film, but her character has been given more depth in this film. We get our first look at her world, which is made of watercolor, she bleeds into the world, the world bleeds into her.
Pavitr Prabhakar is one of my favorite characters in the movie. He is humorous, noble and only wants to help people, which is the basis of Spiderman. Pravitr is from a fictional city called Mumbatton, a cross between Mumbai and Manhattan. He helps Miles and Gwen find and fight the main villain of the film, The Spot. While doing so, his world’s Alchemex collapses, crashing into the other buildings. While this would normally mean deaths, this time Spider-Man was not alone. With the help of Miles, Gwen, and Hobie, he is able to save everyone, which means he saved no one.
The biggest part of Spider-Man/Woman is the fact that they keep losing people, and still remain calm, they still help people. The “Spider Gang” saving everyone destabilized the canon, which caused a giant black hole to be opened up in Pravitr’s world.
Team Miguel is Miguel O’Hara, a scientist turned vampire, who injects himself with spider venom to fight crime and protect people, Jessica Cruz, one of the many iterations of Spider-woman, and Ben Riley, a clone of Spider-Man, who was grown to fight him, but instead allies with him.
The movie ends with Gwen Stacy collecting people for a rescue team for Miles, who has just learned that he is an anomaly, something that is different, something that does not belong. The radioactive spider that bit him was never supposed to, it was supposed to bite the Miles Morales of a different world, who instead became the prowler.
The prowler who has captured him.
