Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse brings epically inventive visuals to part two of the animated trilogy

No superhero has enjoyed as many 21st-century screen incarnations as Spider-Man – a testament, perhaps, to the studio machine in cynically regenerative overdrive, but also to the universal, anyone-can-be-a-hero appeal of the teenage web-slinger, the most enduring comic book movie icon this side of Batman. Spidey's elastic appeal was best captured in 2018's Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, the Oscar-winning animated hit that added Spider-women, spider-pigs and even more Spider-men to an already crowded mix, all while unleashing the reality-bending possibilities of the Multiverse – a concept that quickly became a stock device driving Marvel's lucrative fan service. "Let's do things differently this time – so differently, " announces Gwen Stacy, aka Multiverse Spider-Woman, her asymmetrical mood-ring hair, aquamarine Chuck Taylors and no-nonsense voiceover setting the tone. In the colourful, mash-up metropolis Mumbattan, there's an impossibly dreamy Indian Spider-Man, while a cartoonishly grimy British world yields a Cockney rhyming Spider-Punk, who moves like jagged, DIY collage animation and spits cringey lines like, "It's a metaphor for capitalism." "So, we're just supposed to let people die because some algorithm says to make it happen," Miles says at one point, questioning the need for the canonical death of Peter Parker's Uncle Ben – a core component in Spider-Man lore, without which there would be no hero.