Spider-Man: Crossing the Multiverse may be less compact and lean than the first, but it multiplies the scale, complexity and ambition of its canvas in such a way that what it offers is an earthquake to the narrative possibilities of the medium, only animated. but cinematographic. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it in the cinema and this is something positivebut at the same time what it offers pushes the consequences of the collective attention deficit to the limit.
There are two ways to watch the movie. As a stand-alone piece, as a whole, it has some ups and downs. As a cinematographic proposal, it achieves things that I think have never been done at this level of narration. sequential in the history of cinema. It is a great leap and represents a break in harmony with the demands of an audience that is no longer served by a simple linear story and without enough rudder changes. Spectacle cinema begins to resemble a roller coaster and the adrenaline and dopamine demand new limits of tolerance.
The unusual thing about ‘Spiderverso’ is not the gimmick of the crossover, but how each drawing style associated with each Spider-man featured is incorporated into the visual language of the film, with which a whole explosion of techniques ends up developing a schizophrenic but coherent grammar that blurs the line between comics and cinema. It is something so careful and planned that it seems difficult for a human team to have been able to organize everything with such precision. Style changes for milliseconds, background information, movements towards the camera that cross the screen and come out from another perspective… it’s inexhaustible.
In addition, the idea of the cameo as a graceless resource, here goes from nostalgia recognizable by different generations to the erudition of the legacy of the same character, perhaps working at a level that is too meta to not age prematurely, but always full of comic book energy, confirming something that the success of the MCU has shown in the last 15 years: superhero cinema is the perfect excuse to expand the limits of expression of technique, of put the effects at the service of the story and not the other way around, because they are necessary for any movement of the characters.
The excuse of the multiverses
‘Spiderverso’ does it with amazing creativity, always inspired and fresh. There’s comic timing, there’s a sense of wonder, energy, action, and also an aesthetic taste not necessarily related to recent animation. Backgrounds painted in watercolor, traces of sketch present in the movement, mark of graphite, ink, and almost experimental representation that convert their two hours is almost an artistic thesis of the possibilities of animation that encourage to finally abandon the 3D heritage Pixar. There is progress and the desire to split pears with the tyranny of photorealistic textures.
However, that variety of techniques also confirms that the last frontier of the genre is the multiverses. The state of superhero cinema right now is the phase “Monster Mash”or otherwise called, the ““Ready Player One Syndrome”, the crossover, the unexpected, the fall of barriers that work based on accumulation. The tutti frutti. Therefore, the diversity of spider-men in ‘Spiderverso’ broadens and at the same time limits the canvas of the possibilities of the film to cameos and surprise appearances.
That’s something we saw in Spielberg’s film, but it’s also the basis of Marvel’s success, managing to make films in parallel to be able to offer a great climax where they assault the viewer with recognizable elements. whatNo one is surprised that after its best creative cycle, the company has resorted to the plot of the multiverse?. We’ve had the ‘Doctor Strange 2’ movie, ‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’ and ‘The Flash’ is about to come to complete the cycle. It is no longer the movie of ‘The Flash’, but that of Supergirl, the old Batman and the current one.
A rush of creativity on a strobe level
This happens even outside of superhero movies, there we have the success of ‘Everything at once everywhere’. But although this ‘Spiderverso’ lacks resources “to point the finger at the screen”, the diversity of characters fulfills a function, and in addition to being a rendition of everything that makes the character special (it doesn’t matter what costume he wears in different universes) is not a trick but a true sci-fi paradox that confirms the attention to detail of a more than remarkable film. However, the dilemma that arises is even noticeable in the development of the film itself.
The scenes of action and fun are so intense and full of information that a withdrawal syndrome is created in their dramatic valleys. It is true that in themselves they are a little too long for what they count, but they should not be a drag. The film itself accustoms us to a dynamic that turns against it in the moments in which he wants to tell something. Its panache of lights, colors, flashback inserts, labels that appear and disappear, changes in perspective and mutating shots go to the sound of a jukebox full of songs that jump from one to another bordering on cacophony. You leave the cinema exhausted.
However, directors Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers and Justin Thompson play on the edge of embarrassment and keep the beast under control for two hours and twenty that do not become spectacular at any time, although epileptics should be careful before viewing it. It’s a refinement of editing techniques that Michael Bay introduced in his ‘Transformers’ saga, in which so much happened in such a short time that it was impossible to remember anything. In ‘Spiderverso’ everything can be discerned at all times, but despite everything, the feeling of saturation cannot be avoided.
Frantic cinema for frenzied times
This flood of information, of changes, of jumps and colors is not an isolated event, but rather it responds to the same bottleneck that cameos and crossovers find themselves in. Society walks hand in hand with overdose. Devices, platforms, movies, memes, bands, video games, singers, series, applications, passwords, channels, the media, streamers, and above all, social networks that offer this information in video microdoses that jump from one to another competing for our interest, measuring it based on how many tenths of a second it took you to drag your finger to see the next one.
And no, that you can process all this is not a generational issue, it has nothing to do with being young or old, but rather the moment in which you have gotten used to those doses. Science has shown that the cascade of social media posts and videos causes changes in neurotransmitters such as oxytocin, adrenaline, dopamine or serotonin and this is actively transforming our brainbut this process takes place both in adolescents who cannot get away from their tablet, and in mothers who, after scolding them, jump from Instagram to WhatsApp while watching a movie.
The language of ‘Spiderman. Crossing the multiverse’ is a culmination of that predisposition to the vertiginous that marks the metronome of noise and It’s not their fault whether or not your brain is ready for that storm of microsecond-connected events. It’s not an antidote, but just an adequate amount to make up for the attention deficit that makes many people find boring movies with a precise rhythm that doesn’t need to dump lines and gags every minute. It is an ode to hyperactivity, and a symptom of the difficulty of classic cinema cadences to get back on the liana. The problem is that if the future of cinema has that speed, there will be no way to speed up the engine and more than spectators, we will be polydrug addicts of image and sound.
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