140 min | PG | June 2, 2023 | Columbia Pictures
Miles Morales is back, and so is every Spider-Person across the multiverse. A villain who can punch holes in reality threatens the whole web of worlds. The question is whether one kid gets to write his own story or follow the script everyone else insists on.
Miles Morales is the Spider-Man of Brooklyn, balancing high school, his parents, and a secret he cannot tell them. Gwen Stacy returns from her own dimension and pulls him into a society of Spider-People who police the multiverse. Their job is to protect the canon. Certain events must happen in every Spider-Man’s life, and the guardians believe breaking that pattern destroys worlds. The film is about a teenager who refuses to accept that his future is fixed. It is a story about destiny dressed up as a comic book.
Shameik Moore plays Miles with the restless energy of a kid who knows he is being underestimated. He gives the role both swagger and genuine hurt when the older heroes treat him as a mistake. Hailee Steinfeld plays Gwen with a guarded loneliness that anchors the emotional spine. Her scenes with her father carry the weight of a secret identity better than any action sequence. Oscar Isaac voices Miguel O’Hara as a grim authoritarian convinced that suffering is the price of order. Brian Tyree Henry and Luna Lauren Vélez make Miles’s parents feel like real people rather than obstacles, and the dinner-table conversations land harder than the chase scenes.
Directors Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson, working from a script by Phil Lord, Christopher Miller, and David Callaham, build each universe with its own visual grammar. Gwen’s dimension uses watercolor washes that shift hue with her mood, so the backgrounds bleed and reform as her feelings change. Miguel’s future city renders in sharp geometric reds while Mumbattan layers ornate detail on every frame. The film mixes frame rates and animation styles within single shots, letting characters from different worlds move at visibly different cadences. Jason Schwartzman voices The Spot as a comic nuisance who curdles into a real threat, and his black holes become a clean visual metaphor for a man erased from his own life.
The film is overwhelming by design, packing more ideas into a single sequence than most blockbusters manage in their entire length. It risks exhaustion and mostly avoids it because the emotional stakes stay personal. Miles wants to save his father, and every cosmic rule stands in his way. The story stops rather than ends, leaving its conflict open as the first half of a larger whole. That structure frustrates, but it does not undo the ambition or the craft that gets there.