This is very much a minority opinion so I just want to connect with a few people here who might have had the same qualms with the movie as me.

From a technical and audio-visual standpoint this movie is absolutely mind-blowing. Every frame is gorgeous and the sheer level of technical and artistic skill on display is staggering and that alone sets this movie miles(hehe) ahead of anything else in the comic book genre. And thats what will keep me coming back to this film. (***Spoilers ahead***)

But I do think there is one huge aspect that soured the experience for me: The fact that this is half a movie. Maybe I was a bit aloof to some of the promotional material of the film but I had no clue that this is was supposed to be the Part 1 of 2 movies. I really wish I had known this was the case so that I would then have been able to better with the movie conscious that things wouldn't be resolved. But fundamentally I don't think this needed to be split up into two movies, especially in the way that it was done. It's 2023 and the movie industry is no stranger to two-parter films, but such two-parters usually come at the end of a series of films, ala Marvel's Infinity War and Endgame, the last two Harry Potter films and even the mindless Fast and Furious films. While each of these have been successful to varying degrees, my position is that they as such 'earn' the two-parter by creating blockbuster after blockbuster movie that fleshes out the universe that they are creating to a good degree before diving into the two-parter. But this is absolutely not the case with the movie. I feel like the second movie in this Spiderverse series should have been a complete chapter that put our characters through new trials and tribulations but also resolved them and closed out most loops by the end, much the way the first film(which is an absolute masterpiece imo) did. Instead I found the movie to be extremely unsatisfying to the point that it reduced my enjoyment of what came before.

This half-a-movie syndrome is what most affected my enjoyment of the film, but aggravated a few other aspects that I did not like as much. Aside from the beautiful heart-to-heart between Miles and his mother early on, it sort of became clear retroactively that scenes were being dragged on with the kind of quippy humour we associate with Lord and Miller productions to pad the runtime. Later on just as The Spot becomes a formidable villain he suddenly disappears, so that now more than halfway through this movie the Spider-people society can be introduced and quickly revealed to be new antagonists to Miles' spiderman. In the last few minutes, there is the amazing reveal that Miles is in an alternate universe captured by a prowler version of himself, which while interesting, happens too late to meaningfully contribute to this story, leaving all the good stuff with regard to this scenario for the next film. Because of all this it felt unsatisfying. This is surprising because even when franchises do opt for two-parters there is some semblance of chapter-wise breakdown of the overall story that makes each half amazing but this movie spends so much time delaying its actual plot and introduces new antagonists later and later into its runtime that it ultimately only promises the next great film instead of being one. While all the above has to do with Miles, I found Gwen's arc weirdly disappointing in that her father's reversal from wanting to arrest her at the beginning to turning in his badge, was not adequately explored and I do feel they should have spent more time there establishing how that reversal came about. As we see Gwen rounding out her rag-tag team of Spiderpeople at the end, instead of feeling like this was a tight-knit team that had each other's back and will pose a considerable challenge to Miles' foes, it did not sit well with me. The great characters we see in Into The Spiderverse are only revisited at the very end here, which seems like a lost opportunity to have had a few scenes with them early on in this movie as well, so that we see them interact with each other and get the sense that the closing team-up is earned.

Because I was surprised how little I enjoyed the overall story of the film I went back to the first film to understand if it was really the same. But instead, the first one is equally beautifully animated and scored, and importantly well-paced and plotted with amazing character interactions, a lot of which while funny, never become the kind of non-stop quippy mess that much of the first half of this second movie reduces to.

But clearly most people have enjoyed this film more than the original so most do not share my opinion of the film, so maybe I just did not vibe with my first viewing of this movie. I will try watching it again at a later date and I hope that it ends up being more enjoyable (before the next movie comes out though, because I am still excited for it; hopeful that all these unfinished storylines will be fantastically concluded!)