"Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse". Bowness Royalty Cinema.

Did Brian Michael Bendis and Sara Pichelli have any idea what they were starting when they innocently dreamed up Miles Morales in 2011? Their intention was to create a positive role model for children of colour in a Marvel Universe dominated by Middle-Aged Men In Lycra (except these particular MAMILs didn’t spend weekends hauling their skintight-clad paunches along country lanes on unnecessarily expensive bikes: they had epic battles with other, more evil, MAMILs instead).

What Bendis and Pichelli set in motion was a universe-bending series of unfortunate events that would forever change the status and significance of everyone’s favourite wall-crawler. He would never be your friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man again. He would be your amicably-unpredictable, dimension-and-universe-spanning Spider-Man instead. The reason for this was that Miles Morales didn’t fit into the Marvel Universe that already existed. So to accommodate him – to make his existence explicable – the whole thing had to buckle, twist, distort and expand. A different, parallel universe had to be created. Because of that, a different Spider-Man. Because of that (by logical extension) multiple universes, infinite universes, infinite Spider-Men. And all for the want of a nail.

In the comics this culminated in the multi-issue ‘Spider-Verse’ event, in which the being known as Morlun hauled his sorry vampiric ass from dimension to dimension in a thankless task to kill every single Spider-Man, one web at a time. I’d be astonished if Morlun doesn’t pop up very soon in the movies. In fact there is a passing reference to him in Across the Spider-Verse, when Gwen refers to having met a ‘Shakespeare Spider-Man’ (the character who becomes Morlun’s first victim in Dan Slott’s epic).

This ever-expanding maelstrom of self-referential multiverses is the comic-book equivalent of audio feedback: it just gets louder and louder as it goes round and round. And that’s what happens in Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse. This is Every Spider, Everywhere, All At Once. It’s gorgeous, complex, noisy and kaleidoscopic, exactly like one of the portals it frequently features. It’s an insanely wild ride, and as with all such extreme adventures, some will get off at the end screaming, ‘THAT WAS AWESOME!’ while others will creep off feeling nauseous and looking for a quiet place to lie down. Both responses are valid!

One thing I suspect we can all agree on though: the art in this film is simply stunning. It uses a multiverse of pallets, from watercolour to collage, live-action to wireframe sketches. And they are all bewitchingly beautiful. Some of the compositions, such as the scene where Miles and Gwen sit upside down watching the city at night, are breathtakingly cinematic. And the internal references to comic-book styling, like misaligned print effects or the interpolated bits of lettering, are both intelligent and satisfying. We’ve come a long way from the 1960s Batman show adding the word POW on screen. Now we have the Vulture as a kind of Italian Renaissance figure whose wings flap forth curlicued notelets that would be at home on a Palladian architectural plan.

Another outstanding feature is the performance of Hailee Steinfeld as Gwen Stacy. Steinfeld may be in her late 20s but as teenage Gwen she rekindles the true grit that made her great in the first place, in the Coen Brothers’ post-Wayne Western.

But there’s one thing that underpins this entire film. It’s all about that overriding principle of popular culture: canon. In particular, it riffs on fans’ obsession over whether something is or isn’t canon.

The characters’ own concern over whether key events in the timeline fit with accepted canon dictates the entire narrative of this film. In fact breaking canon is depicted as a crime worthy of being ostracised by the super-hero community. This means that the obsession of fans actually becomes the subject matter of this film.

It’s a canny move by writers Phil Lord (back again after Into the Spider-Verse), Christopher Miller and Dave Callaham. Effectively the characters have become the readers and fans of their own adventures, seeking to control and criticise them, in the way that real fans do. And the violence they harbour for those who go off-canon is a super-hero-inflected version of the ire reserved by fans for those artists and writers who dare to step outside the artificial universe of Marvel in our own, only marginally more real, world. It’s a metatextual soup of self-referentiality, leavened by hitherto unknown levels of action, colour and animated insanity.

References fly past in this film, and there are whole websites devoted to enumerating and spotting them all. I was happy to glimpse Andrew Garfield again, and even more so to see a copy of Amazing Fantasy #15 (the comic that introduced Spider-Man to the world) floating past Miles’s head as he lay in bed. (If he had a copy of that lying around then he can’t be too badly off. Mint copies sell for over a million dollars.)

This would all be great if we could just hear it all and catch the dialogue. But there’s so much going on, so many people speaking all at once, with constant sound effects, music and visual spectacle, that it’s literally impossible to catch even half of what’s going on. I’ve never seen a film that more completely defines the notion of sensory overload. If you can, watch it with subtitles. It’s the only way. And when you’ve finished, you might like to watch the 1976 film recently voted greatest movie ever made, Jeanne Dielman. It includes a 15-minute-long shot of a woman sitting in a chair, just staring into space: the visual equivalent of a couple of paracetamols after Across the Spider-Verse.

At the end of the day, the canonical event that lies at the heart of this film is the other Stacy family death. Not the epoch-defining death of Gwen atop the George Washington Bridge (etched into the history of March 1973 just as immortally as that other monster release from the same month, Dark Side of the Moon); but the death, two years earlier, of Gwen’s father, Captain George Stacy. That’s the canonical event that Miles inadvertently messes with. What the characters don’t realise is that Marvel itself has messed with that event a lot more than Miles Morales ever could. It’s astonishing to think that the mingled horror and tenderness of that scene from Amazing Spider-Man #90 is bodied forth here in a cacophony of action and confusion. The original was powerful, plain and poignant. Here's what happened – in the canon: Spidey was fighting Doctor Octopus on top of a building. A crowd was watching below. Doc Ock dislodged some bricks. They fell towards a small child. The elderly Captain Stacy, despite being infirm and walking-stick-bound, threw himself through the air to save the boy, but was crushed by the bricks himself. As a guilt-wracked Spider-Man cradled his dying body, Captain Stacy said, It…It’s Gwen. After I’m gone, there’ll be no one to look after her. No one, Peter, except you. Spidey thinks, Peter! He… he called me Peter! Stacy continues, Be good to her, son. Be good to her. She loves you… so very much…

And with that he died. The simple revelation that he knew Spider-Man’s identity and never betrayed him added such a tender and resonant dimension to that tragic event, that I, as a fan, will never forget it. For all the fairground attraction of Spider-Man: Across the Multiverse, I don’t think it captures the significance of that one, little, perfect moment.