Patreon Pin Up 11/27/23: Rio Morales (Patreon)

Movie Rio beats Game Rio in this month's Discord Poll! Having both played Insomniac's Spider-Man 2 and finally watched Across the Spiderverse recently, I feel I was well overdue for a Rio pic. I'm going to talk about the movie a bit here. I'll keep it relatively spoiler-free but I am going to reference a scene or two if you'd prefer to go in blind. 

Put simply, Across the Spiderverse is my new favorite movie. I complain a lot about modern movies being too long, but I'd complain less if they were all paced so well. Every frame of this thing is a crazy work of art, and is a stark reminder of why so many animated movies since the first film have been trying to ape this style. Soundtrack-wise this one lacks a stand-out banger quite like "Sunflower" was for the original. But one of my favorite scenes, a web-swing between Miles and Gwen, has a song called "Mona Lisa" by Dominic Fike that has been stuck in my head all weekend.

I may be imagining this but I think Rio here had a stronger presence in the sequel as well. My other favorite scene is one where she totally cockblocks Miles as a not-so-passive-aggressive mom when he's having a moment with Gwen. It's fun stuff. The whole movie nails the little character bits well. 

So did you see it? What did you think? Was it better than the original? Are you, like me, bummed that the entire spider-load has been blown in 2023? Because it takes ten years to make a new video game now and the next Spiderverse movie was delayed indefinitely? Let me know in the comments!