The Flash isn’t *complete* trash
There's a decent superhero character study wedged between the legacies of Batmen and Warner Bros. doing a victory lap
The Flash is a lot more entertaining than I expected it to be, but it still leans too hard on legacy. Further, it demonstrates a problem with all these multiverse movies in the ways they limit the infinite. Conceptually, alternate realities mean an infinite number of possibilities. But the plots of all these films lean on the idea of a certain right way things are supposed to go, using “fate” or, more baldly, “canon” as a story-bound explanation for studio and editorial directives. The limitlessness of spacetime is a window through which corporations pull their past products for reference but which otherwise is a mere obstacle to overcome to return to their existing world. Ergo, they’re so bored or tired of telling stories that advance a general plot through the development of character that the stakes have moved beyond saving loved ones, the neighborhood, the city, or even saving the world to saving alternate timelines. The irony here, of course, is that there hasn’t been another live-action Flash movie to be bored of.
The thematic cultural-political problem here is that predestination and predetermination, while sometimes useful story mechanisms, are not healthy ideas for children to over-imbibe, and these films are – at least hypothetically – for children. They’re not new ideas and they’re not limited to superhero movies, so be that as it may. On the other hand and more humorously, The Flash has a novel illustration of parallel realities even if, in practice, it’s pretty similar to the consensus of Across the Spider-Verse. Because this is WBD-DC’s first attempt at a multiverse on the big screen (echoing their television crossover event inspired by a different crossover event than what inspired this one, though Flashpoint was adapted for a cartoon movie) its coherence doesn’t depend on or isn’t impacted by how differently the logic worked elsewhere. That’s good. What’s bad is when these crossovers turn into a corporate victory lap. This is meaningless to the character and meaningless to a good deal of the audience, existing as head scratches and belly rubs for those of us in the know; we’re supposed to point and applaud, supposed to feel so overwhelmed by nostalgia that it overcomes our need for good storytelling. This works for some members of the audience; aside from one very good gag at the end that works on a meta level (and this is *all* very meta), I’m over it.
We’ve extended beyond connecting with relatively recent memory (excepting that today’s children and teens weren’t born when the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies came out) to Easter Eggs that use CGI to incorporate either decades-old film footage of dead and long-dead actors (which, again, feels back-patty at best and ghoulish at worst) or to synthesize a two minute clip from the sequel to a film that was supposed to happen but never came to pass (which feels like an obnoxious Easter Egg that, again, means nothing to the character and moreover feels like a poor use of the animation budget).
The computer-generated imagery is stretched too thin across the board. Some scenes fit very well – like those featuring Michael Shannon as Zod and Sasha Calle as Kara Zor-El/Supergirl. (For all the references, there’s still no “kneel before Zod,” and maybe I don’t even want it anymore.) Zod is menacing, Supergirl is compelling. It’s an excellent parallel recreation of the climax of Man of Steel. We’ll get back to the CGI but there’s some weirdness in the setting here – Kara is trapped in a Soviet containment facility in Siberia, in 2018. The last Keaton Batman movie came out in 1992, after the Soviet Union had already dissolved. So, the implication is that in that timeline the Soviet Union got back together in some intervening years. I’m sure it wasn’t considered deeply, it’s just odd to me that the Soviet Union remains a stock villain three decades after its fall when regular Russophobia seems to work just fine for most media.
In some cases, the limitations of CGI are forgivable because what’s being illustrated is far enough beyond the realm of human conception that it doesn’t fall into my personal uncanny valley. For instance, the time traveling reaches a near-approximation with what was happening toward the end of the original Doctor Strange, though drawn out longer. On the other hand, some of it just looks plain cartoonish. The Flash is generally visually stimulating, especially in the scenes showcasing the titular protagonist’s powers; they do a great job making him seem amazing, and generally kinetic. Superheroes should feel otherworldly and impossible, and that’s here. The Flash makes its protagonist formidable, as well, instead of just being guy that runs fast. But it also makes use of computer-generated people that don’t look like people and raise questions like “why didn’t they just animate this?” or “why don’t I just read a comic or watch a cartoon instead?”
What’s probably most annoying about this film is that Ezra Miller gives two compelling performances. They plays the Barry Allen of the DCEU and his younger alternate self very well, separating them enough through tone and attitude that it felt like bickering brothers or cousins from different backgrounds working together. This is the most annoying thing because Ezra Miller is a menace, a social nuisance, a tornado of a human being who most generally could be called an incredibly talented, misunderstood artist, and who much less generally should be in jail for a delirious rap sheet. Honestly, some of that stuff could be open to interpretation but the apocalyptic-messianic cult is a big flashing red light for me.
Also, the way Barrry Allen/The Flash runs looks really strange. There’s a physical joke for this, but no explanation.
Ben Affleck and Michael Keaton are both good Batmen, but you knew that before from the various films they played the characters in. The Flash leaning on Danny Elfman’s score felt cheap and was perhaps the most notable example of “don’t remind me of a better thing,” because besides being a throughline between Tim Burton’s excellent films and Joel Schumacher’s differently excellent films, this was also the theme for Batman: The Animated Series and the related movies, like theatrically-released Mask of the Phantasm and straight-to-VHS pictures like Sub-Zero. Therfore, there’s no shortage at all of better Batman-focused properties they’re indirectly referencing. The air of desperation also comes across in that, having failed to give Batman a proper solo outing before crossing him over with Superman in the DCEU and now relegating this universe to the garbage bin, the studio is trying to make up for lost time. Yet instead of fulfilling that promise by focusing on Affleck, the instinct is to go to 71-year-old Keaton and have all the combat animated. To their credit, the advertising warned of this.
Christina Hodson (writer of Birds of Prey, Bumblebee, and the upcoming Fast sequel, among other things) does what feels to me like a very solid job in making the film coherent. As aforementioned, this is assisted because – though it is drawing on multiple film franchises – it doesn’t have parallel DC films dealing with the multiverse which threaten its explanation. The film makes sense and, aside from the lines for Keaton meant to inspire applause, the dialogue and jokes are sound. I can’t tell if the wavering quality of CGI as applying her ideas and those of director Andy Muschietti are more a sign of excess on the part of the writing-directing team or a price paid by an army of artists and designers to help the writer, director, and cinematographer (Henry Braham) bring to life the directives of the studio. My instinct is that it’s the latter.
What else can I say? Well, the movie made me want to read comics, which is good in a way. It almost made me want more DCEU, but not quite. At the end of it all, though, I just wonder why companies think this is necessary now. They need to be reminded they can just end things. Besides fair certainty from the way The Flash ends that James Gunn’s new DCU won’t be picking up where this left off, I’m curious if the character The Flash has any other interesting stories that could be the basis of a film. They got nearly a decade out of a television series, so I’d think so.
The studio pulls this famously divisive multiverse crossover arc because it means an excuse to bring a Batman actor out of retirement to say a line from thirty years ago out of context with the intent of building hype around this film not based on an interesting story but on acknowledging that fans have seen older, mostly unrelated stuff. The original point of multiverse crossovers was cleanup and toy sales – concurrent DC comics between the 1960s and 1970s had gotten far enough afield of one another through different creative teams that there were multiple ongoing continuities of Batman, Superman, and friends with incongruent histories. This is a natural consequence of keeping characters the same age for around thirty years at that point and nearing 90 years now. So, Crisis on Infinite Earths happened to straighten that out; periodically they recombine or split the universes (the event called 52 in 2005; The New 52 in 2011; Convergence in 2015; Dark Knights: Metal to Death Metal more recently, several others I don’t know about).
The DCEU was thirteen films before this one, unless you count Justice League twice – that’s the only thing that could reasonably demand cleaning up, and they don’t bother. The company rightly knows it can ignore differences between Joss Whedon’s and Zack Snyder’s versions of the film, but feel unable to do anything with the Flash on his own. It greatly reflects the problems with corporate comics and the movies they spawned, or rather the current franchise tentpole culture of studio filmmaking as exemplified in Warner’s specifically confused vision. The studio system has overcorrected creatively from a time when geek ideas were considered niche to a time when studios feel they need to make advocates and enthusiasts feel respected, or at least pandered to. And, in the wake of the MCU’s success, everyone wants a giant crossover universe, forgetting that what makes people excited to see characters crossover (from comic books and SFF novels to daytime soap operas and network dramas to Super Smash Bros) is connecting audiences to the characters through meaningful stories.
A plot is just the sequence of things that happen within a story. Films should not exist to do plot maintenance between a closing franchise and a new one, though I suppose it’s funny if they’re advertised to do that and end on an inconclusive note. This is not a matter of me upholding the sacredness of corporate intellectual property – I’m not concerned with that; fans can choose whatever canon they want and corporations cannot, at least not yet, dictate and legislate what you value in your mind and heart. This is a matter of the fact that corporations want all these things to exist and be sacred and that their best bet to succeeding in that would be to let them stand on their own instead of intertwining them. At some point soon enough, ticket sales will reflect that if your story is about breaking its own reality, you are eventually sacrificing a connection with the audience’s humanity to connect it with a bunch of older already-told stories. I do genuinely believe superhero stories can be well-written, directed, and performed, and I think multiverses and nostalgia are going to reach their creative dead end soon. Luckily better movies exist outside of the trappings of superheroes and action mega-franchises, and if you must have superheroes, there are always the funny books.