The Flash
Among the most stunning and aggravating checklists of the superhero blockbuster era, “The Flash” is simultaneously thoughtful and clueless, challenging and pandering. It has some of the best digital FX work I’ve seen, and some of the worst. Like its sincere but often hapless hero, it keeps exceeding every expectation we might have for its competence only to instantly face-plant into the nearest wall.
Then it hits the reset button and starts again which, come to think of it, is what “The Flash” keeps doing over and over narratively with time, parallel universes, and the question of whether “canonical” events in a person’s life or an entire dimension can be altered. From top to bottom it suffers under the double misfortune of being its own worst enemy even as (because) there are real thoughtfulnesses in it, despite an intriguingly unstable cocktail of genres (slapstick comedy, family drama, heavy metal action flick, philosophically driven science fiction adventure), and also arriving on screens right after “Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse,” a high watermark for both superhero movies and major studio animated features which explores most of these same concepts in a more aesthetically innovative way.
Ezra Miller who has had off-screen brushes with fame that make some of this film’s raunchier comedy land poorly stars as twentysomething forensic scientist secret superhero Barry Allen who feels like the “janitor” of The Justice League while he’s still grappling with his mother’s murder and his father’s wrongful imprisonment for said crime. Here again in this very review we encounter a double bind characteristic of “The Flash” you can’t talk about The Movie without describing The Plot in detail; but at the same time much most all? Of The Plot has already been “spoiled,” not just by social media & online forums but by The Movie itself in trailers & marketing materials (Warner Bros. supplied the photo at the top of this review) and also on Wikipedia & etc, so if you’ve read all that you know whether to keep going or put the rest of this piece aside for later.
For those still reading: Remember the ending of “Superman: The Movie” (1978) where Christopher Reeve’s Superman has to choose between stopping a nuclear missile headed for Miss Tesmacher’s home state and preventing his Great Love Lois Lane from getting killed by an earthquake, tries to do both, loses Lois, then turns back time to resurrect her? Well that sequence has been expanded into an entire film and merged with the “Back To The Future” series thanks to Barry’s decision to try to go back in time and change one detail on the day his family was destroyed: Mom sent Dad (Ron Livingston) to the local supermarket to fetch a can of tomatoes she needed for a recipe, when Little Barry hears a commotion and comes downstairs he finds Mom on the kitchen floor with a knife jammed into her bloody chest and Dad weeping over her corpse with one hand on the hilt so Barry surmises he can use his Flash powers return to fateful day add tomatoes save both parents.
Many people are aware that time travel is not easy. This realization usually comes after watching a science fiction movie about it or reading a Ray Bradbury short story like “The Sound of Thunder.”
The Flash, directed by Andy Muschietti (Both “It” movies and “Mama”) from a script by genre ace Christina Hodson (“Birds of Prey,” “Bumblebee”), is not a glum, macho colorless joke. It also takes its ideas and the pain of its characters seriously. When he enters what he believes is “the past” (it’s actually an alternate timeline), Miller encounters another version of himself with an intact happy family and befriends and mentors that Barry, finding out along the way just how annoying he can be to other people.
In the pre time travel section of this movie, Muschietti over-directs Barry his anxiety, clumsiness and facial tics are all so heightened that for a while there he seems like one of those schlemiels Jerry Lewis used to play. But once Original Recipe Barry teams up with Extra Crispy, Miller keeps the schlemiel energy high for Second Barry while dialing it down for First Barry so that the latter can grow up in increments, it’s part of a young hero’s traditional arc. The film shows off its best effects in these mirror image duets it’s the most convincing instance ever of a leading man playing opposite himself since Michael Fassbender in “Alien: Covenant.” There’s even some handheld shakiness to the shots of both Barrys that screams “authenticity” from within their frames; within a scene or two you’ll forget that it’s one actor playing two parts and start focusing on what Miller does with both incarnations of this character.
In establishing the DCEU as an ongoing series where each feature film is supposed to represent a chapter or issue then feed into every subsequent installment in terms not just of plot but tone and voice, they defined Superman’s city-leveling battle with General Zod in “Man Of Steel” as a character and team defining canonical event for every other interlinked feature film in this series. The fallout from that fight figured into the plots and talk of more than one other movie, most notably “Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice.” So when it gets referenced again here in the first act of “The Flash,” you know Barry and Barry will have to deal with it again in another universe. Here comes Zod with his villainous teammates, scarab starships, armored shock troopers and terraforming World Engine.
But there’s no Justice League to team up against him only one superhero (the Caped Crusader) who is not Ben Affleck’s grizzled Frank Miller-y Batman but Michael Keaton’s 1980s Tim Burton Batman. Only older, more haggard and even more alienated from the society he monitors, like Bruce Wayne fused with the long haired hermit incarnation of Howard Hughes. Keaton gives the subtlest performance in this movie as the time-ripened version of Burton’s Batman; he underplays and reacts his way through the thing, adding some freshness to a story that’s probably too dependent on recycled situations and making Miller’s jumpy-abrasive tendencies easier to take. He’s an acting shock absorber smooths out the ride without slowing it down.
Barry (our Barry) gets together with Barry (Keaton Batman) and Bruce (also a Barry; I’m not sure how or why), decides that this universe’s Superman is trapped in a Siberian prison run by Russian mercenaries and tells them they’re all going there to bust him out. Turns out he’s a she Kara Zor-El, Kal-El’s cousin aka Supergirl (Sasha Calle, rocking a modified pixie cut and a killer stare). Superman might still be out there somewhere but his cousin was sent to protect him so she’s a powerful ally who can stand up to Zod.
The movie shows us the modified four person Justice League replacement, when they go up against Zod’s invasion force and it becomes apparent that all of those references to the “Back to the Future” trilogy weren’t just for laughs.
This film’s reimagining of Zod’s attack is the same as what happened at the end of Back to the Future Part II, when Marty McFly had to go back to the same prom that ended the first movie, but not let his parents see him because that could disrupt time. (This movie’s choices about what gets deleted from real world history are weird; I’d love to know why they decided most of the DCEU heroes don’t exist in Barry Two’s universe, but Back to the Future and Footloose and Top Gun and Chicago’s first album were all still going to happen no matter what.)
The most unbelievable scene in this film is its big battle parts of it look like cutscenes from an Xbox game from 2004. It’s too bad because it’s also the most interesting on a narrative level: Batman and both Flashes and Supergirl fight Zod while two Barrys disagree over whether traveling back and forth along dimensional pathways will solve problems or just create new ones. Like any science fiction that wants you to know it takes itself at least somewhat seriously, “The Flash” goes back way back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. Shelley was telling us not to play God with science, or defy nature, so better for our Promethean figure here to give up his illusions than keep walking down a ruinous path. Is this a movie that will listen to Shelley? Or does it think hero and audience want too much for it not to? Will there even ever be another Superman movie if Reeve-era Superman movies won’t let Superman turn back time in one film but erase Lois’ knowledge of his secret identity with a super kiss in another? Credit where due: “The Flash” threads that needle pretty well for itself, giving us more or less happy endings without cheapening them while keeping those questions open.
But then “The Flash” also has a counterproductive side that works against its best interests. Just as nimbly as it translates Shelley’s fears into comic book language, the movie can’t stop alluding to and winking at these other versions of heroes and villains we’ve seen in movies or on TV before, seemingly for no other reason than to remind you that Warner Bros. owns DC and get you to point at the screen and say names. Batman, Batman, Batman, Batman, Superman, Superman, Superman, Superman, Flash, Flash, Flash, etc., keep popping up in scenes set either at or around the “Chrono-Bowl,” a cosmic switch station whose design evokes clockwork gears merged with the concentric rings of chopped-down trees merged with theater-in-the-round merged with a tribunal.
And rather than find an artful way to reuse old footage of Michael Keaton from his previous outing as Batman or Val Kilmer or George Clooney from theirs or even just recast Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s Thomas Wayne entirely so he doesn’t have to appear only in silhouette here while John Wesley Shipp shouts exposition through him like he’s a bullhorn (“I’m serious this time!”), instead they’ve scanned (or rebuilt) these actors who are long dead now as what can only be described as vaguely three dimensional but still very much dead eyed waxworks of themselves laid over audio animatronic puppets.
Recall the procedure behind Star Wars: Rogue One’s “reanimation” of Peter Cushing, which went on to present an even more disturbing “young Carrie Fisher” in its climax, thereby allowing for a nearly featureless “young Mark Hamill” on The Mandalorian, and de aged ’70s movie stars for various legacy sequels? It gets wheeled out here and cloned over and over again, with little in the way of improvement.
The zombie CGI treatment is also given to the film’s main cast in the Chrono Bowl, where their alternate reality selves are visualized. Some of these versions of real people who are alive right now, hold SAG cards and have IMDb pages that regularly get updated look faintly demoniacal. The torsos and hands are not anatomically convincing. One has eyes that point in opposite directions like a gecko. Were the deadlines too tight? Were the digital effects artists so overworked that quality control went out the window always a problem throughout the entertainment industry or is it just not there yet? And even if it ever does “get there,” will it ever not look like one (digital) step away from wrapping a mannequin in corpse-flesh? Doing this kind of thing purely in animation format moots those questions; everything in an animated comics adaptation is a drawing inspired by other drawings, and therefore represents something that isn’t meant to look “real.” Not so in live action. “Hey, that’s Actor X!” becomes “He looks kinda creepy and unreal,” and the magic trick is blown.
What a mess. And what a drag, because what’s good about The Flash really is very good. The movie thinks hard about what it wants to say but not enough about how it says it. It warns against doing a thing while at once doing that thing itself. Barry grapples with the ethics and advisability of actions spurred by a desire to bring back the dead that the film performs constantly, in large ways and small, without a care.
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