The Flash (SPOILERS!!!!) — Review Thread

They're emphasizing that CGI disaster of a scene in promotion?  Why?

The baby in the microwave was a nice touch.

I mean this movie was insane, muschietti is a weird dude.

"Batman interrupted his breakfast and he was low on calories."

Neverending this is real? This is a real plot device?

It’s one of the traits the character is known for.

Pretty much.

Supposedly, there’s a cut of this movie more in line with that tone. Apparently, it’s the version of the movie that Stephen King watched.

Tom Cruise only saw the Top Gun joke, did his fake HAHAHAHAHAHAHA laugh, and didn't bother with the rest of it.

Supposedly there’s three cuts of the movie. The one made under the previous regime, the one after Discovery Channel killed the Batgirl movie and the one after James Gunn was brought in to do a new DCU. And there’s probably a version with Henry Cavill dragged in cause the Rock brought him back for Black Adam.

Don’t know which one Tom Cruise watched. Nor which one James Gunn thought was brilliant.

Full price, matinee, Tuesday discount, Fandango’s 2-for-1 deal or did you buy tickets for the Blackening and sneak into Flash?

Some rando leaked it on twitter and it took 8 hours for them to suspend the account and take it down.

And even then... I bet people turned it off quickly.

The Flash(6/19/2023)

I don’t know if it’s been front and center with the general population in the way it has for me as someone who is pretty plugged in to film news, but the production history of The Flash may be the movie with the most publicly disastrous production history of all time at pretty much every stage of its existence. In pre-production it basically inherited all the mess surrounding Justice League, the movie in which this version of Barry Allen was introduced, and the fate of this spinoff was tied to that whole period DC history. Then it had to deal with two Warner Brothers sales, multiple different ideas of what the DCEU was going to end up being, directorial changes, reshoots, and pandemic era snags in the visual effects pipeline. And then after they were done filming it the movie had to endure a ton of bad publicity generated by its star Ezra Miller going on a truly bizarre crime spree while seemingly having a mental breakdown and then found itself essentially being rendered essentially obsolete with the announcement that James Gunn would be seemingly rebooting the entire DC continuity. And yet… there still seemed like there was hope for this. We heard people who saw it early saying it was one of the best superhero movies ever made, granted these were people with a vested interest in the movie’s success who we probably shouldn’t have been listening to, but it’s not like we heard those rumors about every other questionable movie that studio made. They were more than happy to basically sacrifice Shazam! Fury of the Gods on the fire without consideration, not to mention what happened to Batgirl, so it would seem that somebody genuinely believed this was going to be an ace up the studio’s sleeve that was going to win them some goodwill and that was enough to make me show up when it came out.

The Flash is set a few years after the events of Justice League and it would seem that those heroes have continued working together and opens with Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) having to stop what he’s doing and run to Gotham in order to assist Batman (Ben Affleck) in subduing an attempt to rob a biological weapon from a hospital. After that situation Bruce Wayne helps Allen by using his technology to help unscramble a security video that could be used to clear Allen’s father (Ron Livingston) for the murder of Allen’s mother (Maribel Verdú), which Allen believes him to be innocent of. In a moment of frustration Allen starts running so fast that he breaks through the “time force” and realizes he can use this to effectively time travel and contemplates using it to save his parents in the past. Wayne tries to warn Allen about the dangers of this but Allen thinks he’s found a solution that’s undisruptive enough to be worth risking a butterfly effect. After doing it, though he quickly finds that he has indeed made more of a mess than he’s anticipated as on his way back he gets knocked out of the time force early and finds himself about a week out from the General Zod invasion depicted in 2013’s Man of Steel but because of his tinkering Superman doesn’t exist in this version of the world. He decides that his one hope is to try to find Batman but soon comes to learn that the Batman here is much different from the one he’s come to know.

So, let’s start with the time travel stuff, which had potential as a concept but which is just very poorly handled. From the word go it’s a little hard to even view Allen as much of a hero in this given that there’s something rather selfish and illogical about the fact that he’s going back in time at all, especially after being warned about the dangers of it by Wayne. It would be one thing to just go all in on the anti-heroicness of this and show him saying “I’m going to just change history, consequences be damned” but instead the movie expects us to just go along with Allen being dumb enough to think he could change his family history and then return the future with this resulting in no other consequences. But the bigger issue is that his time travel does not just have the normal butterfly effect consequences you expect it to have, the movie also claims that the effects somehow “rippled” backwards in time as well changing any number of things that happened before that as well for… some reason. I don’t even begin to understand the reasoning for this, the movie’s weird noodle related explanation does not make any sense, and it’s pretty clear this is just a contrivance to allow them to just change a bunch of random things like bringing back the Michael Keaton Batman (which doesn’t make sense in entirely different ways). Put simply, they don’t get away with this and it also kind of undermines the rest of the film because it makes it kind of inconceivable that there’s any halfway logical way to fix this mess and that kind of hurts the stakes of all this.

Barry Allen as a character is also kind of a problem beyond the inherent selfishness of his decision to time travel because he’s often not the easiest character to like just generally. Partly that’s by design. The movie acknowledges quite frequently that Allen is a socially awkward person bestowed with super powers and that he annoys a lot of people around him. This tendency is then exasperated when he enters the alternate timeline and encounters a more privileged and thus even less responsible version of himself who is (intentionally) depicted as even more annoying, much to the frustration of the “real” Allen. Again, the character is ostensibly supposed to be like this, but man that is a very tricky balance to pull off and I don’t think this movie nails it as well as it needs to. To his credit (and I take no pleasure in giving this person compliments) I do think Ezra Miller does a lot to make this work as well as it does. He pulls off the “dual role” aspect of their part and does manage to pull of some of the film’s comedic moments and has some charm to offer.

The bigger problem I think is that the movie vastly over-estimates how much anyone knows or cares about Barry Allen or The Flash as a character. This is a character we were basically introduced to in Justice League, which is its own mess of a project, and he had the least screen time in it and hasn’t been seen since and yet this movie operates as if he’s this beloved character who everyone will already be on board with. It’s like if Marvel went straight from introducing Tom Holland’s Spider-Man in Captain America: Civil War and then went straight to introducing him to alternate versions of himself in Spider-Man: No Way Home, making no real effort to introduce what this version of Spider-Man is like in a “normal” adventure. Hell, it’s worse than that, at least people know Spider-Man as a character form previous iterations; this on the other hand is the first ever big screen version of The Flash and the character just doesn’t have anything like the same pop culture iconography to work with. Beyond that, unearned nostalgia is kind of a pervasive problem with this movie. Like, a big part of this movie is replaying the events of Man of Steel in a world that doesn’t have Superman in it. I liked that Zack Snyder movie way more than most people did, if anyone should have liked seeing that it’s me and yet even in my eyes it seemed kind of ridiculous to be revisiting this as if this was a beloved movie that people would even remember well enough to follow the way its timeline is being honored.

That increasingly becomes a problem for the movie, especially in its second half when it really starts to getting heavy on the knowing references and a lot of them just do not fit in with the rest of the movie. The tone of this thing is just all over the map: a third of it feels like an extension of the “Snyderverse,” a third of it feels like a semi-independent spinoff like Wonder Woman, and a third of it feels like a wannabe Into the Spider-Verse. You do see signs of how each of these approaches could have worked: there is some legitimate catharsis to Allen’s family grief, some of the super speed action scenes are interesting, and some of the Easter eggs do feel clever, but none of these ideas go together at all and kind of undercut each other. Introducing the Michael Keaton version of Batman feels like it could be fun on paper, but having him fight Michael Shannon’s General Zod and his kryptonian troops just feels weird and heretical on both ends. Rooting Allen’s time travel hijinx in deeply rooted sadness and grief could be affecting, but it’s hard to take that even a little bit seriously when it’s happening to the same guy who was stopping to eat a burrito before saving babies falling from a collapsing building not long before that. A more skilled hand behind the camera might have pulled all this dissonance off, but this Andy Muschietti guy just doesn’t have the chops to pull off his tricky balance. The first It movie increasingly feels like a fluke for him and this reminded me a lot more of the weird out of nowhere misjudgments that characterized “Part 2” of that horror dyad and he also proves once again to be rather clumsy in pulling off visual effects shots as this movie has some truly horrible CGI in certain shots.

So, clearly I think this movie has all sorts of problems and yet I’ll give it this: I certainly wasn’t bored while watching it. And I don’t really mean that in some sort of “it’s so bad it’s good” kind of way either. The day before I saw The Flash I caught up with Shazam! Fury of the Gods, which is in some ways a less flawed movie than this but it’s also completely formulaic nothing-burger that offers next to nothing that you can’t get out of damn near every other superhero movie. That in some ways put this movie into perspective as it definitely has more going for it than that movie or the even more inept Black Adam which proceeded it. That of course isn’t to say The Flash is some radically original superhero vision either at this point, in fact it’s multiversal hijinks and Easter egg references have already been done before as well and were done significantly better very recently with Spider-Man: Across the Spider-verse but at least this one isn’t completely played out and it is clear that the people producing this one weren’t just going through the motions and did think they were trying to deliver some pretty big spectacle and fan service and you can sort of feel that ambition on the screen even if it stumbles a lot along the way in several places. This movie is a hodgepodge mess and I don’t endorse it, but at least it isn’t on autopilot, so on that level and that level alone I would say I have a very odd affection for it.
**1/2 out of Five

I actually quite enjoyed this. It's not fantastic but there are absolutely worse superhero movies out there both from DCEU and MCEU. The biggest problem is that, once again and like most superhero movies, it tries too hard too often to be funny and it often gets weird and doesn't land. Barry isn't a serious character and it's hard for the heavy moments to be heavy when you know the movie isn't in that zone. I did enjoy Michael Shannon returning as Zod though, he always was one of the few bright spots in the DCEU. And of course Michael Keaton crushed it as Batman, he was by far the best thing about the movie. If this is the last time we see him as Batman that would be disappointing as he demonstrated that he still absolutely has it in him to play the role but it sounds like we won't be seeing much of him anymore thanks to the stellar management of Warner Discovery.  I don't think this deserved to be the bomb that it was but I think a combination of the DCEU being a disaster and overall superhero fatigue zeroed in on this movie.  Also, it's hard to introduce the 'multiverse' angle when your main rival studio just spent the last couple years doing it.  Maybe it was because my expectations were low but overall I thought this was a pretty fun ride, definitely better than other DCEU stuff but that's all shit so it doesn't say much.