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

The Flash is both "not as bad as I expected" but also exactly as bad as I expected. The best way to express that is to simply walk through my viewing experience. The film opens with a bizarre action scene where The Flash saves people from a collapsing hospital, the central bit being a scene with a half-dozen newborn babies (and a dog) falling in slow-motion. These babies are uncanny digital effects' nightmares and watching them fall in slow-mo would be funny enough, but The Flash's behaviour is what really puts this over the top. See, Flash also has a superfast metabolism so he needs to eat all the time and he spends this set-piece in desperate need of some food. So, in the midst of babies falling to a horrific death, Flash pushes past the children to bust open a vending machine and chow down. He also pulls a burrito from a microwave and places one of the babies in the microwave instead. I couldn't really place the reason for this, but that might be because I was laughing so hard I couldn't breathe. This whole opening establishes the low quality visual effects (most certainly a victim of the pervasive vfx crunch and big-budget filmmaking) that pervade The Flash, and especially its big action scenes.

As the plot kicks in, I found myself rolling my eyes at the film's haphazard application of the butterfly theory as actions which ripple backwards in addition to forwards because time isn't linear see, so it totally makes sense that Barry Allen going back in time 15 years effects the births and identities of characters born many decades early. It's a thin excuse for the film to indulge in multiverse shenanigans. Barry meets a younger version of himself untouched by tragedy, and by extension even less disciplined. To make matters worse, the freak accident which gives this younger Barry his superpowers also takes Barry Prime's powers away. And in these scenes, The Flash actually starts getting good. The concept forces Barry to reckon with his own character flaws very directly and watching the character have to coach a superpowered juvenile version of himself leads to some fun character interactions. The story is also strongly motivated by Barry having to assemble a makeshift version of the Justice League. I wouldn't say any of this material is great, but it's competent, which is more than I can say for Black Adam. I also won't pretend I was immune to the nostalgic charm of seeing Michael Keaton in the Batsuit again.

But then we get to the film's mandatory explosive action climax in the form of the two Flashes, Batman and Supergirl fighting Zod and the Kryptonian army from Man of Steel and The Flash starts to fall apart again. For a start, the fact that the main antagonist and conflict is outsourced from another movie is less than ideal, but the scene construction is also a mess. Say what you will about Man of Steel's climax, at least it took place in a defined setting with clear consequences from the fight between characters. The Flash's battle takes place in an empty desert in yet another example of a superhero movie climaxing in a featureless void. The effects here are also quite bad and none of the action beats are particular interesting. It's frankly also a waste to bring in Keaton's Batman, right down to the classic suit and music, only for him to fight Snyder-era villains. I love both Batman (1989) and Man of Steel but the appeal of each is fundamentally opposed to the other.



So, yeah, The Flash is weird. There are glimmers of a movie that works, maybe even several movies that work, but the whole is a gargantuan mess, weighed down by many of the worst elements in contemporary franchise filmmaking. At a certain point, that miasma of issues become impossible to ignore.

D