Warner Bros. should have slowed down their hype for The Flash.
Their hollow engagement with the multiverse speaks to a larger concern.
The Short Take:
This was fine, but not the triumph early buzz would have you believe. A fun time, especially compared to other DC films. The emotional core of Barry Allen suffocated beneath all the attempts to cash in on the multiverse trend, prioritizing fan service over story.
[The FIRST HALF of this review will be SPOILER FREE. I will issue another spoiler warning when the time comes.]
Image Credit: LA Times
The Long Take:
Tom Cruise lied to us.
Back in March, a story cycled through entertainment news about how the legendary Tom Cruise, ordained savior of movie theaters, screened a preview copy of The Flash in his home and went out of his way to call up Director Andy Muschietti, just to tell him how much he liked the film. According to The Hollywood Reporter, he said it had “everything you want in a movie” and that “this is the kind of movie we need now.”
After that, we were off to the races. Coming out of CinemaCon, the movie theater industry trade show, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav and Co-CEO of DC James Gunn proclaimed that The Flash was among the greatest superhero movies ever made. Following a preview screening, several critics and journalists gave the film extremely high praise.
Fast forward to today, and critics and fans now catching up with the film — myself among them — seem to have a very different take.
All that hype hurt this movie more than it ever would have helped because, expectations aside, it really wasn’t bad. It was far from great, but it wasn’t, as some critics will say, actively bad. The action scenes are at times very fun, especially when certain supporting characters (who were revealed in the trailer and marketing materials, but, out of an abundance of caution, will remain secret for those who have shielded themselves from such things) get in the mix. And I laughed a lot, which is more than I can say for most post-Snyder-Verse DC movies. The second act was especially fun and breezy in a way that good comic book movies often can be.
For me, the film is at its strongest when it is first and foremost a story about Barry Allen as The Flash, whether that means playing off his backstory or exploring his powers. There’s a stretch that just focuses on how The Flash has to learn about and account for his specific abilities. And there’s another at the end that just focuses on Barry’s relationship with his murdered mother — his formative childhood trauma. These were moments when I felt the film was the most authentic and the least anxious about its place in the larger DC franchise. There are several critics and podcasters who disagree with me, harshly criticizing Ezra Miller’s performance (I’m looking at you, Ringer-Verse Midnight Boys) as flat. While I do not condone any of their criminal behavior, I found Miller’s banter with the other versions of himself engaging. It was very clear which one was an older, more experienced Flash and which one was the ne’re-do-well sweet summer child, fundamentally changed by the absence of a traumatic childhood.
To clarify, I don’t mean that the film is anxious about an MCU-style continuity — as in, how does this film move the larger plot of all DC movies forward. In fact, since we’re about to get a completely fresh start under James Gunn’s new leadership, this film actually should have been unburdened by any of those intertextual concerns. (Though its genesis arguably took place at a time before anyone knew about the upcoming reset, and maybe the creators didn’t pivot as much as they should have in light of that change.) I mean that the film exhibits anxiety about the vitality of DC as a film franchise, constantly trailing behind Marvel.
Enter the multiverse. Since this film’s premise opens the possibility to meet multiple versions of iconic DC characters, there is naturally a lot going on. And built into that is the opportunity to surprise audiences with past characters. But, to me, doing this seemed purely for fan service, as if to say, “Hey, remember how many great characters and great versions of those characters we’ve given you over the years? Remember how much fun you’ve had for so long with DC instead of that other studio? Let’s show you how we’ve been around forever and therefore deserve your respect and admiration.” Every cameo and every Easter egg reeked of desperation.
Worst of all, this self-historicizing DC does by way of the multiverse distracts from, perhaps tramples on, the emotional core of Barry trying to go back in time to prevent his mother’s murder. It’s as if the multiverse is a means to an end that has nothing to do with the story and has everything to do with the discourse happening around the film. Did I get a kick out of seeing some of these blasts from the past? Sure. I’m not cold-blooded. But, by the end, I wondered, what was it all for?
And while I loved seeing a certain actor return as Batman, and while Matt Neglia from Next Best Picture made the astute observation that positioning Batman to talk about his own loss as a way to mentor The Flash about how to deal with his makes for good character development, we actually could have done so with the Batman we already had, and it wouldn’t have made that much of a difference. The film we got mainly needed the multiverse to address Barry Allen’s tragedy. So why did the creators behind The Flash feel the need to turn a multiversal story with Barry Allen at its center into a DC film and television museum?
Before I continue to the spoiler section, I’ll say that you can probably wait until this one hits HBOMaaa— sorry, I mean Max. Go see Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse in theaters instead. But, if you do decide to check out The Flash in theaters, you won’t necessarily have a bad time. Just know that it’s fine. DC fine.
[SPOILER WARNING: I’m about to go into more detail, especially regarding cameos in this film.]
Image Credit: LA Times
Now that I can talk about the specific familiar faces we saw in this film, I can say that, again, I loved seeing Michael Keaton back as Batman. Seeing him in these scenes made me want an adaptation of Frank Miller’s book, The Dark Knight Returns, in which an aging Bruce Wayne comes out of retirement for one last adventure. That’s nominally what we got here, but with nowhere near as much depth and introspection into how Batman views himself and his vigilante career. Even with Michael Keaton’s ascot-wearing charm and the fun of seeing his Batman whip out a tape measure, this felt like a shallow nostalgia play rather than a meaningful integration of a specific past iteration of Batman into this story. It felt so strange seeing Keaton playing Batman but without Tim Burton’s Gotham and all the whimsical goth-noir production design along with him. In the process of plucking Keaton out of that world, we sanded him down to make him more generic. And, as much as I loved watching his old Bruce Wayne sell us a slightly soggy metaphor for time travel, the film made no attempt to explain how or why his Batman possesses that knowledge. You could plug and play any Batman into those scenes and not much changes.
Image Credit: CNN
And, for a multiverse story (especially one like Flashpoint, the comic upon which this film is loosely based), those changes, or big consequences rippling from even the tiniest idiosyncrasy, are a fundamental component.
What I mainly alluded to in the spoiler-free section, however, has less to do with Keaton’s Batman, who at least had a substantial part in the film. The scenes in which Barry discovers the inner workings of the multiverse and interfaces with a multitude of realities bothered me the most. The visual effects were muddy and almost ghoulish in their uncanny representation of human faces, like a poorly rendered holodeck program. There have been reports that Andy Muschietti claims that this was all a deliberate stylistic choice, to try to simulate for the audience how disorienting this experience traveling through the multiverse would have been for Barry, but I think that has little bearing on what audiences will conclude when they see this, not knowing the intent behind the design. Plus, I would say that if the goal were to disorient us so we share Barry’s POV, there are much more effective ways of doing that through camera movement and camera angles rather than through CGI.
More importantly, however, seeing Adam West’s Batman, Christopher Reeves’ Superman, Helen Slater’s Supergirl, and even the version of The Flash that preceded Barry Allen, Jay Garrick, doesn’t actually have any impact on the story itself. The events at the end of the film happen in the exact say way and Barry Allen comes to the exact same conclusion if all he sees in The Chronobowl are his parents or the battle in which he fights alongside a doomed Batman and Supergirl.
The deepest cut and therefore most fan-service for fan-service’s sake is by far Nicholas Cage as Superman. I have to admit that I didn’t understand this reference and needed my friend sitting next to me, Colby, to explain the significance. I’m not sure how I missed this, or perhaps I repressed the memory, but apparently there was supposed to be a Tim Burton Superman movie called Superman Lives, starring Nicholas Cage as an “emo” version of Superman (according to interviews with Cage) with samurai-style long hair. He apparently fights a spider in his The Flash cameo because the producer, Jon Peters, asked screenwriter Kevin Smith (yes, that one) to put one in the movie. But once footage of Cage in a Superman suit got out, fans freaked out and the project died on the vine. There was even a Kickstarter documentary to figure out what exactly happened. I haven’t watched it yet, but found this trailer. Enjoy.
The inclusion of a Nicholas Cage Superman most noticeably reveals a lack of understanding of what makes a good multiversal story compelling in the first place. In Across the Spider-Verse, it might be contemplating what happens if a universe never gets a Spider-Man. In Spider-Man: No Way Home, it might be how does Peter Parker inadvertently hurt or help his friends by telling them he’s Spider-man? In Oscar-winning Everything Everywhere All At Once, it might be, what does Evelyn miss out on if her life turns out to be more glamorous, and how does that make her reassess her hopes and dreams in life?
The multiverse isn’t about the past as static or final — the past as history — but about alternate presents and speculative futures. Barry can change his mother’s murder and therefore can change everything else in the universe. So if something — like Cage as Superman — almost but never was, that doesn’t have the same effect as contemplating a way in which our world right now could be different and what significance those changes would have. There’s no cause and effect to poke and prod. No Socratic induction. A multiverse story should be about how different events produce different outcomes and forge different heroes. About the extent to which they are distinct, in tension with the extent to which they are unified. We have to SEE that impact for a trip into the multiverse to have been worthwhile. We have understand how witnessing that impact then helps a character reflect back upon their own life and identity. So dredging up a ghost of DC’s past just to wink and nod at it seems to miss the point.
Image Credit: IndieWire
My concern with all this is two-fold: 1.) that with this rapidly solidifying trend, with the “hotness” of the multiverse right now, we’re going to get more and more multiverse stories that “miss the point” and 2.) that the multiverse will become shorthand for meta self-aggrandizing, becoming more about reminding viewers of a franchise’s brand and legacy than engaging in a “what-if?”-driven thought-experiment. While I was bemused to see Nicholas Cage’s vacant yet somehow arresting stare, I can’t say that his appearance in The Flash helped me arrive at any new epiphanies about who Superman is.