The Flash (2023)
Movie rating: 6/10
The Snyderverse is dead. Bury it. Consider this mercy.
Some of you may recognize that as a reference to Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, second instalment in the DC Cinematic Universe (DCEU) launched by director Zack Snyder. Others may have blocked that particular movie from their minds. The DCEU, colloquially known as the “Snyderverse”, has been largely defined in the public mind by its divisive reception and behind-the-scenes chaos, as the panicky leadership of Warner Bros. Pictures — now part of Warner Bros. Discovery following a corporate merger — reacted to the perceived flaws of each film by overcorrecting in the opposite direction for the next one. Unlike rival Marvel Studios, all this created the sense of a studio with no confidence in its ability to tell stories involving some of the most popular and famous characters on earth.
Now we’ve come to The Flash, which may or may not be the proper last instalment in the DCEU before James Gunn hits the reboot button with Superman: Legacy. But in many ways it feels like a culmination of all that has come before. That’s not just because of its references to previous DCEU films — including series launcher Man of Steel, but also previous film and TV incarnations of these characters, most notably Michael Keaton’s Batman. It’s also because The Flash feels like the most cursed production yet in this seemingly cursed cinematic universe.
After years of delays, multiple director changes, a troubled lead actor with a growing rap sheet, and last-minute attempts by Gunn and WB Discovery CEO David Zaslav to sell The Flash as one of the greatest superhero films ever made, the final product has instead become one of the biggest box office bombs of all time. Following a weak $55-million domestic opening, The Flash saw a catastrophic 72% decline in its second week, and has now dropped out of the domestic box office top 10 after just four weeks in theatres. Analysts predict The Flash will result in as much as a $200-million loss for Warner Bros. Discovery.
None of this drama indicates the quality of the film itself. Specifically, is it any good? The answer is: it’s fine. The Flash is an entertaining popcorn movie with lots of fun moments. Yet even as part of what is perhaps this movie’s ideal target audience, while I think it’s an entertaining enough, the result feels curiously underwhelming. Why?
Spoilers follow.
The Flash follows titular speedster Barry Allen (Miller) as he discovers he can travel back in time if he moves fast enough. The DCEU’s resident Bruce Wayne/Batman (Ben Affleck) warns him about the perils of changing the past. But Barry is consumed by the desire to go back and alter the chain of events that led to the murder of his mother Nora (Maribel Verdú) and conviction of his father Henry (Ron Livingston), who was falsely blamed for her death. When he does change the past, surprise surprise, there turn out to be unintended consequences.
I’ll admit I ended up seeing this movie later than I anticipated, after I realized I was a little reluctant to spend more than two hours in a movie theatre with Ezra Miller. But whatever you think of their off-screen issues, Miller is a talented actor and delivers a solid performance in a dual lead role, playing two distinct versions of the protagonist — no easy task. Keaton is as great as ever as Batman, stepping back into his most famous role without missing a beat and clearly having a good time, while Affleck has a couple of good scenes. Sasha Calle makes an effective Supergirl even if she’s underused. There are funny moments and lots of Easter eggs for fans.
The mileage you get out of The Flash may depend on how big a fan you are of the DC Universe. In general I’ve always preferred DC over Marvel, and I like most of the Snyderverse movies, so I enjoyed myself for the most part. Given that Superman is my favourite superhero, I’ve watched Man of Steel many, many times over the years, particularly when that was the only film in what became the DCEU. To this day, I’ll still defend it despite its flaws. So I was happy to see the callbacks to that film, including the presence of General Zod (Michael Shannon) and Faora (Antje Traue) — though the latter has few if any lines and conveys little of the presence that made her such a fan favourite in Man of Steel.
I think the biggest problem with The Flash is one that’s plagued the larger DCEU: the fact that in almost everything it does, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) usually got there first. There’s a real irony there, given that DC historically tended to pioneer certain ideas and character archetypes. After all, it was a Flash comic book story, “Flash of Two Worlds!”, that first introduced the concept of the multiverse. Marvel’s now most famous villain, Thanos, was originally created as a ripoff of Darkseid. But when it comes to blockbuster movies, Marvel became the pioneer.
It was Marvel that produced the first superhero teamup movie The Avengers. The Justice League, which directly inspired Marvel Comics starting with the Fantastic Four, was a relative latecomer to the silver screen. Thanos made it to theatres before Darkseid and is now likely more famous than his inspiration. And it was Marvel that first brought the superhero multiverse to live-action film, starting with Spider-Man: No Way Home — a film that delighted fans by bringing back previous Spider-Men Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield alongside incumbent Spider-Man Tom Holland.
Since then, the multiverse concept has gone from novel to overused with astonishing speed. Marvel alone has started to run the concept into the ground, with several movies since exploring the multiverse (including as the animated Spider-Verse films). Meanwhile, Everything Everywhere All At Once swept the Academy Awards last year. By the time The Flash made it to theatres, the idea of the multiverse was already becoming stale, more of an excuse for fan service than anything else. Elements like the return of Keaton’s Batman would have had more impact if we hadn’t already seen the likes of No Way Home play the same trick.
There’s a deeper problem with the multiverse. Once you get beyond the novelty of the concept, you’re left with a fictional world in which nothing has any consequences, since there are infinite other versions of these characters. The Flash tries to get around this by explaining that certain events must necessarily happen and can’t be changed, which it calls fate. But the multiverse, combined with time travel, means the stakes inevitably feel lower. This is also a Marvel problem: characters who died in the Avengers films, such as Loki and Gamora, have since returned in the form of versions from different timelines.
Here’s where The Flash might prompt the ire of even the most devoted Snyderverse fans. It’s nice to see Affleck back as Batman, since he’s one of my favourite versions of the character. But at the end of the film, after Barry has more or less restored the original timeline, we discover things aren’t as they were before when his friend Bruce pulls up in the form of … George Clooney.
What’s meant as an audience-pleasing Easter egg feels more baffling the more you think about it. If you liked the Snyderverse version of Wayne/Batman portrayed by Affleck — too bad! He’s apparently gone now. Or maybe we’re supposed to believe that Barry went back after the events of the film and “fixed” the timeline to somehow give Wayne the appearance of Affleck again, not Clooney. How he would do that is beyond me. It’s the kind of surface-level pandering that might be effective for a second, but ultimately undermines the DCEU as a whole. It reinforces the feeling that none of this matters.
There are other problems that go beyond the multiverse. Let’s start with Keaton’s Batman. First, it’s great to see back onscreen the Batman I grew up with and Keaton is excellent anytime he’s onscreen, whether in or out of the suit. As much as I’ve shifted towards Affleck in recent years being my favourite live-action Bruce Wayne/Batman, Keaton makes a convincing case for himself as the best version.
At the same time, the writing for his character is lacking. When we first see him, Keaton’s Wayne has become even more of a recluse than he was in the Tim Burton films: grey-haired, long-haired, bearded, drinking heavily, and occupying his time with painting. What happened to turn him this way? Honestly, it’s unclear. Maybe the details were better elaborated than I remember. But what I got was that crime had virtually disappeared in Gotham and there was no room for Batman anymore. I call bullshit, because this is The Dark Knight Rises all over again. In that film, Batman went into hiding after taking the blame for murders committed by Harvey Dent/Two-Face, and became a bearded recluse. The city subsequently passed the Dent Act, which wiped out organized crime in Gotham. The idea that a crime-ridden cesspool like Gotham could become a crime-free utopia so fast was dumb even in Christopher Nolan’s supposedly “realistic” interpretation of Batman, and it’s dumb here.
Moreover, Keaton’s Wayne is awfully quick accepting what Barry and his alternate self tell him about the multiverse and deciding to help them. You could argue that an alien invasion led by Zod that threatens the entire planet would be a good motivator. OK, I’ll roll with that. But the film commits a cardinal sin in depicting old-man Batman without truly acknowledging the character’s age.
Michael Keaton was around 70 years old when he shot this. But if anything, his Batman here is even faster and more agile than he was in the Burton films. The behind-the-scenes reason for that is that the Batsuits of the Burton-Schumacher era were so heavy and cumbersome, the actors could barely move in them. Now the materials (and CGI) allow for more movement. Yet it’s hard to accept that this 70-year-old man with no superpowers, who apparently has spent all his time drinking and painting, is kicking more ass than he did in his prime. Batman v Superman did a better job acknowledging Batman’s age by aping Frank Miller’s seminal The Dark Knight Returns, even though Affleck was only in his early 40s when BvS was shot.
The most damning criticism I’ve heard of both Keaton’s Batman and Calle’s Supergirl in The Flash is that they act more like plot devices than characters. I don’t think I can refute that criticism. YouTuber Captain Midnight said that you could have replaced Keaton’s Batman with any other Batman actor here and it wouldn’t have made a difference. I don’t think he’s wrong.
That brings us to a larger problem with this movie, one that other DCEU films share: it seems more preoccupied with bringing together different characters in one movie than in telling a coherent story. Purely as a DC fanboy, I enjoyed the CGI-assisted cameos at the end: George Reeves’s Superman, Adam West’s Batman, Christopher Reeve’s Superman, Helen Slater’s Supergirl, and especially Nicolas Cage as Superman fighting a giant spider — a reference to the unmade 1990s Tim Burton film Superman Lives. Captain Midnight referred to some of these cameos as “ghoulish”, especially George Reeves, who died young under mysterious circumstances and believed playing Superman had typecast him and ruined his career. I didn’t feel the same way, but others may differ.
I realize I’m having more trouble summarizing plot elements in The Flash than I do for most movies because there’s just so much convoluted mythology and references to previous iterations of DC characters. For that reason, I’m beginning to understand why this film has struggled at the box office. I enjoyed watching it as someone who’s rewatched the DCEU films many times and still defends most of them. But for a casual viewer, much of this might seem incomprehensible. Even the nostalgia play of bringing back Keaton as Batman will mean less for younger viewers, given that the last time he played Batman was more than 30 years ago.
To its credit, the film incorporates almost all the things fans of The Flash would want to see: tapping into the Speed Force, phasing through walls by vibrating his molecules at high speed, etc. Still, it’s when the film focuses on Barry himself — either version — that it’s most effective. The emotional core of the film is Barry’s relationship with his parents and his desire to change the past to save his mother from death and his father from imprisonment. That’s a legitimately compelling narrative. Barry’s last scene with his mother is genuinely moving, and both actors play it perfectly.
That focus also makes the relationship between Barry and his alternate self — a younger, more immature version who never had to suffer the trauma of his mother’s murder — more engrossing. Considering that Miller’s role in Justice League (either version) was primarily as hyperactive comic relief, it’s a wonder that this works so well. But pairing the Barry we know with an even more annoying version turns out to be a stroke of genius. We actually do see teen Barry grow over the course of this film, as the two re-create the conditions that gave Flash his powers in the first place. This also provides a smart way of handling Flash’s origin — which was never depicted in earlier DCEU films — by doing it in a way that feels fresh for the audience and not just a retread of the standard superhero origin movie. Watching teen Barry discover his powers offers the same thrill as Tobey Maguire in Sam Raimi’s first Spider-Man — quite a feat given how many superhero movies we’ve seen since then.
On the negative side, many viewers have commented on the surprisingly subpar visual effects in The Flash. The standout is an early scene where Barry saves babies falling out of a collapsing building, most of whom look like plastic dolls. There are other scenes in the “chronobowl” — the junction between different parallel universes — where actors have jarringly fake faces that remind one of nothing so much as the infamously awful CGI Dwayne Johnson in 2001’s The Mummy Returns. That shouldn’t be the case in a 2023 film with a budget of more than $200 million. Maybe the studio was skeptical about its chances for box-office success and cut corners accordingly. On another note, I hate to say it, but the “lasso of truth” scene with Batman and another cameo by Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman felt a bit cringe-worthy. Gadot remains perfect as Wonder Woman, but seeing her reminded me of WB’s corporate shenanigans that ensure she will likely not play the role again.
The Flash is a fun enough movie on its own terms, but made me realize how jaded I am now about superhero films in general. I say that as a dedicated geek who’s fervently followed every aspect of these films’ production throughout most of my life. It might just be a case of me getting too old to care about power fantasies of characters in silly costumes punching each other. It might be that the idea of a shared cinematic universe of superheroes, once so cutting edge, now feels tired. It might also be the fact that there are so many problems in the real world, I could care less about a scene where, for example, a superhero foils a bank robbery. Governments around the world have stolen tens of trillions of dollars from working people to fund bank bailouts and corporate welfare. Show me a movie where a superhero goes after them. I won’t hold my breath, because superheroes ultimately defend the status quo, and that’s a lot less sympathetic the more intolerable our existing order becomes.
These movies are corporate products, and that cold calculation has become ever more apparent with movies like The Flash. Any enjoyment I got from this movie was primarily through my emotional and nostalgic associations with DC characters. That was enough for me, but maybe not enough for you. Meanwhile, two more lame-duck movies from the old regime at Warner Bros. have still to come out: Blue Beetle and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom. Good luck to them, following on two massive DC/WB flops with The Flash and Shazam! Fury of the Gods.
Box office results suggest audiences in general are tiring of superheroes. What was once unimaginable spectacle to see on the big screen has now become routine. With soaring inflation and the rising cost of living, more and more people can’t afford to go to the movies anyway. The Flash gets an overall thumbs-up from me, again with the caveat that I’m a big DC fan. But even as a passing diversion, superhero blockbusters have lost much of their lustre.
