The Flash — The 90s Batman is back!
Some spoiler-free thoughts about The Flash movie. I haven’t yet seen the film, so this is all based on trailers, which, despite my general uncertainty about the DCEU, has got me excited.
Batman is back! Or rather at least two versions of him are back. One is the most recent iteration played by Ben Affleck but the other hasn’t been seen since 1992’s Batman Returns (or arguably 1997’s Batman & Robin if we ignore actor changes and the possibility that those later 90s films will not be canonically ignored).
My first on-screen Batman was Adam West. I’m not old enough to remember its original run, but TV in the 80s and 90s was full of reruns of the original campy Batman TV show. The first new Batman for me though was 1989’s Batman, starring Michael Keaton as the caped crusader. I’m rather excited therefore, to see him don the cape once again in The Flash. Seeing an older version of Keaton’s Batman just sounds amazing, and completely unexpected. Who would have thought that would happen back in the 1990s?
Nostalgia is only one part of the reason why I’m interested in this development. The Flash (2023) is based (loosely or closely) on the Flashpoint comic story from 2011. I don’t follow a huge amount of the DC comics, but this was one of the first stories that I engaged with, and I loved it. I love it more now, as Flashpoint leads into…
