The fracas around Andy Muschietti’s The Flash is a strange case of film publicity following natural laws, specifically Newton’s Third Law of Motion – every action has an equal and opposite reaction. In this case, it was the near-orgasmic levels of hype that the film accumulated through a slow and steady trickle of whispers and rumors about how utterly amazing it was, working their hardest to offset all of the absurdity that happened during and after production. After going through a decade-plus of development hell and a list of would-have-been could-have-been directors and writers, Warner Brothers’ finally managed to put the film into production, only for it to nearly be undone by corporate craziness and Ezra Miller’s struggles (at some points, it felt like we’d get another expose or major article about their exploits in some Premiere-tier rag at least once a week).
Writers wondered whether or not it’d ever actually make its way to the screen – after all, Batgirl didn’t – and pondered whether or not it’d have a future impact given James Gunn’s seizing of the DC reins. But, at every point, there was a new item about how it had wowed some test audience, a board of Warner execs, Tom Cruise, or a crowd at CinemaCon, where it debuted a month or two back as a “work-in-progress.” And besides, there was so much, in theory, for one to like – Michael Keaton’s back as Batman! There’s a new Supergirl! It’s a multiverse tale, so anyone from the DC’s on-screen history can show up! – the FUD generated by all those Vanity Fair articles has mostly been assuaged.
As far as damage control PR campaigns go, this was one hell of a job on the part of whatever in-house crisis firm WB has, a genuine masterpiece that should probably be studied as a part of Public Relations 101 at HBS. Yet, that says nearly nothing about the quality of the movie itself. I always loathe to bring up off-screen struggles because they don’t mean anything about the finished film (at least most of the time). In most cases, that knowledge forces someone to consider an alternate, better version of the work at hand (we’re generally optimists when it comes to the could-have-been), but that’s unavoidable with The Flash, an utterly bizarre mishmash of whatever prevailing corporate ideology was batting Muschietti and company about the stormy seas of production. In some ways, it’s a miracle that this thing is even a cohesive whole, but the seams are so evident in so many ways – the effects, the inserts, the post-hoc cameos – that they have a detrimental impact on the film itself. It’s not necessarily good or bad, it’s just strange, and that comes with its pros and cons, with its two worst moments serving as bookends to a fun middle.
I doubt that Warners will go to that time-tested tradition of skeptical studios dropping the first 10 minutes on their YouTube page because the impression you’d get from those opening minutes would probably keep most people as far away from the movie theater as possible. This opening action sequence – which sees Barry Allen (Miller) joining the heroes of the Snyderverse for one last heroic act following a distress call from Ben Affleck’s Batman – is conceptually amusing. In a bit ripped from the Lord and Miller drafts of the film, Barry has to balance saving an entire maternity ward from a collapsing Gotham hospital with the fact that he needs to eat a shitload of food to function at his best (really, that was the bit they copped to when they were asked what their draft was about). It’s done in that Quicksilver-style that everybody liked a lot in X-Men: Days of Future Past and enjoyed a little less in X-Men: Apocalypse. Again, sounds pretty fun, but every choice made in this scene is astonishingly terrible.
Muschietti’s depiction of the electric-tinged slow-motion space that Barry enters when he’s using his powers strays too far away from the Snyder aesthetic, which at least made the visuals comprehensible if they were a little dull. He opts for a heavy tungsten tint to the scene, which results in piss-colored visuals. Adding to the pain are a bevy of effects-heavy shots that look, to not mince any words, like dogshit in the urine-colored brightness of the image. If you want to know why superhero movies have gotten so dark, it’s because it’s easier to conceal the faults in your VFX. Every falling CGI baby, object, and even Barry’s suit, which is so oddly rendered it looks like Miller’s face was just superimposed over an entirely CGI body without motion capture (and this continues throughout the film), look like your average third-party PS3 game would outcompete them. Add some cringe-worthy humor and odd pacing to the mix, and you get something that’d send people running for the aisle if not for the sunk-cost fallacy.
Yet they’re rewarded with a fun second act if they stay seated. In case you’ve forgotten, Barry’s origin story has a tragic component to it – his father (Ron Livingston, taking over for Billy Crudup) was wrongly convicted for murdering his mother when Barry was just a kid – and using the knowledge that he’s accumulated from years of superheroics, he decides to do something about it by traveling through time in the Academy Award-winning Speed Force (depicted interestingly here by Muschietti, as essentially a coliseum of film-strip moments, stacked on top of each other like rows of stadium seating, with Barry in the middle to act as a click wheel, scrolling through time) to prevent his mother’s murder entirely. Affleck-Bats tells Barry not to fuck with the time stream, and like any good angsty superhero, he doesn’t listen to his angstier-elder and zooms into the past, making it so that the circumstances that led to her death don’t occur at all. As he’s returning to the present, he’s shoved out of the timestream by a dark figure, landing on the street in 2013, right before he got his powers. He’s overjoyed to see his mom alive and well – his childhood home being the beacon of warmth he’d always hoped it’d be – but he soon realizes that shit is wrong. He didn’t just assume the position of Barry Allen in this world when he entered it, and he has a younger version of himself, pre-powers, to take care of.
This younger Barry’s presence – as well as his characterization – is at the core of the movie’s most interesting conflict. This Barry is, to put it lightly, a total moron. Given that his childhood was much happier, he didn’t have the accelerated path to adulthood that our Barry did. He’s basically perma-stoned, carefree, delighted by goofy bullshit, surrounded by friends and family, living in a swell apartment, and annoying as all hell. Naturally, he’s a walking reminder of how much Barry’s life in his home world sucks, and he regards him with a fair amount of frustrated resentment. Never pushed on a path to criminal justice – not having your father wrongfully imprisoned will do that to you – he’s not interning at the crime lab where a mixture of lightning and assorted chemicals gave Barry his powers, and it turns out that our Barry just happened to land right on the very day that the accident occurred. So, the pair break in and replicate the accident, giving young Barry super-speed but robbing him of his own powers.
This is bad for two reasons: Our Barry can’t get back to his own time, and just when Barry is trying to figure out how to get his powers back, General Zod (a sleepwalking Michael Shannon) shows up, looking to finish his quest from Man of Steel. It just so happens that the only superhuman on Earth (as far as he knows) is a young and irresponsible version of himself. The Justice League doesn’t exist in any form – Superman is mysteriously missing, along with all of the other heroes – though there is a much older Bruce Wayne (Keaton) living in a dilapidated mansion, as well as another Kryptonian (Sasha Calle, brooding badass) imprisoned in the Arctic. Along with his former self, he’ll have to bring the group together to face Zod and, perhaps, make it back to his own timeline unaltered.
This section of the film is by far the best example of what it might have looked like had Muschietti been given complete control of the project, and it’s a lot of fun. For all of their troubles, Miller is a fantastic performer, alternating well between the poles of the Barrys. They channel that We Need to Talk About Kevin darkness in our Barry, making him downright unlikable to try and stress the depth of their hurt as well as their pain at being forced to watch another version of himself live the life he’d always dreamed about while also their befuddlement at how the worst aspects of himself managed to cohere into a personality that he finds repelling. At the opposite end of the spectrum, their gift for physical comedy shines brightly in younger Barry, who reacts to having his powers (and the limitations of those powers) with the kind of goofy charm and flippancy that one might expect a college kid to have if, emerging from an eight-day bender, they discovered they could suddenly travel faster than the speed of light. Yet the events that occur have the same effect on this Barry that his mother’s murder had on ours, only this time, he’s got superpowers from the jump and very little responsibility to go with them. Their conflict gives the film some depth and heart, striking at a complex emotion that few of the multiversal films released – even Everything Everywhere – have gone to.
Yet despite their good work, few will be talking about Miller, given that they’re overshadowed at every turn by Keaton, who is relishing his time back in the cowl with a kind of winking nod, channeling that offer-he-couldn’t-refuse paycheck into the character’s sheer energy. He shows up as a bearded gremlin who paints and listens to his old records in an empty Wayne Manor, who still has kung-fu skills and the ability to strategically cook a good pasta dish when needing to bond with a new pal in the kitchen. He’s initially hesitant to join the Barrys on their journey – years and years out of the saddle will do that to you, especially given that he’s won the War on Crime in Gotham, which is now one of the safest cities in the country – but there wouldn’t be a movie if he didn’t in the end. When he does, it’s hard – even for me, who has come to resent the nature of nostalgia call-backs – not to crack a broad smile, even if Muschietti crams in a bit too many references to the Burton films (“You wanna get nuts?,” etc.) than he probably should.
He gets the film’s best action sequence, a nasty bit of Snyder-inspired fun that occurs when the threesome goes to break Supergirl out of a Soviet missile silo (yes, that’s right, The Flash embraces the alt-history aspects of its origins and has Batman beat up a bunch of Soviet soldiers) which Muschietti shoots cleanly and confidently. His old gadgets are also amusing, with him even pulling out a tape measurer from the utility belt when plotting their explosive escape from the Soviets. The irony offsets the flattery, and what you wind up with approximates an authentic evolution of the character from the Burton films, which is dope to witness.
Alas, we come to the second bookend, the film’s conclusion. I’m not going to name names or really delve into any climactic specifics, but The Flash ends on such a moribundly cynical note – persisting through its final battle until the first credits start to roll – that it’s difficult to watch. I don’t mean that just in the sense that WB’s de-aging effects and whatnot lag behind the competition at Marvel; I mean that in the sense that would-be ethicists will have a field day with how clumsily things are done here, and given how the tenor of that debate is progressing online, I don’t imagine it going over particularly well for WB. At least one could call up all of the participants in something like No Way Home and ask them to join the project. But even worse is its slap-dash surprise ending, which only exists in its current form because the DC regime changed horses mid-stream and trashed their original plans for the DCEU. It’s not a bad punchline, but it’s weirdly disappointing in context – it feels like Muschietti and the film itself tried to grow beyond the parameters they were given, only to be brought back to Earth by corporate dictate. It’s going to befuddle those who don’t really give a good goddamn about superhero movies and enrage others who care way too much, but it was a solution to a problem posed, and that’s all that matters to the suits.
So what the hell does one make of The Flash? Its mixture of amusement and infamy will undoubtedly make it the weirdest blockbuster you’ll see at the multiplex this summer (though who knows how Dial of Destiny will turn out). A lot of it is as advertised: It is, in some ways, the movie that Tom Cruise was so entertained by (though I have a theory as to why he watched it that I will not spoil here, and no, he does not make a cameo), as well as the movie that every single suit and their extended family feared that it would be. In truth, I see it as the perfect capstone to the DCEU era, with all of its little quirks – it’ll certainly make for a more fitting aesthetic and tonal conclusion than Aquaman 2 will, given that James Wan isn’t really keen on inter-universe bullshit – reflecting the two competing desires at the heart of its endeavor.
Warners wanted their universe to be director-driven to contrast with Marvel but were very sensitive to audience pressure, and given their precarious economics, these movies couldn’t fail. They couldn’t pull a Field of Dreams and wait for people to show up after they built a universe, and they were willing to drop things left and right (Zack Snyder, Henry Cavill, you name it) to make something that would silence the nerds and entertain the audience. These two approaches are opposed to each other, unstoppable energy and immovable object, and ultimately the studio itself served as the outside force that brought the motion of the DCEU to a halt, regardless of the audience reactions or filmmaker excesses or whatever. The Flash is a testament to all that: The joys, the failures, the need to please, and the occasional moment of bravery. It’s less a movie than a range of watermarks, encapsulating everything from low to high and back again.