The Flash is a eulogy for every DC movie that never was

For a movie about a man who can move incomprehensibly fast, The flash definitely arrived late. Originally slated for a 2016 release, according to a 2013 DC movie plan that ultimately turned out to be too ambitious, The flash comes from a chastened DC ten years later as it prepares to reboot its cinematic universe with James Gunn at the helm. 2023, The flash now serves as one of the last films in the Snyderverse, a eulogy for DC’s Zack Snyder era – but surprisingly also for all of DC’s page-to-screen adaptations. The result is messy and strange: it’s a bright, light-hearted film overwhelmed by corporate hagiography, a pat on the back for a number of films that never quite succeeded.

Considering all this, the worst thing a movie can call The flash could do is feel slow. To its credit, the film’s two-and-a-half-hour running time moves into an impressive clip. This is even more amazing considering it has one of the most convoluted plots in a recent run of superhero movies that absolutely suck with multiversal exposition. Although it lacks the clarity or resonance of eg Spider-Man: About the Spider-VerseChristina Hodson’s script keeps the story fully focused on the protagonist’s emotional journey and treats the finer points of his metaphysical world-building as flavor, an excuse to do some extreme comic book stuff.

The opening briefly reinstates Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) as a part-time Justice League member and full-time forensic lab analyst on a personal journey to clear the name of his father, Henry (Ron Livingston), who has been convicted of murdering Barry’s mother. , Nora (Maribel Verdu). The plot kicks in when Barry learns that the last major potential breakthrough in his father’s case won’t exonerate him. In a moment of terror, Barry discovers that if he runs fast enough, he can surpass the speed of light and travel through time, observing history in a ring of space-time he calls “the chronobowl.” Ignoring a warning from Bruce Wayne/Batman (Ben Affleck) about the dangers of altering history, Barry decides to travel through time to prevent his mother’s murder and his father’s imprisonment.

Despite this fear-fuelled premise, director Andy Muschietti (It And It: Chapter Two) cleverly gives the movie a Looney Tunes sensibility, reintroduces Barry with one of the wackiest opening sequences in a superhero movie to date, and uses the time travel premise to The flash a buddy comedy, pairing Barry with a younger, more obnoxious version of himself from the past.

Most of the movie takes place in a new timeline that Barry creates, where the decision to save his mother spills out to create a version of the DC movie universe devoid of metahumans, on the verge of its fundamental disaster : General Zod (Michael Shannon) arrives as he did in 2013 Man of Steel, but this time with no one to stop him. Barry is forced to recreate his superhero origins with his younger self, as well as team up with the only known superhero in this timeline: Batman, but the one played by Michael Keaton in Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman and its continuation.

This is true The flash stops being a movie and instead becomes several other things, some downright cynical. There’s the blatant nostalgic play of making Keaton’s Bruce Wayne/Batman the film’s biggest supporting character – a role that Keaton, to his credit, doesn’t call. The flash doesn’t stop there. Like Barry, the filmmakers run too far, too fast, and too wild, until their movie almost spirals out of control in a confused jumble of meta commentary and eulogy, as they reflect on the history of DC movie adaptations and the Snyderverse that began. it, and that will soon come to an end. (There’s a second Aquaman movie and Blue Beetle on its way before Gunn’s universe, dubbed the DCU, kicks off.)

Moving from time-travel antics to multiversal doomsday epic, Muschietti treats Barry’s emotional arc of acceptance less like the heart of The flash, and more like his bookends, an experience that Barry grows out of in the hope that audiences will also find it worthwhile. But so much of the content of The flash not for Barry. It’s for DC’s stalwarts who will get all the meta nods and jokes. The film is a chronicle of corporate synergy, mixing old and new in an effort to entice DC fans across generations, assuming meaning will emerge from mere recognition.

What’s so special about it The flash‘s version of the multiverse shenanigans that have now taken place in three Spider-Man movies, an entire Marvel animated TV series, and a Doctor Strange sequel is that so much of it leans on the audience knowing what could have been, and yet always craves for It. It’s a movie full of wistful what-ifs. What if Michael Keaton stayed on as the definitive movie Batman? How would it fit into the modern landscape? What if the Snyderverse didn’t come to an end as DC’s James Gunn era begins to flesh out its plans? What if The flash could be free from the controversy surrounding star Ezra Miller, and an affordable franchise built on their downright big-hearted and heartfelt performance?

The flash is a bright, colorful, imaginative movie with enough verve to pop off the screen, even if it’s often nonsensical in its wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff. But as nice as the visuals are, it also indicates the same priorities that Muschietti showed in the It movies. So much of it The flash gives way to computer-generated effects, not just for the depiction of superhumans fighting to save the world – Sasha Calle plays a rage-fueled Supergirl, even though the film leaves her frustratingly little to do – but for the longing looks to alternate possible pasts, as Barry travels through time and space to see what could have been.

In these cans, the audience is shown a computerized guernica of faces and characters they know or could know. But disturbingly, almost none of those familiar faces and familiar traits are played by real people. They are just similarities. To notice. A reward for the faithful who have actively followed not only the DC stories that hit theaters, but those who almost did. In this, The flash is the greatest, the ultimate DC comic book movie. And it feels so much smaller for it.

The flash will be in cinemas from June 16.