The Flash (Warner Bros. Discovery, DC Comics, DC Entertainment, New Zealand Film Commission, Québec Production Services Tax Credit, The South Australian Film Corporation, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film I saw with the Bears San Diego last night (Tuesday, June 20) was The Flash, a movie that had a long and convoluted production process that reportedly involved shooting three different endings before they finally hit on one that worked … sort of. The Flash himself was one of the weakest DC comic-book superheroes, mainly because his only super-power was speed; I remember in my early teens encountering the comic books featuring him (a few of them, anyway) and thinking, “Is that all he can do – he runs?” Warner Bros., which bought Detective Comics (DC) mainly to get the movie rights to their various superhero characters, Superman and Batman in particular, started attempts to do a Flash movie in the 1980’s and they got a Flash TV series briefly on the air in 1990-1991 and another longer-lived cable series from 2014 to May 2023, when what was announced as its final episode was shown. Writers, directors and actors rotated in and out of the Flash movie project over the years until the final crew included Andy Muschietti as director, Joby Harold writing the “original” story, Christina Hodson doing the screenplay, and actor Ezra Miller starring as a rather nebbishy Flash whom we first meet in his non-superhero identity, Barry Allen. He shows up at a combination coffeehouse and deli and expressed disappointment that the woman who usually serves him is off that day (“She’s probably with her boyfriend,” he says glumly) and the young man working the counter doesn’t know what sort of sandwich he wants. (One of the wittier running gags in the film is how much The Flash has to eat to sustain his energy level.)

The first half-hour of The Flash is sheer delight; true, it’s just a bunch of exciting action sequences with little or no connection between them, but at least early on the movie maintains a fun aspect and doesn’t take on the degree of Anguished Seriousness all too many comic-book derived superhero films do these days. Then Anguished Seriousness takes over with a vengeance; after the exciting opening in which The Flash, Batman (Ben Affleck) and Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) team up to keep a pair of pretty anonymous villains from poisoning the water supply of (fictional) “Central City” with a killer virus, the true plot point of The Flash emerges. It seems that Barry Allen’s father Henry (Ron Livingston) is in prison for murdering his mother Nora (Maribel Verdú). His alibi is that he was off at the grocery store buying Nora a second can of tomatoes to fill out a recipe she was making and someone else came into their house and stabbed her, but he isn’t able to prove that based on the store’s grainy security-camera footage. Since he’s recently discovered that if he runs fast enough he can move back and forth in time, The Flash a.k.a. Barry Allen determines that if he can get to the grocery store in time to make sure his mom doesn’t forget that second can of tomatoes, he can save his mom’s life and keep his dad from taking the fall for his murder. Only by doing that he, you guessed it, unravels the entire fabric of the space-time continuum and ensures that in this universe Kal-El, the original Kryptonian name of Superman, never comes to Earth; Wonder Woman and Aquaman also don’t exist; and though Batman is still real he’s now played by the aging Michael Keaton instead of Ben Affleck and he’s retired from crime-fighting after the two films in which Keaton played Batman originally and Tim Burton directed (marvelously; in fact I long thought the 1989 Batman with Burton directing, Keaton as Batman and Jack Nicholson as The Joker was the best comic-book superhero movie ever made – until 2018’s Black Panther came along and easily topped it). Also someone else besides Michael J. Fox stars in the Back to the Future movies.

The original Barry Allen loses his Flash powers while a younger incarnation of the character (also played by Ezra Miller? I’m not sure and there’s no listing on imdb.com for another actor as The Flash, but for my money the younger Flash was considerably sexier and hotter-looking than the older one) gains them. As one of the people from Bears San Diego pointed out, this whole concept of the “multiverse” – the idea of different parallel universes that intersect at various space/time points and can interact with each other under unusually freaky circumstances – has been more characteristic of Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe movies than the ones from their principal rival in the superhero biz, DC, and one of the most recent Marvel movies had been called Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. At a previous Bears film night one of the other guys pointed out that James Gunn, director of the Marvel Guardians of the Galaxy movies, had been lured away by DC for the film The Suicide Squad and a sequel-TV series called Peacemaker. (Then Marvel had to borrow him back for the third Guardians of the Galaxy because the stars of the first two movies refused to return to their roles without him.) So it’s possible that the mixing of creative personnel between the two superhero powerhouses might be blending their storylines as well and leading to both companies using dramatic gimmicks like the “multiverse.” One of the subsidiary gimmicks of the “multiverse” is that they can blend various depictions of the iconic heroes; in this case, having at least four different Batmen (Ben Affleck, Michael Keaton, Adam West in a clip from the 1960’s TV series, and [spoiler alert!] George Clooney, who turns up as Bruce Wayne in the final scene even though Clooney has previously denounced his earlier Batman movie, Batman and Robin [1997], as the biggest mistake of his career, and just two years ago he gave an interview in which he said he would not allow his wife or their kids to see it) and three different Supermen, George Reeves from the 1950’s TV show, Christopher Reeve from the iconic 1970’s and 1980’s movies, and the most recent (and badly cast) Superman, Henry Cavill (though I don’t think the cameo Cavill shot made the final cut).

I quite liked the earlier parts of The Flash, but the film just got drearier and drearier as it progressed and the ending really made no sense even by the meager standards of superhero fiction. At least we got to see weird-looking light-studded balls in the black sky of space, presumably representing all the various earths made possible by Barry Allen’s misbegotten attempts to rework the space-time continuum so his mother doesn’t die and his father isn’t arrested and convicted of killing her. (For a truly great writer’s “take” on this dramatic principle – a man who realizes that he has to let the woman he loves die in order to fulfill the correct destiny of human history and keep evil from ruling the universe – check out Harlan Ellison’s award-winning script “The City on the Edge of Forever” from the original late-1960’s Star Trek.) The Flash’s script also brings back General Zod (Michael Shannon) and his sidekick, Faora-Ul (Antje Traue), from the 2013 Superman film Man of Steel (which irritated me partly because at least half of it took place on Superman’s planet, Krypton, before it blew up, and partly because Cavill was so wretchedly miscast as Superman; in the comics he was drawn as taller and more robust than most Earth men, and the original live-action Supermen – Kirk Alyn, George Reeves, Christopher Reeve – were cast that way, but Cavill is short, wiry, and while he was in excellent physical shape when he made Man of Steel, partly due to the exercise regimen he went on for the part, he’s not the stuff of which Supermen are made), as principal villains who want to exterminate Earth’s entire population to make way for the Kryptonians, whose entire collective DNA is encased either in Superman’s in Man of Steel or in Supergirl’s (Sasha Calle) here.

The General Zod plot line was reasonably scary in Man of Steel but just seems like a wash here, and contrary to a rather strange article on the cbr.com Web site (https://www.cbr.com/the-flash-man-of-steel-improvement/), I don’t think the moral dilemma was handled anywhere nearly as well here as it was in Man of Steel, in which Superman realized he had to kill General Zod to spare Earth’s indigenous population from total annihilation. The Flash is one of those movies that seemed to have been put together with spit and bailing wire; it exists not because dedicated, visionary filmmakers had a story they were dying to tell (if you want a superhero movie that is also an auteur masterpiece, see Black Panther) but because some people at a major studio (or two, or several) wanted to make a ton of money recycling the old superhero formulae – and don’t get me started on Ezra Miller’s general weirdness as a human being (he claims to be non-binary and uses they/them pronouns; he’s also had a relationship with a 12-year-old girl and been through various mental crises that at one point got so severe he had to seek medical help or Warner Bros. was going either to scrap this film altogether or recast it), the kinds of stuff all-powerful studio publicists were able to conceal from the public in the Golden Age of Hollywood!