Like Barry, the filmmakers run too far, too fast, and too wild, until their film nearly spirals out of their control in a confused tangle of meta-commentary and eulogy, contemplating the history of DC movie adaptations as well as the Snyderverse that began it, and that’s coming to a close shortly. There is the blatant nostalgia play in making Keaton’s Bruce Wayne/Batman the film’s biggest supporting character - a role Keaton, to his credit, does not phone in. This is where The Flash stops being a movie and instead becomes several other things, some of them outright cynical. Barry is forced to recreate his superhero origin with his younger self, and to 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 sequel. Most of the film takes place in a new timeline Barry creates, where the decision to save his mother ripples outward to create a version of the DC movie universe with no metahumans, on the brink of its foundational disaster: General Zod (Michael Shannon) arriving as he did in 2013’s Man of Steel, but this time, with no one to stop him. In spite of this angst-fueled premise, director Andy Muschietti ( It and It: Chapter Two ) smartly infuses the film with a Looney Tunes sensibility, reintroducing Barry with one of the goofiest opening sequences in a superhero film to date, and using the time-travel premise to make The Flash a buddy comedy, pairing Barry with a younger, more obnoxious version of himself from the past. In a moment of anguish, 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 perils of altering history, Barry decides to time travel to prevent his mother’s murder and his father’s imprisonment. The plot kicks into gear when Barry learns that the last big potential break in his dad’s case will not exonerate him. The opening briefly reestablishes Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) as a part-time Justice League member and full-time forensics lab analyst on a personal journey to clear the name of his father, Henry (Ron Livingston), who’s been convicted of murdering Barry’s mother, Nora (Maribel Verdú). While it lacks the clarity or resonance of, say, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Christina Hodson’s script keeps the story squarely focused on its protagonist’s emotional journey and treats the finer points of its metaphysical world-building as flavor, an excuse to do some extremely comic book things. This is even more astonishing given that it has one of the most convoluted plots in a recent stretch of superhero films that are absolutely lousy with multiversal exposition. To its credit, the movie’s two-and-a-half-hour run time moves at an impressive clip. Given all this, the worst thing a movie called The Flash could do is feel slow. The result is messy and strange: It’s a bright, breezy film that is overwhelmed by corporate hagiography, a pat on the back for a bunch of movies that never really worked out. In 2023, The Flash now serves as one of the final films in the Snyderverse, a eulogy for the Zack Snyder era of DC - but also, surprisingly, for all DC’s page-to-screen adaptations. Originally planned for a 2016 release, according to a 2013 DC movie plan that ultimately proved too ambitious, The Flash arrives a full decade later from a chastened DC that’s getting ready to restart its cinematic universe with James Gunn in charge. For a movie about a guy who can move incomprehensibly fast, The Flash sure did arrive late.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |