The Flash: A Fun Superhero Film That Shies Away From Cinematic Depth

THE most frustrating thing about a Modern Superhero Movie is that proper high-concept devices — like time-travel, alternate realities, butterfly effect, memory science, the linearity of living and feeling — get the studio-tentpole makeover. It’s like watching geeks who’d rather be rich and good-looking. (The worst of them are rich and good-looking people pretending to be geeky). One might accuse Christopher Nolan of doing the same. Except in his case, the scale remains in service of the ambitious story. There is no dumbing down; on the contrary, the blockbuster-level accessibility makes them more alluring. But no matter how novel a comic-book superhero film sets out to be, you know that ultimately it’s the IP (Intellectual Property) that will temper its freedom. It’s the Marvel and DC stamps that will require some blatant superheroing, some tonal cliches, some hybrid of self-reverential and self-referential humour, some cameos, some nostalgia, some climactic chaos. In its own parlance, the IP is the canon (or in DC Speak, the “inevitable intersections”) that keeps the film adaptations from straying too far — or getting too smart. At some point, those roots morph into shackles.

In that context, The Flash, which marks the reset of the floundering DC Extended Universe, is perhaps as good as it gets. Given Marvel’s recent record, it was only a matter of time: This film is DC’s first foray into multiverse storytelling. You read that right: The Justice League is now available in its very own Multiverse flavours. Here’s a multiverse for you, for you, and for you…and for you in the back! Jokes aside, it wasn’t until Spider-Man: No Way Home that the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe — keep up with me, boomers) managed to find that elusive sweet spot between clever fan service and cash-grabbing traction. I enjoyed that one, so it’s only fair that this DCU debutant — very much a counterpart of the Spidey template — feels like frothy and fast-paced fun. It’s the best kind of artistic corruption.

The Flash stars the troubling-but-talented Ezra Miller as the titular superhero (alter-ego: Barry Allen) who goes back in time to prevent his mother’s death, despite warnings from DC mentor Batman (Ben Affleck). If we’ve learned anything from stubborn superhero mythology over the years, it’s that tradition (and childhood trauma) is sacrosanct; personal indulgences come at a price. So Barry’s little adventure ruptures the fabric of history, and causes him to lose his superpowers and get trapped in an alternate reality without metahumans — but with an 18-year-old version of himself, Tim Burton’s retired Batman (Michael Keaton), and the castaway Kryptonian known as Supergirl (Sasha Calle). As it turns out, this timeline isn’t random: It’s the week in which the evil General Zod comes looking for Superman in Man of Steel. Together, this first-draft Justice League (including two Barry Allens) must stop Zod from destroying the planet while also getting present-Flash back his powers and keeping his mother alive.

The Flash doubles up as both an origin story and the beginning of a rebooted franchise. Yet, it also has the idiosyncrasies to work as a standalone film. Barry works in criminal forensics because he wants to fix the system that failed his family. His father (Ron Livingston, filling in as the new Billy Crudup) was wrongfully convicted of his wife’s murder, and has been imprisoned since. Barry’s jaunt back in time, then, feels like an accidental consequence of his grief — he sprints away from his childhood home in tears, only to find himself breaking the speed-of-light barrier and barrelling through time itself. When he tinkers with the past, too, it feels less like a superhero movie and more like a playful Back to the Future instalment — an ode cemented by Barry’s shock on learning that the originally-cast Eric Stoltz (and not Michael J Fox) is Marty McFly in the alternate timeline. The sequences of Barry tutoring his dopey 18-year-old self makes for a disarming double-role bromance. I wonder what it says that the actor — who has been charged with felony and assault in the last year alone — is eerily convincing as two different phases of one life. In the same frames, no less.

Keaton and Calle, too, do a nice job of treading that thin line between comic-book spoof and self-awareness. They don’t fall into the Thor trap, where the internet-skit humour often dilutes our emotional investment in the stakes. I also like that the protagonist’s super-fast metabolism and restlessness bleed into the film-making, and not in a gimmicky way. We get straight down to business (or “the film hits the ground…running”), when Flash — who calls himself ‘The Janitor of the Justice League’ — is called on by Alfred to mop up a bat-mess in Gotham because Brooding BatFleck is busy battling his own baddies. The action vibrates with boyish adrenalin, which in this case elevates a loophole-riddled 140-minute plot by affording it no time to pause and be judged. The speed is disorienting, and it’s all part of the trick.

In terms of visual effects, I suppose The Flash is the only superhero film ever to embrace the tackiness of its form. The makers seem aware that their superhero is by far the toughest as a live-action sell, what with his video-game-style velocity and comic-panel whooshes. It’s not a very screen-friendly power. There’s no way audiences will buy it. So instead of salvaging his unfilmable forces, the film becomes a rare one that’s prepared to laugh at its own choices. A bit like Deadpool, but on a purely technical level. So The Flash is almost deliberately cringey when he zips across space and slows down every microsecond of time. The graphics are terrible and the character knows it. He’s not supposed to be convincing or cool, and once we buy into this valiant idea, it’s hard not to enjoy the commitment. For instance, the opening set piece features — believe it or not (actually, don’t) — a laughably campy mid-air rescue of several screensaver-like newborns (“Is that a baby shower?” old Alfred yelps) falling from a collapsing skyscraper. It’s so ridiculous that it’s great. Similarly, Barry’s time-travel doesn’t pretend to be sophisticated; he’s more or less in a stoner model of that Interstellar bookshelf-in-a-black-hole set. The colours and the computer illusions pop with pride, unabashed in the boy’s 8-bit journey through a stadium of memories and events.

That a can of tomato puree becomes the ‘flashpoint’ of Barry’s future — his mom forgot to buy one, so his dad went to the supermarket on that doomed morning (only for the CCTV footage to fail the man) — speaks to a recent title that evoked a “What if?” parallel-reality scenario. The Bear, the hit series about a bereaved chef who returns home to save his family sandwich shop, is another narrative that hinges on missing cans of tomato puree. Without getting into the specifics, it’s not a sci-fi or fantasy show; yet, a lot of it is about the fictions we tell ourselves to make the truths more tolerable. I remember writing a piece about how grieving is essentially the grammar of travelling through time: It’s the act of remembering to make it easier to forget. Which is to say that this popular device isn’t as flimsy as it looks. It’s rooted in an innately human tendency to sacrifice the facts that make us, at the altar of the imagination that breaks us.

It’s also why I’ve started to get a little more affected by time-travel loops. I’ve been struggling through a personal loss, and I often wonder about going back in time and altering the anatomy of this wound. Would I risk the destruction of who I am today to resurrect who we were yesterday? Apart from dangling the carrot, superhero movies simply increase the stakes — choosing the personal over the universal changes the course of mankind. Everyone else might die if a death is reversed for ‘selfish’ reasons. But I’d like to believe that, for normies like us, going back in time is more about reliving than resuscitating. It’s about reclaiming one more memory, squeezing out one last dance, having one more drink. Tragedies cannot be reversed, I accept that. But I’d also like to believe that, in a parallel timeline of my multiverse, there’s a version of me that’s defying these ‘canon events’ of destiny. Perhaps this version believes that tragedies need not happen in the first place, forget reversing them. Perhaps this version of me is fighting the trope that I must lose my best friend to become a stronger and more necessary man. Perhaps this version is unwilling to conform, and striving to be original to puncture those pre-written narratives of life. He doesn’t have to endure a tragedy to become the person he is. He doesn’t have to be a story in order to feel human — or superhuman. Pain doesn’t always have to be the cornerstone of power, does it?

My thoughts echo the premise of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, the beautifully animated film that — by being about a superhero who resists cliches and strives to rise on his own terms (without playing the darkness or diversity cards) — critiques all the risk-averse Marvel and DC reboots over the decades. The Flash is one of those symptoms, even though it recycles the protagonist’s sob story (the “our scars make us who we are” syndrome) in a fresher way. But in this post-Spider-Verse age, it’s difficult to fully appreciate a superhero movie that’s playing by the book by making it more colourful. Why not just rewrite the book, or better still, throw it away and start a new one? The only one with the courage to answer this question is a computer-generated Miles Morales, not a flesh-and-blood Barry Allen and his ilk.

Perspective makes all the difference, though. The 18-year-old Flash from the timeline in which his family stays unbroken is, actually, the more interesting and fearless one — he’s bold enough to challenge the rules of superhero storytelling and fight for a stable past. He knows no better, which is why he is the more original Barry Allen. Unfortunately, he is not the central character of this movie. The older one doesn’t want to poke the establishment (in this case, DC literature), as a result of which he will be The Flash going forward. He’s the one that has a future, because he has accepted the status quo of his identity. He complies. If that isn’t a metaphor for the times we live in, I don’t know what is.