No movie has elicited such a profoundly negative array of emotions within me more than Warner Bros.' mortally offensive, The Flash. Directed by Andy Muschietti and written by John Francis Daley, Joby Harold, Jonathan Goldstein, and Christina Hodson, The Flash is a decade-defining super feature that should end a disastrous run for WB's failure to launch a cinematic universe. A universe that started ten years ago with Zack Snyder's Man of Steel and will end right where it began without the merit, confidence, and belief in artistic creation that emboldens a filmmaker like Snyder.
The potential of cinema should inspire any filmmaker and the limitless guides of subjective perception that'll blossom into a motion picture. Any writer should be interested in the nature of humanity and how to map a functional story for a cast and crew to maneuver within the blueprints of their work. Any producer should fund a project they'd be more than happy to attach their name to so that the visual language of their storytellers can reach thousands. No such people impassioned by the limitless potential of cinema exist in relation to The Flash. It's a top-to-bottom disaster within the context of the movie and the scope of real-world implications that has plagued this production for years. It should have died on the assembly line, and its release should inspire new legislation regarding the abuse of technology in film.
As melodramatic as possible, movies are so powerful, they can change the world. They exist to create and uncover the fabric of our cognition as mortal beings on a plane of coincidental impossibilities. So what happens when a movie doesn't believe in what movies are capable of and only believes them to be monetary pipelines to larger-than-life superegos with deep pockets? They kill films and send them to the electric chair to fry the brain and rot the body for every cent they can torture out of a daily consumer.
That move requires so much marketing finesse and buzzword backing by Hollywood favorites that it's exactly what they did to generate hype for The Flash. Tom Cruise, Stephen King, Terry Crews, and new DC-head, James Gunn, validated this movie months before its release. A verbal promise to get butts in seats because they believe that, or they knew they had such a bomb on their hands that they paid enough people good money to say anything for a quick buck and a headline. Surely no movie could be poor if you've got this many reputable sources telling you it's one of the most outstanding achievements in superhero film history! The Flash is no such achievement. It is an embarrassment with sideshow act performances and a pathetic understanding of motivated storytelling. It's a movie that turns back the clock until it no longer matters for Barry Allen, as it kills all that he loves and all that the audience knows one step at a time.
The amount of miscalculations and visible misprints in a movie this expensive is inexcusable. The film starts in media res and quickly backtracks into a redundant origin story for the next hour. It has to retread the past for the Barry Allen we knew from Zack Snyder's Justice League and the Barry Allen he'll discover in a different universe. Second Barry has an entirely new passage to gaining powers in his universe. This double dose of exposition is prolonged and featureless. It goes for cheap gags with sleepy roommates, face planting into walls, and revisiting the origins of the scarlet speedster with all of the mumbling, bumbling, Barry-isms that make him an unbelievable fool compared to the forensic scientist we thought he was. Ezra Miller does the character no favors, either. Pushing aside his tyrannical crimes during the film's post-production for just a moment, his weepy faces and dramatic outbursts are a career worst. No matter how many water drops they plant in Ezra's eyes or poorly strung together chords of somber emotions try and force you to cry, the filmmakers' own doing nullifies the performance. Not only did they fail to tell a compelling story about Barry Allen, but they also forced him into four to five other movies before they ever tried discovering the identity of this character.
The writer's room and Muschietti showcase an apparent disinterest in telling a story about The Flash. This Barry Allen only exists in relation to other movies because they have no confidence in their hero (and lead actor). Think about superhero films of the past that build their settings, score, iconography, and motivation around the main character. Sam Raimi's Spider-Man fuses New York and Danny Elfman's score into Peter Parker so he can stand confidently postured on his legs. Tim Burton's gothically engineered nightmare of Michael Keaton's Batman is a world all its own in the scope of comic-book cinema. None of these fundamental, key elements establish the Flash as an identifiable hero beyond his red rubber suit and lightning bolts at his feet. Central City is any CGI backlot with a motor mouth barista and uninteresting cityscapes. Benjamin Wallfisch's score is replaced by a 'Now That's What I Call Music!' soundtrack, the supporting cast reeks of sidewalk talent pulled off the streets, the only villain in the movie is a Superman staple, the tone is in shambles and the story an unprecedented slog of superhero slop on every conceivable level of merits that hardly qualifies as 'filmmaking.' It's a canonically infused, financially abused, and creatively inept chamber of soul-sucking disintegration.
Earlier, I mentioned that movies are a powerful tool. What happens when that tool is misused to defile the tombs of the past and mold them into a digital recreation that defaces the audience's trauma?
Despite the motion of their heroic acts, trauma etches a restraint around the heroes - constricted by the binds of their experiences. The audience doesn't have the ability heroes do, and great stories allow us to project a little bit of ourselves into those boots, capes, cowls, masks, and armor to ignite the catharsis of double meanings. When allowed to feel your insecurities, turmoil, trauma, or splinters on screen, heroes transform into electrifying conduits of emotional expression. They shock our nerves and highlight the act of heroism despite all that has defined the foundations of their path. The Flash unearths that foundation and toggles the levers of memory by manipulating the hollowed form of escapism as a mischievously constructed ruse of storytelling without understanding the totality of who these people were and what their symbols meant to people, not just in the Chronobowl sequence that has made the rounds on social media, but from the sound of the gun.
To know that Christopher Reeve spent the last part of his life seated in a wheelchair just to be unseated as a phantom form of himself in a meaningless creation within the context of the movie is robbery. It is insulting to the memory of who he was as cinema's first man that could fly and what that memory has meant to decades of viewers since 1978. This segment needs to be more cohesive in the context of the movie. Barry peers into the colliding multiverse and sees these zombified resurrections of unfinished memories and emotionally hollow icons where the camera lingers on them to 'wow' us. This scene is for those that CC James Gunn in their tweets, hoping that he'll recognize their stream of tweets to celebrate this hazardous waste of time - a premature celebration of DC's false savior. This team went out of their way to relay these ghoulish models to us instead of using it as a moment to allow Barry to peer into the multiverse, where his path branches in the totality of the universe. The movie debases its catalog of banner films instead of giving the story an ending where the hero's foundation passes through different forms of himself as a signifier of ultimate consequence.
This false note evolves when Barry returns to that fateful day at the supermarket to make peace with never seeing his Mom again. He accepts the tragic fate of her death by removing the can of tomatoes that caused this event and forgoes any lesson he may have learned by conveniently placing the can where the camera can solidify his father's alibi. The Flash is so unconcerned with making emotional sense they strip meaning from the rightful close of a story where the hero accepts his fate as a chance to pander to the audience (again) with another ridiculous cameo. Like many other (expensive) movies being released, The Flash's ending is inconclusive. It has no interest in expelling any thematic juice from the infrastructure of a story. It only wants to allude to general ideas about 'trauma,' 'time,' and 'fate' without giving their multiverse of madness a reason. No one in this film learns anything that would reshape their perspective because it's all undone. It's storytelling soup and visual noise rumbling and tumbling over lines of exposition for so long you've lost track of all developmental procedures that would typically inhabit a film interested in establishing meaning over expelling mediocre dialogue sandwiched between the most alarming visual effects you've seen in some time.
As the second film released in as many weeks about the multiverse, this tells me that these films are exposing the interiority of our trauma to lay the groundwork for perpetual suffering. Harvesting the corpses of their icons and an unfinished Superman project also tells me that WB views their art as a visible asset stripped of the humanity that reached out and may have contextualized a moment in time for us where the hero embodied something personally challenging for a viewer. Look at how the film recycled Man of Steel's final act and removed the collateral damage where an immigrant Superman faced the dogmatic philosophies of General Zod. The thematic underpinnings are abandoned because everyone involved in this disaster only views films as basic machinations within the scope of film history rather than the tools meant to ignite the spark of our most creative senses. As they were before, when the interest in storytelling meant more in service of character and less about defacing every audience member who wasted their money on this film.
As an individual, my anxieties, trauma, or overstimulated triggers AREN'T salivating over the defiled corpses of my memories to appear in movies. I don't 'heal' by seeing recognizable faces like Michael Keaton or hearing musical cues that 'remind' me of how I felt when I was a teething baby that shits in my Huggies. Beyond superheroes, film is conscious of existing on its terms when they are made with the intention of finding new worlds to breathe unique life into. When a film takes the shells of its characters and misplaces them in other characters' worlds where everything only exists as a preemptive obituary for the past, you have denied the mortality that is inherent in the creation of seeing life on the big screen.
Endings are not always the means to new beginnings. Especially when life's endings outside the realm of major motion pictures are conclusive, movies should not be working to resurrect dead people for our sake. They aren't owed to us. The very real people that once inhabited these roles imbued with the powers of filmmaking and super alike, were people outside of their iconography. We recognize them as symbols, but they once lived and breathed as people. People with their own dilemmas maneuvering the unfair shakes of life where they couldn't turn to the big screen and gawk at a symbol issued on a slow-motion platter because the art being made at the time inspired them to find their peace and project that onto their art. The Flash doesn't provoke or rekindle any of the internal drama we face because it believes that if film can nurture and milk the audience through their trauma, they don't have to try and help us push through the passages of discovering who we are outside the movies.
They believe that if we recognize images and hear enough memorable sounds, we will work through the 'healing' process just like their hero. They couldn't be more wrong. The Flash is an anti-life equation - a film of the belief that death is a fulcrum of time meant to be revisited and manipulated until our corporate overlords condition us into believing that our salvation comes in the form of a neverending afterlife they've created for us without our consent.
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