OUT NOW: The Flash (Andy Muschietti, 2023)

Something is broken.

Within the Hollywood system, within capitalism itself.

Even before we get to the zombified recreation of Christopher Reeve.

This movie is everything wrong with contemporary Hollywood.

As we contend with the implications of AI, this movie is symptomatic of the space that technology will quickly occupy.

As Hollywood becomes less an industry and more a branch of larger corporations, the room for innovation and creativity has been reduced dramatically.

Creativity has never been the centre of Hollywood, but the industry used to be run by people who wanted to make movies. They wanted to make movies that made money - and they would spread their resources across a variety of different genres, budgets and specific audiences.

We have gone from remakes and sequels to focusing on an increasingly smaller number of films based on previous works.

The money men want sure things - but now that means mining the same things over and over again.

In the past, filmmakers would try their own spin on popular hits, now we do not even get that.

The success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Star Wars has given other companies the wrong roadmaps for success.

The subsequent rise of the multiverse as a concept in popular films is not a creative notion but a way to monetise and rehabilitate past hits (or attempts at hits). Speaking of which, Spider-Man: No Way Home had a whiff of staleness about its inclusion of earlier Spider-Men and their respective villains. There was a vague sense that it was a con, a movie based on an over-reliance on nostalgia for emotional responses, rather than actual drama.

If that movie nudged at that door to that idea, The Flash kicks it wide open.

Ezra Miller is a human disaster area - a toxic confection that the studio is content to stand behind. If the movie around Miller was half as good as the movies it pays tribute to (and I am not that big a fan of Batman ‘89), it would be easier to dismiss the whole confection as a misfortune - a movie torpedoed by casting a POS.

Instead, one is forced to contend with a movie-as-trailer built around said POS as host to a series of characters and moments designed to appeal to fan memories.

There are not even slivers of moments where it feels like the film finds something human, something with texture and contradiction. I am usually able to pull nuggets out of movies like this but The Flash is so facile and incestuously enraptured with the company’s back catalogue that it was a fruitless search.  

This is a movie designed for a perverse kind of wish fulfilment - what if Michael Keaton came back as Batman?; what if Nicholas Cage’s Superman had existed?; what if Christopher Reeve were still alive (and not disabled)?

Whatever is workable about the title character’s story feels tertiary. Bits and pieces of an interesting drama have been wedged into disparate corners to facilitate the inclusion of Michael Keaton’s Batman.

Kiersey Clemons has about five minutes of screen time - she is barely involved at all, and I forgot about her until I reached this part of the ran… review.

Filled with jokes that make the movie more aggravating (and feel like attempts to soften the star after his offscreen controversies), Miller’s performance defined by extremes - his teen version is heightened to the level of cartoon, and reduced to being a stand-in for Batman fans to gauck at the guest star.

Sasha Calle looks cool but has little to do as Kara Zor-El.

And then there is Michael Keaton.

Keaton’s character exists to facilitate a refraction of nostalgia, blending meme-level references of 1989’s Batman (‘You wanna get nuts?’), and a desire to recraft his Batman in ways closer to more contemporary iterations. 

There is nothing to his character, or the decision to include him, that adds to a deeper understanding of Barry Allen’s story.

This movie feels closer to getting all your action figures and having Keaton-era Batman fight Michael Shannon’s Zod.

The film’s inherent cheapness is matched by its look.

As it progresses, the film looks like a perverse parody of criticisms levelled at Marvel.

There is a sense of intangibility as virtual cameras hurtle around vaguely defined, overly lit computer-generated environments.

The third act is a disaster to look at - characters are poorly rendered, with flattened faces and angular, hard lines around their edges.

Watching this movie felt like the end: not just of this run of comic book movies; or of Miller’s career; my hope is that 2023 and The Flash are the end of a way of making Hollywood movies.

Movies which are solely about stroking a specific viewer’s ego, movies which are only interested in regurgitating familiar characters, and movies made by people who take their workers (like the VFX artists who worked on The Flash) for granted.

Hopefully this is rock bottom. Hopefully.