Movies are expensive, time-consuming experiences. Aren’t we entitled to complain if we don’t receive our money’s worth? I think so. The Scarlett Speedster’s first solo installment in the DC extended universe warrants a few complaints.
First, Andy Muschietti claims The Flash’s (bad) CGI is meant to reflect the “distorted . . . lights and textures” from the Flash’s perspective. Unfortunately, this fails to account for the lackluster CGI in scenes when the Flash is not speeding about. Nice try, Andy, but no cigar.
Visual effects aside, Ezra Miller’s interpretation of Barry Allen is a stark departure from Grant Gustin’s CW incarnation. The former is whiny, odd, and overly talkative; the latter is endearing, funny, and soft-spoken. Miller would have done well to emulate Gustin’s performance, though one wonders if the intolerability of Miller’s Flash is related to his own abysmal character. In an age of cancel culture, where infractions far less severe than Miller’s mile-long rap sheet warrant summary dismissal, one wonders why a better — both ethically and professionally — actor couldn’t be cast to replace Miller. Surely, such a change could have been easily explained away with a little handwaving and multiverse gobbledygook.
Ezra Miller’s casting, however egregious, is not the film’s biggest pitfall. The Flash’s confused, inconsistent treatment of free will, determinism, and responsibility — themes shared by Spiderman: Across the Spider-Verse — is even more frustrating than its grating protagonist.
Spoiler alert!
Taking inspiration from the 2011 Flashpoint comic and the 2013 animated movie, Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox, Barry goes back in time to prevent his mother’s murder, with catastrophic results. Bruce Wayne (now Michael Keaton again instead of Ben Affleck, because of multiverse shenanigans) explains the consequences of time travel with a spaghetti-based analogy in the movie’s most cogent, best-performed, and least-nauseating scenes. After trying and failing several times to stop villainous Kryptonian interloper General Zod and his army from destroying the planet (in a replay of the events of 2013’s Man of Steel), Barry realizes the only way to save both the world and the multiverse is to allow his mother to be murdered, thereby correcting the timeline, and straightening out the spaghetti, so to speak.
If this is how the movie ended, it might still constitute an insightful meditation on amor fati: “love of fate.” There are few things more tragic than the murder of one parent and the wrongful incarceration of the other. Although Barry possesses the ability to rewrite history, he chooses to accept his own reality after discovering that it is the best of all possible worlds — the alternative being the annihilation of the entire planet. We aren’t confronted with the Flash’s choice; we don’t run at relativistic speeds and the fate of the planet does not hinge on our decisions. But this is precisely what drives home the moral of accepting the past as immutable, inexorable, and necessary that much more compelling: Even if we could change the past, we ultimately wouldn’t want to.
Except this isn’t how The Flash ends.
When Barry goes back in time, the audience believes he is setting everything back to exactly how it was before his time-travel shenanigans. But this isn’t the case: Barry lets his mom die but manipulates the past such that his father’s alibi is corroborated in the present. As Barry walks out of the courtroom, he is surprised by evidence of a new timeline: George Clooney, back from 1997’s Batman & Robin, is Bruce Wayne instead of Ben Affleck (or Michael Keaton). I don’t know why Barry is surprised; he and the audience spent the past two hours and 15 minutes learning that the smallest interventions in the past inevitably alter the timeline. What I do finding surprising is the writers’ decision to render meaningless the entire plot of their film while making its protagonist imbecilic and irresponsible in addition to irredeemably annoying.
Points off for adding insult to injury.
A word to the wise: Go see Across the Spider-Verse in theaters or watch The Flashpoint Paradox on Amazon Prime for a coherent treatment of free will and determinism.