The Flash
As The Flash processes the concept of a temporal paradox, his film puts the fun back into the multiverse.
Time for a change: Ezra Miller meets Ezra Miller. (Image courtesy of Warner Bros.)
“Not every problem has a solution. Sometimes you have to let go,” Nora Allen (Maribel Verdú) tells her young son Barry. It is one of the last things she says, moments before she is stabbed to death by an intruder. Then Barry’s father (Ron Livingston) is accused of her murder and is sent to prison, essentially robbing Barry of both his parents on the same day. That was then. However, the grown-up Barry (Ezra Miller) refuses to heed his mother’s advice, especially when he discovers that his alter ego, The Flash, has the ability to reverse time, thanks to his supersonic speed (think Speedy Gonzales, or Sonic the Hedgehog). So The Flash does just that, because he is a problem solver – which is precisely why he took that job as a forensic investigator for the Central City police. He is not content to let his emotional scars define him…
Left to mop up the minor chores of everyday chaos in Gotham City – while Batman, Wonder Woman and Superman are off dealing with bigger problems – Barry’s heroism goes largely unacknowledged. And the opening scene is quite the curtain raiser. While waiting to boost his calorie intake at a local sandwich bar, he flies off to intercept “a baby shower” – a precipitation of new-born infants plummeting from the maternity ward atop a collapsing hospital block. Intercut with this is a sequence featuring Batman (Ben Affleck) charging through the streets on his Batmobile to apprehend a gang of homicidal thieves.
The Flash certainly has his uses, but if he can reverse time and bring his mother back from the dead (and thus save his father from prison), he intends to do so. And he’s not convinced by the cod philosophy of Batman who reasons that “all the scars we have make us who we are.” And so Andy Muschietti’s The Flash is another time-travelling blockbuster, but one that is very aware of its cinematic precedents. When Barry does manage to travel back to 2013 and is reunited with his parents, he also encounters his younger self. But this year is not the 2013 that Barry himself lived through. His younger self is well genned-up on time travel thanks to Back to the Future, the 1985 sci-fi hit with Eric Stoltz. OK, so Eric Stoltz was originally cast as Marty McFly, but wasn’t he fired and replaced by Michael J. Fox? So Barry finds himself in an alternate timeline, a timeline in which Batman now looks like Michael Keaton (as in Tim Burton’s 1985 Batman) and the world is about to be taken over by General Zod (Michael Shannon). As Ben Affleck’s Batman had warned, going back in time could “destroy everything.”
As a superhero, The Flash is an engaging one, chiefly because he is an underdog. He recognises that he is “the janitor of the Justice League” and at work and in social circles he is awkward and still a virgin (in spite of his adoring female fans). But he also has an enormous heart and is determined to right as many wrongs as he can, even if his attempts go unrecognised. As the actor Ezra Miller now goes by the non-binary pronoun ‘they’, it is confusing that they play two versions of the same protagonist, so that ‘they’ become ‘theys.’ Be that as it may, Miller makes an eager and touching superhero, a figure able to save the world if only somebody would hand him a candy bar (to supply those necessary calories).
There are tons of surprises (no spoilers here), and a steady stream of in-jokes, many of which are more likely to connect with older viewers who have grown up with the DC Comics catalogue. And in spite of the film’s flirtation with the space-time continuum and the multiverse, it manages to feel fresh – and is never short of a good jest.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Ezra Miller, Sasha Calle, Michael Shannon, Ron Livingston, Maribel Verdú, Kiersey Clemons, Antje Traue, Michael Keaton, Saoirse-Monica Jackson, Rudy Mancuso, Temuera Morrison, Jeremy Irons, Ben Affleck, Gal Gadot, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Andy Muschietti, Nicolas Cage, George Clooney, Jason Momoa.
Dir Andy Muschietti, Pro Barbara Muschietti and Michael Disco, Screenplay Christina Hodson, from a story by John Francis Daley, Jonathan Goldstein and Joby Harold, Ph Henry Braham, Pro Des Paul D. Austerberry, Ed Jason Ballantine and Paul Machliss, Music Benjamin Wallfisch, Costumes Alexandra Byrne, Sound John Marquis, Nancy Nugent and Brandon Jones, Dialect coach Roisin Carty.
Warner Bros. Pictures/DC Studios/Double Dream/The Disco Factory-Warner Bros.
144 mins. USA. 2023. UK and US Rel: 16 June 2023. Cert. 12A.
