Flashback
Was The Flash a waste of time? I don't know
Some good things: Sasha Calle is a fresh charismatic face as Kara. She recalls Bruce Wayne's reluctant admiration of her cousin in Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns: "There's just the sun and the sky and him, like he's the only reason it's all here"-- only she doesn't ruin anything by talking; unlike her cousin she's a newly hatched chick who can go either way, deadly or demure, perhaps a combination of both.
Michael Keaton-- welcome back, even if that's a stunt double doing your action sequences for you. Lined faces with wary eyes are a rare gift in comic book movies today, the creases having only deepened after almost thirty years. A lot of history is evoked thru surrounding details-- the cobwebs, the neglect, the airless feel of a life the world has left behind. Michael Gough's Alfred is remembered through a faded photograph; the weight of Bruce's isolation is implied in throwaway words, that Gotham "is one of the safest cities in the world." Again recall Frank Miller's comic, and Dr. Wolper's lunatic theory that the public psyche is "a vast moist membrane" which Batman has dealt "a vicious blow...a whole generation of young people will be bent to the matrix of Batman's pathological self-delusion." What if Wolper was right all along? Does Bruce brood over his city, knowing his absence keeps things quiet, the tone of his deliberately hidden life informed by the passing of his one remaining surrogate parent? I feel a whole world of story in this brief passage, and keeping it brief only makes the teasing glimpse all the more memorable.
As for Ezra Miller-- yes he's a creep and a jerk; his performance onscreen tho sells the movie, from comic white-collar worker perennially late for his day job to annoying adolescent hyped at the idea of becoming a superhero to griefstricken son mourning his beloved mother. Whole plot hinges on whether or not we believe these incarnations of Barry Allen through differing points along his timeline; some won't, can't blame them for it, but I do, and I suspect Miller (Ezra not Frank) was instrumental.
The story--well Dr. Who dealt with the premise before, in Nick Hurran's "The Day of the Doctor" (from a script by Steven Moffat) and "Father's Day;" before that there's Shane Carruth's extraordinary (and extraordinarily low-cost) Primer, and before that Robert Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps" (Carruth's is arguably the most intricate, Heinlein's arguably the earliest, Moffat's the funniest). The script by Christina Hodson is a streamlined version of Geoff Johns' Flashpoint comic series-- have not read them, but based on the screenplay it's a reasonably entertaining example of the subgenre.
Arguably the weakest link in this (when you think about it) fairly solid daisy chain of talent is Andy Muschietti's direction. Saw his horror short Mama, liked it; not a fan of the feature based on that short (even with Guillermo del Toro producing). Have not caught the It adaptations, but from what I've seen he doesn't have a distinct enough visual style to make the whole shebang take flight. Allen running on his Speed Force looks faintly ridiculous, with Miller miming a leisurely loping gait and the whole world whizzing by as if on rear projection (or the digital equivalent); the orb that forms round Allen representing his diverging timelines is an intriguing initial image, but when orbs from alternate universes arrive and start colliding with each other the whole thing feels like a battle of multi-colored disco balls, or a deleted scene involving 3D holograms from Logan's Run.
Too bad so close, but the sight of Keaton's grizzled mug prompts me to think about what remains my favorite superhero movie of any universe (take a wild effing guess). Whereas The Flash ends in a brutal twenty-minute (feels like an hour) desert showdown between Kryptonians and the US military, Batman Returns strings along a series of visual gags (a Batarang strikes down three thugs, is captured by a dolled-up poodle; a deviled clown spews fire at bystanders-- Batman spins his vehicle around, roasts the horned creature where he stands with the car exhaust) that carom into the next plot point. It's almost as if Tim Burton wasn't really interested in fist fights or plot (insert horrified emoji here) so much as he's interested in gags like clockwork toys marching straight out of a boy's nightmare, a gothic mix of the grotesque and the childlike. When bat meets cat, Burton kicks things up a notch: suddenly the fights are frankly sexual encounters, Bruce and Selina flirting and sparring like screwball comedy lovers with martial-arts training. Returns' ending doesn't make a lick of sense but I suspect it isn't meant to; we're in love with the characters (or at least I am), and all we want is some kind of apotheosis for each according to his or her spirit animal: for the penguin, an icewater grave, for the cat a drastically reduced (but stubbornly viable) lifespan, for the bat eternal damnation.
The Flash for all I know is the DCU's (or Warner/Discovery's) $220 million idea of what passes for entertainment. Returns offers Burton's idiosyncratic take: an alternate universe where digital effects are minimal and visual texture gorgeous; an alternate universe where logic is shoved out a high window and bats and cats and penguins reign supreme, exchanging comic banter and karate blows and kisses like they mean it. Now that's a world worth altering one's timeline for.
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