The Flash: The Multiverse Madness Invades DC, and It's Still Fun
By Chris Knight
Rating: B-plus
The day may arrive when I tire of the multiverse shenanigans of comic-book cinematic universes. But it hasn’t dawned on me yet.
Just two weeks after the release of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, and barely a year since we saw Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, comes The Flash, latest from Warner/DC. And boy, does it lean into its alternate-universe stratagem.
The bare-bones plot is that Barry Allen (a.k.a. The Flash) learns that he can run faster than the speed of light and thus travel backwards in time, something his friend Bruce “Batman” Wayne (Ben Affleck) counsels against.
But Barry’s mother was murdered when he was a kid, and his father has been wrongly imprisoned for the crime, so he decides to run a little errand, making a small change in the past that he hopes will undo her death.
Well, of course it doesn’t work. You want 144 minutes of “and then everything went swimmingly?” Instead, Barry winds up trapped between our present and his own past, in a universe where his mother is alive, but his 18-year-old self doesn’t yet have superhuman powers. Oh, and Bruce Wayne is now played by Michael Keaton.
It’s a clever conceit, and it makes Keaton one of the most well-travelled superheroes in any universe. Not only was he Tim Burton’s choice of Batman in two movies in 1989 and 1992, but he sort of reprised the role in 2014’s Birdman, playing a washed-up action hero. Then, for good measure (or was it for evil?) he appeared as Vulture in Spider-Man: Homecoming and (briefly) in Morbius. At this rate, I wouldn’t be surprised to see him fight himself.
In The Flash, he explains to Barry that changing the past doesn’t just create a new branch of time like in Back to the Future — it produces a fulcrum, “a retro-causal” wave that propagates backwards as well as forwards in time. It’s screenwriter BS, of course, but sounds just believable enough to let us dispense with the “Yeah but what about —?” questions and just move forward. And also back.
This pseudo-science is why Batman is suddenly much older and possessing different Bat-technology. It’s why there is no Wonder Woman. It’s why Superman has been replaced with his Kryptonian-cousin (Sasha Calle), though she still flies with the odd one-foot-raised posture that was Kal-El’s trademark.
It also allows for a bit of comic retro-causal casting — in this spaghetti strand of the multiverse, Eric Stoltz kept his job playing Marty McFly in Back to the Future, while Michael J. Fox was cast in Footloose, and Kevin Bacon made Top Gun. No word on what happened to Tom Cruise, but I like to think he got to play Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High while Sean Penn went and made Mask in Stoltz’s place, thus closing the loop.
In any case, the whole in-the-past nature of The Flash’s plot makes for a nice push-and-pull between small stakes and large. On the one hand, this is merely the story of a young man who tries to save his mother, and then has to find his way back home.
On the other, the return of Michael Shannon as Krypton’s nefarious General Zod means the fate of Earth once again hangs in the balance, just as it did the first time he showed up in 2013’s Man of Steel. (Or, if you prefer, in 1978’s Superman— and believe it or not there are nods to that version of the universe as well.)
This bifurcation extends through the movie as a whole. There are some crazy-cool special effects in an early scene in which The Flash saves a truly insane number of babies from certain death — take that, Battleship Potemkin, and also The Untouchables, and Naked Gun 33 1/3! But some of the Batman effects look like they came from the same era as Keaton’s caped crusader.
And while the movie motors along with admirable pacing for most of its lengthy running time, it stumbles in the final act, which is marred by even more bad special effects and a maudlin reunion. The movie (like oh so many others) would benefit from a 20-minute trim.
You may have noticed that I haven’t yet addressed the elephant that is the well documented and bizarre behaviour of star Ezra Miller, who has been arrested for disorderly conduct and assault, and well as being charged with burglary and served with at least two restraining orders.
It’s been a thorn in the side of the studio, and it doesn’t help when The Flash tells a rescued nurse that she should seek help for mental health issues from the trauma of her ordeal — a reminder that Miller is said to have recently done something similar.
But if I spent the first 30 minutes of The Flash pondering the strange real-life conduct of its lead actor, that still left almost two full hours to sink into the story. Whatever Miller may be like off the set, the character is very watchable, though it remains an open question whether Warner Bros. will recast The Flash for the next film.
Maybe Eric Stoltz is free? Stranger things have happened in some universes.
The Flash. Directed by Andy Muschietti. Starring Ezra Miller, Michael Keaton and Sasha Calle. In theatres Friday, June 16.