Fifteen years after Iron Man first made its bow in theaters, it’s safe to say that the superhero genre has mostly hit creative stagnation. Small-scale stories have been replaced by CGI-drenched battlefields intended to set up another decade of movies (Quantumania, looking at you), and a fixation with “multiverse” storytelling—admittedly a comic book mainstay—has robbed individual installments of any serious stakes. (After all, what does it matter if someone dies? You can always get them back from some reality or other.)
Given all that, I was pretty cynical heading into The Flash, which was widely billed as a reshuffle of the narrative cards to allow for James Gunn’s DC reboot. I’m not a fan of Gunn’s aesthetic sensibility—if Zack Snyder’s style trended Nietzschean, Gunn’s wallows in the grotesque—and expected The Flash to be little more than a cynical cash grab that left a bad taste behind.
Imagine my surprise, then, when The Flash turned out to be one of the best summer blockbusters in years. Somehow, it manages to be funny, heartfelt, and even awe-inspiring—a throwback to a time before the need for “connected universes” swamped the need for moral and metaphysical drama.
Picking up sometime after the events of Justice League, this installment finds the eponymous hero, Barry Allen (Ezra Miller), struggling to balance superhero responsibilities with his quest to free his wrongfully convicted father from prison. With legal strategies running short, Barry hits on a dangerous idea: if he can step backwards in the flow of time far enough, he can change the past to stop his mother from being murdered and his father from being convicted in the first place.
Of course, he tries precisely that, but the reality to which he returns is very different than he expected. There’s a younger version of himself (also Ezra Miller), who picks up super-speed powers of his own—but there’s also a strange dearth of the “metahumans” that populated Barry’s prior reality. Superman, Aquaman, Wonder Woman, and the rest are nowhere in sight.
Alas, those heroes will be sorely missed. As it happens, Barry has reentered the time-stream shortly before the events of Man of Steel, where Superman fought General Zod (Michael Shannon) to prevent the destruction of the planet. Zod promptly shows up, but in this reality there’s no Last Son of Krypton to oppose him: Barry has created a reality with supervillains, but no superheroes.
Fortunately, it’s not as if there’s no help to be found. Enter Michael Keaton, reprising his role as the 1990s-era Batman of Batman and Batman Returns. (Yes, it’s a nervy choice to revisit the character after Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, but let that slide.) After “old Barry” and “young Barry” manage to rouse him from his Howard Hughes-style isolation, the aging Bruce Wayne reactivates the old Batcave and prepares for battle. There’s no Superman in this reality, but there is a Supergirl (an impressive Sasha Calle), and just maybe this makeshift team will be able to go toe-to-toe with Zod.
The Flash was helmed by Andy Muschietti, the director behind It and It: Chapter Two, and it features all of his cinematic strengths and none of Gunn’s distinctive weaknesses. There’s a real sense of wonder onscreen (particularly once Supergirl shows up) and sheer joie de vivre that seems to have been lacking in so many franchise outings lately. Yes, the CGI is iffy—especially in the film’s third act, when it becomes distractingly poor—but this is forgivable enough given that the characters and story, rather than the spectacle, are the real attraction here.
And the characters and story are good enough that, despite all the whiz-bang that fills the screen by the end, The Flash is genuinely poignant. When all’s said and done, this is a story about accepting reality in its tragedy and in its beauty—about saying goodbye to loved ones and moving forward.
In the current superhero storytelling environment, this is radical stuff. At the risk of moderate spoilers, Muschietti’s take on the “multiverse” is starkly different from Marvel’s—so different, in fact, that I hesitate to even use the same word. This multiverse operates according to a logic that is precisely the opposite of Marvel’s: where the Marvelverse allows tampering with timelines to get better outcomes—such as reversing Thanos’s famous snap—in Muschietti’s multiverse, some events are fixed. The hand of fate—or, one could say equally accurately, the hand of Providence—lies over all timelines, ordaining some outcomes and foreclosing others. While the precise way in which they happen might change, the events themselves must be.
(I can’t resist pointing out that this is an Interesting and compelling way of depicting the distinction between primary and secondary causality: the arrangement of affairs to produce certain particular results doesn’t turn everyone into puppets or deprive them of their agency—their “gnomic wills,” in theological terms.)
The upshot of all this is that characters’ lives and decisions matter—they can be consonant with this overarching plan, or can attempt to circumvent it. And efforts towards the latter, as the film’s third act makes clear, can lead to real horror (the phrase “metaphysical corruption” is particularly apt in one character’s case). This is more inventive and thought-provoking stuff than we’ve gotten from the genre in years.
At the time of this writing, The Flash was headed for box-office bomb territory, likely failing to earn back its massive budget. And this is a tremendous shame. Frankly, after the last few years of big-budget movies, I’d started to wonder whether I’d lost my sense of wonder—if somewhere along the moviegoing way, the thrill of big-screen adventure had just worn off. The Flash convinced me otherwise.
By a considerable margin, this is the best superhero flick since Avengers: Endgame. Highly recommended.
Literary Analysis 