Movie Review: ‘The Flash’

Review by Lauryn Angel

Let’s get this out of the way: Michael Keaton’s Batman is the best thing about Andy Mushcietti’s The Flash. It may just been nostalgia on my part, but seeing my favorite Batman on screen again elevated the movie from just okay, to almost great. Even if Keaton hadn’t put on the Batsuit, I would have been happy see him pottering around Wayne Manor. But he did don the Batsuit, and despite Bruce Wayne’s claims that he’s “retired” from his vigilante ways, he definitely did not let his bat-skills get rusty. Is it fan service? Sure. But it’s still a lot of fun.

Barry Allen’s solo film is definitely more character-driven than plot-driven. Ezra Miller, whose personal troubles have cast a long shadow over the film, plays two versions of Allen, on)e older and wiser than the other. And while the quick-quipping Allen was great fun in Justice League, two Barry Allens for over two hours is almost too much. Luckily, the older Barry comes to the same conclusion and pulls back a bit.

This is yet another multiverse pic, and the instigating incident is the impending appeal trial of Barry’s dad Henry (Ron Livingston) for the murder of his wife. On the eve of the trial, Barry discovers that if he runs fast enough, he can rewind time. Against the advice of his pal Batman (Ben Affleck), Barry decides to go back in time and make a small change to prevent his mother’s murder. But Barry returns to a very different timeline.

Unlike other recent superhero stories, The Flash doesn’t jump between universes. Instead, the Barrys remain in the new timeline Barry created, and the fun comes from the small differences – such as who starred in Back to the Future or the names of various products. But it’s the big differences that cause Barry to do some soul-searching and realize the true cost of his happiness.

The Flash is one of the better DC films, but it still has a lot of problems, most of them due to bad CGI. There’s a scene early in the film involving babies, and the CGI is so bad, that it eliminates any sense of jeopardy for the babies and is instead laughable. Some of the figures in the Chronobowl sequences are so poorly rendered that I had to wonder if the effects were finished when I saw the film at an early screening.