BEFORE: Yeah, I'm under-employed so I had a chance to go see a movie on a Tuesday afternoon, which is the cheapest time to see a movie in Manhattan, once you figure in the matinee pricing and the "Discount Tuesday" promotion, I got a $19 ticket down to $7. That's a good deal if you're short on cash but you still want to keep up with your summer blockbusters. And all I had to do was return to my previous place of employment - I bought popcorn and soda, when it would have been SO easy to sneak in snacks, so I'm at least that considerate. The older ticket ladies are still there, and one of my old managers, but I didn't see any ushers or concessionaires that I recognized - well, it has been two years and that's a job with a high turnover rate. If my ex-co-workers all got out of there, good for them.
Michael Keaton carries over from "Worth".
THE PLOT: Barry Allen uses his super speed to change the past, but his attempt to save his family creates a world without super heroes, forcing him to race for his life in order to save the future.
AFTER: SPOILER ALERT, this film is still playing in movie theaters - you know, the place you used to go to watch films before they all started streaming to your phone.
I'm a bit down on myself because I'm under-employed for the next two months - I'm trying not to panic because I grabbed every shift I could during the two big festivals in May and June, so I worked so many hours that my paychecks in July were larger than normal, and I just let the bank balance build up a bit. Will it be enough to get me through to August? I'm not sure because I may not get paychecks from that job until late September, that's how the payroll works. So I still have to think about finding some temp work maybe, but I want to wait until after I serve on jury duty in mid-July. I just don't want to have to start something and then have to put it on hold. And then there's also partial unemployment payments, I should qualify for that.
Whatever - I can't fix my life in a day or a week, no matter what I want to do or try to do, so instead I'm taking baby steps each day to try and improve things. Like I can watch a movie a day, and by the end of the year that's a huge list - so each day I'm trying to also check something off the to-do list or take a step on each bigger project so that even if I can't cross off something today, I've gotten a little bit closer to crossing that thing off, eventually. (I know it's a poor excuse, but I do have jury duty coming up in July, if I took a new job then I'd very quickly have to ask for time off from that job, and then where would THAT get me?). But fixing one's life is what "The Flash" is all about -
This is really "Flash: No Way Home", and I did warn everybody that if they allowed that Spider-Man film last year to be really successful, that it would lead to more films set in the metaverse. Sure, we got "Everything Everywhere All at Once", where an Asian woman had to learn from her counterparts in parallel universes to become a better mother (is that what happened?). Anyway, that film won Best Picture, so I guess it was a success, but now we have the same concept in "The Flash", where Barry Allen has to travel the metaverse and interact with other versions of himself and other versions of the DC universe in order to become a better son? Why can't he just be better without breaking the universe?
Also, just as "No Way Home" featured every actor who'd ever been Spider-Man, suggesting that each actor's movies took place in a different parallel universe - well, sure, by all means let's bring all the various villains from those universes TOGETHER in one place, how could that possibly go south? Why, because Tom Holland's Spider-Man got exposed and Dr. Strange cast a spell? Is that enough reason to cast Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield again? And to say, "Oh, THIS is how the Spider-verse works?" I'm still not sure, it still feels like such a cash grab, and an after-thought on how to keep the old Spider-Man movies still relevant. Now here comes the "Flash" movie to do the same damn thing with Batman - every Batman movie with a different actor apparently takes place in a different DC universe. It's OK, there are at least 52 of them to spare at last count.
It's a very cheeky way to not have to do an origin movie for the Flash - that would have made the most sense, maybe, but DC instead decided to hit the ground running and go forward, not back - although we do see how Flash got his super-powers, but we see it through one Barry Allen's eyes as he tries to give super-powers to an alt-universe Barry Allen. It's a lot like how Marty McFly had to avoid the other version of himself in "Back to the Future II". Which, the movie reminds us, was a movie that almost cast Eric Stoltz as Marty McFly, and maybe did just that in an alternate version of our universe. This somehow caused a ripple effect that meant Tom Cruise was not the star of "Top Gun" in that world.
By interacting with another version of himself, Barry Allen comes to a few realizations about himself - he tends to talk fast, and not let other people finish their sentences. OK, good to know, something for him to work on - self-realization can only help. Younger Barry is also quick to leap into situations before being completely briefed on them - it must be hard asking the world's fastest man to just slow down, take a breath and make sure he fully understands the situation before leaping into it - but then again, in his defense, lives are on the line usually, so time is of the essence.
Now, in the comic books, the Flash usually used a device called a cosmic treadmill to travel in time - but here he just has to run really fast, faster than the speed of light. Oh, sure, that's simple, why didn't you just say so? But don't the physicists tell us that nothing can BE faster than the speed of light? What about the speed of dark, is that faster or slower? Anyway, just keep running faster and I guess you'll get there - er, then.
Flash means well, of course - his mother died when he was young and his father was accused of killing her, and is still in prison, so if he could only go back, and change one small thing without interacting with anybody, surely there can't be anything wrong with that, right? RIGHT? So he reasons that if only his mother had bought just ONE more can of tomatoes at the store, then his father wouldn't have gone to the store, and then he would have been at home to protect Barry's mom. This is the seductive nature of time travel - but how does Barry know that his father wouldn't have died instead, or also? NITPICK POINT: Why can't Barry just go back and not change anything, just SEE who killed his mother? Like, take a picture, wouldn't that help without destroying the timeline?
That darn butterfly effect states, though, that you can't just change one thing and hope that everything after that goes smoothly - after all, it's Barry's mom's death that inspired him to get a job in the crime lab, and then also to become a superhero. So if you take away that incident, don't you mess with Barry Allen becoming the Flash in the first place? Similarly, if you save Batman's parents, don't you also kill Batman, or at least take away the NEED for Batman? Well, the movie ends up dealing with all of these issues, eventually, it just takes its sweet time doing it.
Time, as the Michael Keaton Batman tells us, is not linear like a piece of uncooked spaghetti - and when you change something, you don't just create a branch off into a new, slightly different reality. A timeline is more like a piece of cooked spaghetti, it's curvy and it overlaps and touches the other pieces of spaghetti in the bowl and that's what the multiverse is. Once you add some pasta sauce it's all one giant mess, which, OK, seems about right for DC Comics - so every creator can tell the story THEY want to tell, and we'll just say it's a new timeline. Timelines are twisty and messy and covered in parmesan cheese, if you like that sort of thing. And we know that this is the way the universe works because the writers tell us so - notice that real scientists don't weigh in on this, because there's really no such thing as the multiverse. Then there's the Alan Parsons theory, which states that time is "flowing like a river, to the sea, until it's gone forever." That seems simple enough, but it's just too simple for comics and now movies.
This was loosely based on the "Flashpoint" crossover in the DC Comics, which the writers used to alter the DC universe temporarily, then put it back together again with some upgrades and improvements. But it's not the exact same story - in the comics Flash changes the past and finds himself in a world where Bruce Wayne was killed as a boy and Thomas Wayne, his father, became a much tougher Batman after losing his wife and son. And there was no Superman, because his spacecraft got intercepted by the guvmint and he was raised in a lab, with no sunlight or human contact.
But the film goes in a different direction - in the alt-reality that Flash created with his time-travel, there's no Superman at all, which becomes really bad news when General Zod comes to Earth (as he did during 2013's "Man of Steel) with his terraforming machines to turn the planet into New Krypton - Flash and the alt-Batman team up to track where the spaceship from Krypton landed, and bad news, it was in Russia (shades of the "Red Son" Elseworlds comic), and they go there to find not Superman, but an alt-version of Supergirl. Well, I guess you take what you can get, so Supergirl and Batman and the two Flashes take on Zod and his crew, but in a world without Superman, Wonder Woman or Aquaman, they're hopelessly outmatched.
The alt-Flash sees the solution, though - keep rewinding time and fighting the battle against Zod until they win. Sure, that's what a young Flash would do - but the older Flash realizes that rewinding time was what started all the trouble in the first place, and they could replay the battle a thousand times and never come up with a good outcome. So, inevitably, older Flash has to fix everything by going back to the divergence point and putting things back the way they were, so that the alternate reality never happens. It's a good thing they put General Zod in the film, though, because otherwise there wouldn't have been a villain, except for The Flash himself, who broke the universe trying to fix one small detail and make his life better. But he learns that you can't just change one thing without changing everything, and that's important not just for him, but for everyone who has regrets or has lost someone and wishes that things had happened differently - that's all wasted effort, for the most part, and it's a valuable lesson. On the other hand, undoing everything that was done means that I spent two and a half hours watching a film that ultimately negated itself, so where do I get a refund?
The opening sequence where Flash saves 10 babies, a nurse and a dog from a hospital wing collapse is, of course, very thrilling, and is a great display of what Flash can do with his powers, BUT the bad news is that we've seen this all before, when Quicksilver saved all of Xavier's students from an exploding building in "X-Men: Apocalypse". Essentially, it's the same scene, so couldn't they have found a better way to show us what Flash could do without ripping off a Marvel movie? Flash also has very bizarre ways of saving the falling babies, like he puts one inside a microwave (it's not plugged in, obvi) but this is a bad look, you shouldn't ever show a baby inside a microwave in a movie, it just gives people at home bad ideas. Flash also has to stop and eat before saving everybody, because food is fuel and he's running low - I get that this is the way his powers work, but it's still a bad look, grabbing a bite to eat before saving somebody's life.
We also get a look, late in the film, of the chaos that got caused, on a multiversal scale, by messing with the timestream. All of Barry's over-fixing and traveling through time causes some kind of chain collapse, and so we see giant colored spheres representing the various timelines crashing into each other - but it's a visual representation of something that we should NOT be able to see, not even from the space between the timelines. So gotta call a big NITPICK POINT on this one, because we as humans are tiny specks within the universe, we can barely see a mile in any direction, we can't see another planet without a telescope, so how the hell can we see one timeline crashing into another? Also, you just got done telling me a timeline is shaped like a piece of spaghetti, and now, all of a sudden, they're spherical? Would you please make up your mind?
Another big NITPICK POINT is that we never find out who DID kill Barry's mom. Sure, we knew it wasn't his dad, but then, who did it? Flash went through all of this and broke the universe and put it back together again, and he STILL doesn't know? Bogus.
Maybe another NITPICK POINT with Flash's powers, where getting hit by a second bolt of lightning takes away his speed powers, requiring a THIRD bolt of lightning to turn them on again. Really, his powers are THAT simple and binary, that's it's like an off/on switch? Have you tried unplugging your Flash and plugging him back in again?
Wait, wait, another NITPICK POINT that's Flash-power related. I get why Barry Allen is always late for work, because there's a building collapse or he has to do some Justice League thing at the most inconvenient time. But why is he always BEHIND in his police work? The film states that he wants to be thorough in his work at the crime lab, because he's ultra-careful that he gets the evidence right and no innocent person gets proven guilty. But he's STILL the Flash, he should STILL be able to do his work at super-speed and be thorough at the same time. He could do every test three times and still process everything faster than anyone else, so how does this even make sense? Can't he also think at super-speed if he can do everything else at super speed?
And then there's the irony that "The Flash" took so long to make - they first planned to release a film about the Flash in 2016, but then "Justice League" came out in 2017 so they moved the date of "The Flash" to 2018. Then there were re-writes and scheduling conflicts and personnel changes, and in the end 45 different writers worked on this film at various times. So the original plan was for this film to fit in with "Aquaman" and "Wonder Woman" and "Justice League", but the process took so long that it almost seems apt, that this film about multiversal collapse ended up being released just as DC/Warner decided to tear its movie universe down and start over with a new set of interlocking films. So maybe this "Flashpoint" storyline can be useful in justifying that scorched-Earth policy and the cleaning of the slate? Not sure.
I (sort of) met Michael Shannon last month - he directed a film that was in the Tribeca Film Festival, and came to the theater where I work to speak to the audience after the screening. I had just watched "Bullet Train" two weeks before, so I tried very hard not to freak out when he came out of the theater and asked me where the men's room was. It's a common enough question that's only weird because it came from General Zod.
Also starring Ezra Miller (last seen in "Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore"), Sasha Calle, Michael Shannon (last seen in "Bullet Train"), Ron Livingston (last heard in "The Tender Bar"), Maribel Verdu (last seen in "Pan's Labyrinth"), Kiersey Clemons (last seen in "Dope"), Antje Traue (last seen in "Seventh Son"), Ben Affleck (last seen in "The Tender Bar"), Jeremy Irons (last seen in "Kingdom of Heaven"), Temuera Morrison (last seen in "Aquaman"), Gal Gadot (last seen in "Shazam! Fury of the Gods"), Saoirse-Monica Jackson, Rudy Mancuso, Luke Brandon Field (last seen in "Jojo Rabbit"), Sanjeev Bhaskar (last seen in "Yesterday"), Sean Rogers, Kieran Hodgson (last seen in "See How They Run"), Ian Loh, Karl Collins, Andoni Gracia, Bastian Antonio Fuentes (last seen in "Jurassic World Dominion"), Rosie Ede, Andy Muschietti (last seen in "It Chapter Two"), Lynn Farleigh (last seen in "Miss Potter"),
with cameos from Nicolas Cage (last seen in "Val"), Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (also last seen in "Kingdom of Heaven"), Christopher Reeve, George Reeves, Helen Slater (last seen in "The Secret of My Success"), Adam West (last heard in "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood"), REDACTED (last seen in "Scandalous: The Untold Story of the National Enquirer"), ALSO REDACTED (last seen in "Sweet Girl")
RATING: 6 out of 10 candy bars from the vending machine
