2023-06-15 22:10:55
James Gunn has said of Flash that “it’s probably one of the best superhero movies ever made.” Stephen King assures that it is “sincere, funny and amazing”, that he “has loved it”. David Zaslav has also given his support, and Tom Cruise has gone so far as to indicate that “these are the kinds of films we need now”, without clarifying exactly what he means. First of all, it would be necessary to specify what role they all occupy and what is their relationship with the new movie attached to the superheroic universe of DC and Warner.
Gunn, who recently said goodbye to Marvel with the volume 3 of Guardians of the Galaxy, is since the end of 2022 the president of DC Studios. King has, for his part, a good relationship with Andy Muschietti (director of Flash) after he adapted his great novel, It, within the same Warner of which David Zaslav is currently CEO. Lastly, Cruise once Top Gun: Maverick ended his fight with Paramount for the highest grossing of last year prior to Avatar. the sense of water, is considered the savior of the Hollywood industry. He represents, today, the great cinema spectacle.
The most interesting of Flash It’s not that the resulting film is much (very much) worse than what these celebrities claimed. The interesting thing is that one major Hollywood has embarked on such a desperate public relations campaign to cover it up.
The most jinxed DC movie
By now we have already assumed that great things are not to be expected from the DC Universe. At least in relation to its main series, the one that was inaugurated by the man of steel in 2013 and which some call the “Snyderverse” because of how much the artistic vision of Zack Snyder has determined their creative budgets. Even after the director left. Outside of the Snyderverse, in terms of independent films or those based in limbo “Elseworlds”, there is more optimism or capacity for surprise. The Batman y Joker are, in fact, highly appreciated films that today contemplate their own sequels and spin-offs.
The existence of both films (set, to further confuse it, in two different Gothams) should have convinced the heads of DC Studios that it was best to dispense with a strict plan: forget about trying to emulate the careful orchestration of the Marvelite competition. At some point or another along the way, this idea has been taken up, but according to Zaslav, he was promoted to CEO of Warner after the merger with Discovery, the option of playing Cohesive Universes and packed schedules once again won supporters.
If Gunn was chosen as president of DC Studios it was neither more nor less than because of his relationship with Kevin Feige, and his star plan right now is to restart everything and distribute the following projects through phases, as they do in the Marvel Universe . In 2025 the Chapter 1: Gods and Monsters, with a film about Superman’s youth that Gunn himself would direct, and another version of Batman. what is the relationship Flash with all this? Well, the answer is certainly complicated.
Flash it is an inextricable part of the Snyderverse. There have been attempts to give this veteran superhero (born in 1939 and one of DC’s bannermen) a movie of his own since the ’80s or so, but they only matured at the beginning of the last decade. It was then that, while the youth network The CW broadcast The Flash (series belonging to another alternative superhero universe, the Arrowverso, infinitely more logical than the one at hand), from Warner it was planned that Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justicesequel to the man of steelwill prepare the ground for the crossover definitive.
The study signed Ezra Miller, who had known fame from productions such as We need to talk about Kevin o The advantages of being an outcast. Miller would make a cameo as Barry Allen, the fastest superhero, in Batman v Supermanwith the plan to reappear in the later League of Justice and in a solo movie. With which, taking accounts, we discover that Flash It has been in development for at least seven years.
While League of Justice became an endless headache for Warner (and a fandom noisy ended up causing the existence of Zack Snyder’s Justice League), the project of Flash it passed through many hands, retaining Miller as the lead. Seth Grahame-Smith, the Phil Lord/Chris Miller duo (who recently produced another interdimensional vigilante film, Spider-Man: Crossing the Multiverse), los Jonathan Goldstein/John Francis Daley de Dungeons & Dragons: Honor between drones…and finally, Andy Muschietti. But the problems did not end there.
During filming, Miller began to display strange behavior. When it concluded, the interpreter’s problems with justice they multiplied and put Warner at a devilish juncture. Should he release a film whose star he could not promote, perhaps because by then he would be behind bars? Doubts precipitated several release delays, as Miller showed intent to make amends and Gunn took control of DC. His plan became, we said, restart everything. with what Flashas it was conceived, seemed close to losing all meaning.
Flash is based on a very popular comic book arc, Flashpoint. In it, Barry Allen manages to travel through time with his super speed to prevent a family tragedy, thus altering the entire time line and causing different versions of various DC characters to emerge. It is just like what happens in Muschietti’s film: Barry’s father is in jail accused of murdering his mother (played by Maribel Verdú), with which the protagonist tries to repair both misfortunes by changing a few things from the past. . So Flash introduces a Supergirl, Sasha Calle, and takes up the Batman that Michael Keaton was for Tim Burton. Finally, it impels the DC Universe to lose any coherence. That it did not have any coherence from the start is the least of its problems.
Cinema as simulacrum
Flash indeed has remarkable similarities with Spider-Man: No Way Home, and thickens the current fever for the multiverses of Hollywood. What it contributes to this harvest has already been described: the film rises above such an accumulation of mishaps and extra-cinematographic nonsense that any attempt to monopolize dramatic depth, or move in the same terms as it did No Way Home with several Spider-Man recovering, it’s an awkward footshot.
Flash some flash of lucidity is allowed within the hecatomb. Perhaps aware of how ridiculous it is to go back over the events of the man of steel as if this film had an affective status similar to those Spider-Man by Sam Raimi, the script throws in a couple of desperate gags. The first sign that something is wrong when Barry Allen returns to what he thinks is his timeline is a great joke about Return to the future (very significant, also, because of how basic this film is as a reference for the plot). And the subsequent appearance of Keaton as Bruce Wayne, trying to explain the mess, plays in his favor with the familiarity that the public already feels for these plots.
Beyond that, everything is horror. A painfully familiar horror, on two counts. On the one hand, Flash collects the vices of the Snyder era in terms of an awkward calligraphy of the action (with slow cameras and aberrant snapshots) and even more embarrassing digital effects, which here reach a sort of peak of what kitsch. It’s not so much that Flash does not have money to do better or that it is unintentionally shabby, as those responsible understand that there is an aesthetic to which to adhere religiously.
It would be something respectable, since it seems to endorse a picturesque decision that in the end is more memorable than the bulk of gray invoices of the Marvel Universe. But this brings us to the second realm where Flash stands as an exhausting and hardly bearable proposal, acting as a wild review of the current ills of industrial cinema. That Hollywood has this multiversal fever is explained by the crisis of generation of imaginaries that it is going through, where the confusion of alternative realities (or intellectual properties in past instances) offers easy satisfaction with the recycling of icons.
It’s what he did No Way Home after all, and what it does Flash in a drunk and senseless way, showing in his giddiness that the void from which he emerges is the same as the one in the film starring Tom Holland. For most of his footage, Flash resists conversion into a robotic showcase, but by the third act its infernal CGI allies with the avalanche of cameos, winks and easter eggs most embarrassing Hollywood has ever concocted since Who cheated on roger rabbit? show the way in the 80s.
And it’s very depressing, of course. The algorithmic and sclerotic images of this third act (with references that only Internet natives or people who have been dead for several decades can celebrate) certify the burial of fiction to the point of eclipsing dramas or central themes of the film itself. They lead to a state of fatalistic indifference, since Tom Cruise’s words seem like those of a serial killer. Because if these are the kind of movies we need right now, maybe they’re best left for dead.
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