It's hard to describe how much a film like The Flash can mean to a long time DC fan. I could just talk about how tight the screenplay is mixing a perfect balance of humour and pathos and telling a classic comicbook story in a way that is completely accessible to mainstream audiences, how it is a fun and well made action movie that moves along and packs in great set pieces, and how well the film honours the legacy of decades of DC films and TV that came before it while also managing to be its very own story. But I'd be lying if I didn't speak to the impact this film and all of its heart-on-its-sleeve love it exudes for everything DC Comics-y both in terms of film series and the source of all that, the comics.
For DC fans, stories like this date all the way back to The Flash of Two Worlds story in 1961 but would continue through "Crisis" crossovers culminating in the Crisis on Infinite Earths series which also featured a Flash central to the story of restructuring the nature of the Universe (or Multiverse). Now seeing this film explore this legacy featuring the live action world, and in such a visually and narratively beautiful way, is so completely satisfying for hardcore fans. Some like to reductively call this "fan service", which I've always felt was a fairly arrogant sort of dismissiveness, but really it is about legacy and acknowledges the full set of stories and histories that each audience member brings to their watching of the film. Instead of pretending that we haven't experience multiple variations on the Batman story (for example) this honours that in ways that all that history make the story telling so rich.
And Hodson's script not only does this for "effect" but it ties those very themes into her story. This is about intersections of our understandings, and the way, in our real world, we are tied to events that have happened, how they contribute to who we are, our responsibilities in dealing with that, and how unhealthy it is to ignore our pasts. The "time travel" trope is a metaphor for accepting who we are and how we get here.
But yes The Flash is also just a really fun movie that is smart and funny and simply entertaining. It doesn't have to be any of this extra stuff. But for those of us that it is, we get even more out of it.
A lot of what makes The Flash so damn entertaining is the performance of Ezra Miller. A highlight of the Justice League movie(s) they are just perfect here, completely encapsulating the character(s) they are playing. In many ways this movie is a send off to the interlocking stories started in Man of Steal but also potentially the start of something new. And that ties right into the comic stories this film is paying tribute to, stories that wrapped up older legacies and reinvented worlds and characters for new storytellers to run into the future with.
It certainly made me excited to see what the future holds.
The Flash
Starring: Ezra Miller, Michael Keaton, Sasha Calle, Michael Shannon, Ron Livingston, Maribel Verdu, Kiersey Clemons, Antje Traue, Ben Affleck, Jeremy Irons, Temuera Morrison, Gal Gadot, Nicolas Cage, Jason Mamoa, George Clooney, Teddy Sears, George Reeves, Christopher Reeve, Helen Slater, Adam West
Director: Andy Muschietti
Writer: Christina Hodson
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