The Flash and the Limits of Fan Service
Hollywood Needs a Creative Reset.
Warning: This article contains spoilers for The Flash
“We need a statement, not a manifesto.”
Imperial Grand Moff (and arguable hero of the original trilogy) Wilhuff Tarkin uttered these words upon watching his planet-sized creation prepare to destroy the Holy City of Jeddha in 2016’s Rogue One
Of course, what made this moment so significant was the fact that it wasn’t original actor Peter Cushing saying these words since Cushing had been dead for more than two decades before.
Instead, Disney had recreated Cushing using a digital stand-in and motion capture technology to bring the deceased Tarkin back to life.
The film then concluded with a shot of a CGI Carrie Fisher as New Hope-era Princess Leia, as if Disney needed the cherry on top of its uncanny-valley chocolate sundae.
If Rogue One’s re-creations of Peter Cushing and Carrie Fisher were the statement establishing that Hollywood can resurrect the dead on-screen, then The Flash may be the manifesto.
The long-troubled film tells the story of Barry Allen’s attempt to rewrite his own life story by going back in time to prevent his mother from dying and his father from being sent to prison for her murder.
The first two-thirds of the movie are uneven as Barry tries to undo the damage he has done to the multiverse. The film only hangs together because of Ezra Miller’s dueling performances.
Miller differentiates the two Barries effectively by forcing the older one to become more mature and worldly over the course of the movie while keeping the younger one teetering on the edge of immature obnoxiousness.
Michael Keaton’s Bruce Wayne is a welcome return, but you can’t help but feel the dissonance watching his Batman fighting like the Batman of Arkham games. Keaton’s Batman was never an action hero. He was a weird, monosyllabic creation of Tim Burton’s imagination. His inclusion in the fight scenes feels very much like a plug-and-play decision by a studio looking to jam a square Batman into a round hole.
(Also, how often do we need Danny Elfman’s Batman theme droning in the background?)
Following the fight in the third act between Sasha Calle’s disappointingly underutilized Supergirl and Michael Shannon’s completely lifeless Zod, the film delivers what may be Hollywood’s pièce de résistance when it comes to resurrecting the dead.
Director Andy Muschetti gives us footage of George Reeves, Christopher Reeve, Nicolas Cage, Helen Slater, and Teddy Sears, all as their respective versions of Superman, Supergirl, and the Flash. It’s a sequence that cannot help but take the viewers out of the movie – especially when you process an incredibly niche joke about Cage being Superman and fighting a giant spider.
Putting aside any ethical concerns about these cameos, there’s no denying that they are effectively pointless in the grand scheme of the story The Flash is telling.
What’s frustrating is there’s a strong, if somewhat simple, story at the heart of The Flash about learning to come to terms with the scars and trauma that define us. It’s a lesson clearly delivered to Barry towards the beginning of the film by Ben Affleck’s Bruce Wayne – but it takes Barry the length of the story to understand the importance of this lesson.
But all these cameos do is distract us from that story.
These snippets of familiar characters do not actually mean anything to Barry or to his internal conflict. I’m convinced there’s a good film hiding somewhere underneath the layers of distractingly bad CGI and fan service, but we will never get it.
Perhaps the studio lacked faith in the movie to stand on its own — or maybe they took the opportunity to fully wipe the Snyderverse’s slate clean while distracting the audience with shiny faces.
The film’s final 10 minutes do manage to pull it all together with a moving final sequence featuring Barry letting his mother go in a lovely bit of acting by Miller. It then follows by a genuinely uproarious moment featuring George Clooney returning to the role of Bruce Wayne to at least try to wipe away the blandness of a CGI-heavy, stakes-free battle set in a nondescript desert.
The Flash’s expected underperformance at the box office may put the kibosh on explicit references to the multiverse in our movies (and not a moment too soon).
Because if all the multiverse means is the opportunity for fan service by resurrecting dead actors the audience immediately recognizes, then Grand Moff Tarkin was half-right – we didn’t need the statement at all.
Across the Spider-Verse, while much more successful as a story and movie-going experience, suffers from the same thing. Hollywood’s infatuation with the multiverse seems to have drained the industry of all creativity. In a world where anything is possible, then there are no real stakes to ground the story.