Ezra Miller’s career is up in the air after many alleged allegations of atrocious misconduct, and even though we aren’t here to judge Miller as an individual person, we are more than qualified to judge their latest theatrical release in Andrés Muschietti’s The Flash.
The Flash has had one of the weirdest journeys to the big screen in recent years. After the disastrous mishandling of the SnyderVerse by everyone involved, The Flash hit roadblock after roadblock before being released. The film wrapped filming back in October 2021 and kept getting pushed back until finally finding its eventual release date last week. From there, the tides continued to shift after a regime change during a merger that birthed Warner Bros. Discovery and, for better or worse, so far it seems worse, that only complicated matters further.
The recent months leading into The Flash’s release saw many high-profile individuals lending their names to rave reviews, praising the film as if it were the greatest superhero film ever made. From Tom Cruise to Marvel Studios director turned DC Studios CEO James Gunn, The Flash was supposedly shaping up to be the perfect superhero film, even being advertised as scoring higher with test audiences than Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight.
But despite all of that, how exactly did it shape up once it hit theaters? Well, it didn’t even come close to comparing with Nolan’s second Batman film, not with critics, audiences, or box office financial returns.
At the time of this writing, the Flash holds a 65% with critics and an 84% with audiences on Rotten Tomatoes with a lackluster opening weekend return of just over $55 million, staggeringly low compared to its opening projections of somewhere in between $70 and $85 million. And, at present, it has only made right around $210 million at the box office against a budget of close to $220 million.
But everyone has an opinion and with so many things working against The Flash, we still wanted to see it and figured we might as well share our thoughts. So, with all the above, here is what we thought of the movie:
The CGI was horrendous, but the movie was excellent in every other way.
Say what you will about Ezra Miller as a person but they can act. And not just Miller but the supporting cast and co-stars in Michael Keaton and Sasha Calle all knocked it out of the park for what little screen time they got, Keaton more than others. But as this is a movie all about Flash, naturally Miller would get double the screen time at a bare minimum and twice that, considering they were playing two versions of themselves. Which is one of the absolute highlights of the film.
Ezra Miller’s character in Barry Allen always felt like an overly done comic relief since the character’s inception in Zack Snyder’s DCEU. It worked at times, felt forced at others, and many fans were a little tired of the hyper-active, socially awkward Allen schtick fairly early on in the franchise but it really works under Muschietti’s direction.
You see, as our main primary timeline Barry Allen comes to terms with the realization that traveling back in time can change everything, he realizes that the past version of himself is an obnoxious pain in the ass and often difficult to deal with. Barry comes to the painful realization that everyone around him has had to deal with this for so long that he decides to improve his past and present self through various coaching methods and often scolding. This leads to a remarkable performance by the two halves of Miller shown on-screen in ways that often fall flat or feel absurd. But it works here, to damn near perfection. And Muschietti as well deserves equal praise for pulling out such remarkably impressive performances of his actors.
There’s no need to dive into the plot as we all know what its about by this time and we know the various bat’s out of the bag (or cave, as it were). But before we get to what we did not like, we just want to say that we hope Sasha Calle comes back as Supergirl at some point because, despite having very little screen time, she was fantastic. In fact, her minor performance as Supergirl in this movie was better than Brie Larson’s entire solo Captain Marvel film, which left us bored to death.
Michael Keaton’s Batman was also fantastic, as you would come to expect, which certainly made us want more from the character and his own universe. But at a certain point, there can most definitely be too much of a good thing and we really don’t need yet another timeline featuring a separate ongoing and unrelated Batman series in a spaghetti ball of confusing DC films presently.
Getting to the point, the story, which is loosely based on the Flashpoint comic arc, was well-adapted to the big screen, the acting performances were as good as you would hope, and overall, the film is, in our humble opinion, DC’s best of the SnyderVerse by a significant amount. Despite this, the film will likely not see a sequel starring Miller under the new leadership at Warner Bros. Discovery. On top of that, poor word of mouth regarding the CGI has plagued the film since early reviews debuted before its mainstream theatrical release.
Many reviews we have seen claim that the film “falls apart in its third act” but we disagree in a general sense. The third act is no doubt its weakest, due to the poor CGI and nothing else- or, at least nothing that bothered us. But to many, us included, the CGI looked awful and no doubt ruined the experience for some.
Director Andrés Muschietti’s claims that the CGI was a stylistic choice depicting a rather blurred and unique way that Barry sees the world while running through the Speed Force felt like a weak excuse for whatever reason they went with such heavy, PlayStation 3-era computer-generated imagery when much of it could have just as easily been done with live actors. However, that may actually have been the problem.
While CGI has notoriously been lacking in the superhero genre over the last couple of years due to poor wages, high demand, and short deadlines, it is possible that the reason The Flash was met with such heavy CGI was due to issues with casting availability. This is surely just speculation on our part but think about it- the film wrapped up in 2021 but had to undergo a change in the ending and was met with many delays and with so many allegations against Miller, some actors may have not made themselves available in the third act as much as was needed and had to be digitally replaced.
However, the other issue with the CGI was that all too often, when two Barry Allen’s were on screen, one was Miller live and in person while the other was clearly a CGI double that looked like a video game cutscene spliced in. It was jarringly noticeable and it looked terrible.
The CGI was a constant reminder of a shortcoming that plagued the movie from start to finish but only truly came to a head in the final act of the film. While we agree it was not good, it didn’t ruin the movie for us as a whole. Miller’s performance(s) as both versions of Barry Allen made us laugh and even cry on more than one occasion. And we would be remiss not to point out how this was a great way to introduce an origin story for a character that has been established for nearly ten years. Somehow, everything storywise paid off and Andrés Muschietti was able to put together a brilliant film with the help of an excellent screenplay by Christina Hodson.
