The Flash (2023)

It seemed like a bizarre twist of fate that I saw The Flash exactly ten years to the day after first seeing Man of Steel. (Save your ticket stubs, friends.) So much of The Flash revolves around a sideways retelling of the events of Man of Steel, while at the same time serving as the ostensible finale for the cinematic universe that began with Henry Cavill’s debut as Superman. For this reason – and so many more – it is a challenge to think of The Flash as its own thing, as a superhero movie unto itself. The Flash is by and large a fun time at the movies, but it is so nakedly corporate and so eager to shuffle another franchise off this cinematic coil – and consequently it is difficult for this fan in particular to celebrate and embrace it wholesale.
 
After the events of Zack Snyder’s Justice League, Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) has unlocked the ability to travel backward in time. Hoping to exonerate his wrongfully-imprisoned father, Barry changes the past to prevent his mother’s murder – but in so doing, he creates a universe with no metahumans to stop the invasion of General Zod (Michael Shannon). With only the fiery Kara Zor-El (Sasha Calle), an aging Batman (Michael Keaton), and his own alternate universe doppelganger (Miller again), Barry must either save the present, restore the past, or lose the future.
 
At the center of whatever you make of The Flash is the cauldron of personal and legal challenges in which Ezra Miller is currently embroiled. A fine enough Flash in ZSJL – and a decent, if overly Spider-Man-esque, variation in the theatrical Justice League – Miller never presented as irreplaceable. And for Warner Bros. to pin their hopes on a film starring not one, but two Ezra Millers, while simultaneously claiming that Batgirl was unreleasable, seemed like such a curious choice. Here again, Miller is quite fun as both Barrys, giving suitably nuanced performances to differentiate the two, but it is equally hard to watch the film and not imagine a less problematic performer in the role.
 
As if to distract from the Miller of it all, the film brings in scores of old faces and a few new ones, too, and on that count I must concede it works. No matter what baggage you bring to the theater with you, there is an undeniable thrill from revisiting Stately Wayne Manor and seeing Michael Keaton fly a Batplane with Danny Elfman’s score thrumming in the background. Keaton has not lost a step as Batman, reinhabiting his idiosyncratic Bruce Wayne with ease. Meanwhile, the other returning Michael reprises his General Zod, albeit with little of the personality and narrative heft that Shannon brought to Man of Steel. It’s a treat to see his Zod again, but his performance feels a bit like someone bringing a favorite action figure out of the toybox and playing only the hits.
 
On the flip side, Sasha Calle’s Kara is scratching the surface of a very interesting take on the character, though she has far less to do than the trailers let on. Still, playing up her role as Superman’s older cousin and riffing on the Flashpoint comics, Calle makes a compelling case for being more than just one cast-off universe’s Supergirl. If the reports bear out the Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow film we’ve been promised, I’d say it’s worth giving Calle a fuller shot at the role.
 
And yet, hard as I tried to watch The Flash as its own one-off film about the Scarlet Speedster, it was so very difficult not to view the film as a kind of living funeral, an elegiac wake for an aborted cinematic universe that I’m going to miss so terribly much. For all that it tries to be a celebration of the DC film universe writ large, it was impossible – at least for me – not to feel an accompanying pang of sadness. This, for example, is likely the last time we’ll see Ben Affleck as Batman, and his performance is so touching, partly because it’s an absolutely wretched way to say goodbye, even while he wrings such effective pathos from the bare minimum that the script gives him to do. Ditto Miller, whose performance is nothing overly special until the final act, which gives us a powerful emotional climax that the film scarcely deserves. If this is indeed the final run for this Barry Allen, what a waste to leave just when things were getting interesting.
 
I made the mistake of watching the Flash scenes from Zack Snyder’s Justice League the night before seeing The Flash. It was a mistake because that iteration of the character was so fun and so fresh that I couldn’t wait for more Barry Allen. Those super-speed scenes looked crisp, and I still get a little emotional at Barry’s big “Make your own future. Make your own past” moment. By comparison, The Flash is lousy with muddled CGI (which director Andy Muschietti, bafflingly, insists is deliberate) and the loud-and-clear message is instead, “Stop living your past.” It’s advice that the film might well have taken, riddled as it is with cameos, callbacks, and references – only a few of which are actually well-used and not, frankly, ghoulish. 
 
At the end of the day, though, The Flash is entertaining enough. It’s fun enough. It’s fine. It’s not good enough to merit the extensive discourse around Ezra Miller’s employability. It’s not a great sendoff for the so-called Snyderverse. It’s not an auspicious beginning for the new James Gunn universe – if indeed that’s what The Flash would ever have been. And it’s not even a loving highlight reel for DC Universes gone by, dangling most of its shiny cameos like baubles on a Christmas tree. It’s junk food, albeit junk food that happens to star some of my favorite fictional characters. But if it’s going to leave my preferred interpretations of those characters lying face-down in a puddle, turning them into punchlines instead of paragons, this might just be where I jump off the cosmic treadmill.
 

The Flash is rated PG-13 for “sequences of violence and action, some strong language, and partial nudity.” Directed by Andy Muschietti. Written by Christina Hodson, John Francis Daley, Jonathan Goldstein, and Joby Harold. Based on the DC Comics. Starring Ezra Miller, Sasha Calle, Michael Shannon, Ron Livingston, Maribel Verdú, Kiersey Clemons, and Michael Keaton.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)

Five years and one Oscar later, Into the Spider-Verse just happens to be my favorite Spider-Man film. Apologies to Spider-Man 2 and Far From Home, which are the best that live-action Spidey has to offer, but Into the Spider-Verse is such a diamond absolute of a movie, so entertaining in an effortless way that belies its complex juggling act. It was a joy to queue it up the night before seeing its sequel, Across the Spider-Verse, which might have been a bad idea: Across is fantastic, but its predecessor was perfect. 

Sixteen months after becoming his world’s Spider-Man, Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) is still juggling his responsibilities to his school, his family, and his city. But a surprise visit from his not-so-secret crush Gwen “Spider-Woman” Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld) forces Miles to reckon with his place in the Spider-Verse, an interconnected multiversal web of superheroes under attack from the villainous Spot (Jason Schwartzman). Miles finds himself teaming with old friends like recent dad Peter B. Parker (Jake Johnson) and new allies like Spider-Man India (Karan Soni) and Spider-Punk (Daniel Kaluuya) – all led by the humorless Miguel O’Hara (Oscar Isaac), who understands Miles’s great responsibility better than anyone.

 

Across the Spider-Verse goes big. It’s purportedly the longest animated film in American cinematic history, and it’s packed to the gills with more spider-people than most comic books can accommodate. Across begins with an extended sequence set on Earth-65, home of Spider-Gwen, and it’s such an engaging bit of table-setting that one fairly wishes the whole movie had been Gwen’s; the scene looks like something out of a Robbi Rodriguez comic, and the film might very well have been Gwen’s wholesale had the second act kept her front and center. (Fear not, true believers, Sony has already promised Gwen will be leading a spin-off film and, we can reasonably assume, next year’s Beyond the Spider-Verse.)

 

Indeed, my second-biggest gripe with Across – albeit far from a dealbreaker – is that the film struggles to be a two-hander between Gwen and Miles. It reminds one of middle chapters like The Empire Strikes Back and Infinity War, both of which interposed their antagonists as protagonists while splitting up the good guys on parallel narrative tracks. The first and third acts of Across belong to Gwen, but the middle act is solidly Miles, still plucky and earnest with his tongue firmly in his cheek. In the first film, he managed to turn the theory of relativity into a cheesy pick-up line, and here he’s fully inherited the uniquely Spider-Man brand of goofball sarcasm. Across never quite balances them the way that Empire so gracefully did – we lose Gwen’s plot when we see her through Miles’s eyes – but if Gwen is this film’s Leia, Miles is still squarely its Luke. 

 

Like Luke Skywalker, Miles enters into a much bigger world in Across, serving also as the audience’s gateway into the larger realm of the Spider-Verse. These sequences on the densely-populated Earth-928 are going to be ripe for a home video audience to freeze-frame and analyze, loaded with cameos and references from the last sixty years of Spider-Man content. But amid all these homages and single-frame appearances, the creative team have not forgotten to anchor it all to compelling story arcs for the primary characters – their longing to belong, their fears of commitment, and their rebellious wonderings whether they’re able to write their own stories. This, after all, is what made Into the Spider-Verse such a roaring success – that we managed to meet no fewer than five new Spiders and parallel versions of villains like Doctor Octopus, all in under two hours without shortchanging any of them.

 

The makers of Across have more time to play, but paradoxically it seems they didn’t have enough time, because the film speeds along for two hours and twenty minutes before slamming on the brakes. To be fair, ending a story with “to be continued” is one of the oldest and noblest traditions in comic book history, and it does solidify the film in conversation with Empire Strikes Back and Infinity War. Yet while I’m a little rankled that the film stops rather than ends, I think my principal complaint is actually the fact that I don’t have more of this film already being injected directly into my eyeballs. The principal story arcs have mostly concluded, and the characters have made choices that show how far they’ve grown, but there is still something shamelessly corporate about mandating my attendance at Beyond the Spider-Verse by withholding the end of the story until March 2024. (Don’t worry, guys, I was already planning on it!)

 

I never check my watch during a movie, and so I had thought the third act was just ramping up when Across flashed those three cliffhanger words across our screen. And so, if that’s actually the beginning of a brand-new first act, I’m legitimately excited to see what happens next. I’m equally thrilled to see how the creators deepen the world one more time; the introductions of Spider-Man India and Spider-Punk are so compelling that we forget that we haven’t seen Spider-Man Noir, Spider-Ham, or Peni Parker this time around. Which other spiders are waiting for us just beyond Beyond? If the third installment in the trilogy is as breakneck and beautiful as the second, we might have to rethink whether we let other franchises get away with the cliffhanger ending.

 

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is rated PG for “sequences of animated action violence, some language, and thematic elements.” Directed by Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson. Written by Phil Lord, Christopher Miller, and David Callaham. Based on the Marvel Comics. Starring Shameik Moore, Hailee Steinfeld, Bryan Tyree Henry, Luna Lauren Vélez, Jake Johnson, Jason Schwartzman, Karan Soni, Daniel Kaluuya, and Oscar Isaac.