The Flash movie review & film summary (2023)
Unfortunately, “The Flash” also has a countervailing tendency that undermines its best self. Even as it cleverly translates Shelley`s worries into contemporary comic book terms, it serves up callback after fan-wanking callback to other versions of heroes and villains from film and TV, seemingly with no other purpose than to burnish Warner Bros` properties and make the audience point to the screen and whisper the names of actors, characters, films, TV shows, and comic books that they recognize. Batman, Batman, Batman, Batman, Superman, Superman, Superman, Superman, Flash etc .
And rather than find an artful, modest way to repurpose library footage from earlier adaptations of DC comics—as, say, “In the Line of Fire” did with footage of a younger Clint Eastwood from “Dirty Harry“—the actors who originally played them, many of whom died long ago, have been scanned (or rebuilt) as vaguely three-dimensional but uncanny grotesques, like Madame Tussaud`s wax figures laid over audio-animatronic puppets. Remember the process that “reanimated” Peter Cushing in “Star Wars: Rogue One,” and later served up an even more unsettling “young Carrie Fisher” in the climax, paving the way for a nearly expressionless “young Mark Hamill” on “The Mandalorian,” and de-aged `70s movie stars for various legacy sequels? Here, it trots and multiplies to the point of nausea, even if the technology hasn’t improved much.
The film’s principal cast also gets the zombie CGI treatment in the Chrono-Bowl, to visualize alternate realities. Some of the versions of these real, living actors with SAG cards and regularly updated IMDb pages look faintly demonic. The torsos and hands aren’t anatomically credible. One has eyes that point in opposite directions like a gecko. Were the deadlines rushed and the digital effects artists exploited until quality control disappeared—a problem throughout the entertainment industry—or is the technology just not there yet? And even if it ever does “get there,” will it ever not seem one (digital) step removed from wrapping a mannequin in corpse-flesh? Doing this sort of thing in a purely animated format moots such concerns. Everything in an animated comics adaptation is a drawing inspired by other drawings, and therefore a representation of a thing that is not meant to seem “real.” Not so in live-action. “Hey, that’s Actor X!” gives way to, “He looks kinda creepy and unreal,” and the spell is broken.
It’s a mess. And it’s a pity, because what’s good in “The Flash” is so good. The movie thinks a lot about what it wants to say and not enough about how it says it. He eagerly warns about one thing while simultaneously creating a version of the thing itself. Barry, driven by a desire to bring the dead back to life, grapples with the ethics and correctness of the actions that the film continually performs, large or small, without breaking a sweat.