Running To Stand Still

There's a measure of irony to the fact that the first feature film about DC Comics' Scarlet Speedster should prove to reflect the fable of the tortoise and the hare. As early as 2017, Warner Bros. was developing The Flash as an adaptation of the Flashpoint storyline from the comics. At the time, nothing like that in the comic book movie genre had made it to the big screen. Had WB hit the ground running early on, DC could have initially had the multiverse all to themselves but creative issues kept The Flash from bolting from the starting line. In the meantime, both Marvel Studios and Sony Pictures were making slow but steady progress on their own multiverse sagas. Now here in 2023, in a world where we've had Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018), Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021), Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022), and the currently playing Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, The Flash can't help but feel like it's lagging behind. Despite having the chance to be first over the finish line, DC is coming in a distant second in the race for the multiverse.  

On the positive side, there's much in The Flash that is fleet and funny. Despite the personal issues that have plagued Ezra Miller, they're very good here in a dual role as the Barry Allen of two different worlds. While I'll concede that Miller's portrayal of Barry might be like nails on a chalkboard to some viewers, I say their performance is in tune with the comedic angle screenwriter Christina Hudson and director Andy Muschietti are going for. 

The Flash's emphasis on humor might rankle some fans, especially devotees of the grim Snyder verse, but I think it was the smart choice to make. The Flashpoint storyline, if played totally straight, can't help but make Barry look pretty lousy, like a deeply reckless and short sighted person who can't see past his own selfish needs. The CW Flash series took the serious approach when they did their own Flashpoint and it only made Barry come off as an unsympathetic jerk. How could it not? Barry takes the fact that he misses his mom as a reason to unravel reality for billions of innocent people. 

In making The Flash essentially a comedy of (cosmic) errors, and portraying Barry's action as those of an emotionally stunted but well intended fool, it makes his actions more palatable. He's able to come across less as a selfish asshole and more like a helpless goof who's prone to catastrophe. 

The Flash has an almost lampoonish quality to it as Barry races from one reality to the next, dismantling the DC universe as he goes, with the multiverse like a set of spinning plates that Barry is madly struggling (and failing) to keep in the air. 

Things do get darker as the film goes on and as the dramatic stakes rise but yet it all comes back around to funny business with the movie ending on a punchline, the point of which being that the DCU has been permanently broken. It's a good laugh (with a great cameo) but at the same time, this is a movie that needed to bring clarity to the DCU and the fact that it doesn't is a problem. 

When the new DC regime, led by James Gunn and David Zaslav, came in last year and announced that the much touted "change in the DC hierarchy of power," Black Adam, wasn't actually going to lead to anything and that the DCU that began with Man of Steel in 2013 would be ending (despite the return of Henry Cavill's Superman in Black Adam's post credit scene), it fell on The Flash to make the case why that was a good idea and to establish what the new direction of the DCU would be.

Instead The Flash comes across as a cinematic pie in the face of the DCU, frequently sillier than even the most broadly comic Marvel movie and I have to think that's not what DC fans are in the mood for, especially in the wake of the universe they'd become attached to over the last ten years being so unceremoniously scrapped.

Say what you will about Black Adam but I think The Rock had the right idea in regards to not throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Black Adam might not have been a monster hit but it made the right moves in teeing up the DCU for bigger things to come while going for a more palatable soft reboot of sorts. Even though movies like Man of Steel and WW84 might not have been the best vehicles for them, Cavill's Superman and Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman were still very well liked and I think there was an audience that simply wanted to see them (and others from the Snyder verse) get their shot in a refocused DCU. If you're going to kick these actors to the curb, you've got to do it gracefully in way that respects their contributions to the DCU while also making the strongest case possible for a new direction and The Flash does neither. 

Additionally, The Flash squanders both Micheal Keaton's return as Batman and Sasha Calle's introduction as Supergirl. Both of them have some outstanding scenes (I particularly enjoyed the re-introduction of Keaton, in a fight scene that's reminiscent of a Pink Panther movie with Kato lying in wait to ambush Clouseau) but their arcs come to unsatisfying ends that feel undeserving of the characters. Reports say that the final version wasn't what was originally planned, with changes made since in order to accommodate the changes in the DCU but what they went with was not the right choice. After setting up Bruce, the two Barrys and Kara as a mini Justice League and following their strategizing to take down Zod, this section of the film ends on a deflated note and as a result the inclusion of Bruce and Kara ends up feeling pointless and dispiriting rather than heroic. 

Spoilers here but it feels like a poor choice to prime the audience to anticipate how Flash, Kara and Bruce are going to take down Zod only to find out that, oh, they don't. The entire time spent in Bruce and Kara's reality ends up being a prolonged lesson in failure and while the experience teaches Barry that sometimes there isn't a way to fix things, there should have been a better way to get him to that point without having the bulk of the movie be about everyone fighting a losing battle. 

The most curious flaw of The Flash, though, is that even though the story hinges on Barry changing the fabric of the universe to save his mother, he never shows any interest in finding out who killed her or why. It's doubly maddening in that Barry's other big motivation is in clearing his dad of the crime. So why does it never occur to him to find out who did it and bring them to justice? At the very least, where's the curiosity about this crime on Barry's part? I mean, it's one thing to not want to interfere any more overtly than he's already doing but how about getting some answers for himself? You can time travel but you don't want to find out why your mother was murdered? Really?   

It's such a bizarre oversight to have this not even be a factor in the film. In the comics the murder is committed by one of Barry's arch foes from the future but even if the movie didn't want to take it in that super villain direction, they've still got to address why this crime was committed in the first place and it's just crazy that it goes ignored. 

In the comics, Flashpoint was a blunt means to an end. Having Barry undo his mother's murder wasn't about exploring Barry's trauma. While that might have been the surface storyline, underneath that Flashpoint was just a mechanism meant to restore the DC multiverse that had been undone back in 1985's Crisis on Infinite Earths and doing it within continuity. It was essentially a reboot in disguise. 

To apply what Flashpoint did in the comics to the movies, they needed to have a similarly clear and pragmatic plan in place of what they were looking to accomplish but unfortunately the goals The Flash started with changed drastically during the course of its production and post-production, going from teeing up the next round of adventures with the DCU characters we've come to know to becoming their awkward send-off and that last minute swerve badly kneecaps the final product. 

 

A production that ran into more problems than it could handle before it was able to cross the finish line, The Flash should have shown that the DC universe is still in the race but instead it makes it look like a franchise that's running on empty. 

Holding Out For A Hero

I'm not sure the higher ups at Warner Bros. know what they're doing when it comes to making the most of their DC properties but after seeing Black Adam, I believe that Dwayne Johnson is aware of the possibilities. The marketing for Black Adam caused me to crinkle my nose with its emphasis on pushing an antihero in a cinematic universe that was guilty of leaving its big name heroes languishing. When you have a universe of heroes but you've sidelined the greatest one of them all, the message it sends is that you're in the wrong business. To see Black Adam, though, is to feel more encouraged about the future course of the DCEU. Not ecstatic but encouraged. I wouldn't bank on anything until it actually comes to pass but this is the first time in the entire DCEU era that I felt, ok, things might actually pan out here.  

Even though this is an antihero story it ironically offers up more straight-up fun than we've seen from Superman, Batman or Wonder Woman in the DCEU era. Black Adam might be a dark dude and he may be tortured in his own way but this is not a dour film. It's comic book-y and action packed. It has to be said, though, that the first twenty minutes or so are pretty rough. There's some painfully clunky exposition to get through but once Black Adam himself arrives, things take off and the movie barrels along from that point on, even as it remains hampered by several flaws. 

The main everyday human characters of university professor Andrianna Tomaz (Sarah Shahi) and her son Amon (Bodhi Sabongui), both caught up in the resistance fight against presence of the organized crime syndicate Intergang in their homeland of Kahndaq, are not terribly interesting but this is a problem rooted in the writing more than in the performances. A bigger issue is that Black Adam also lacks a compelling villain. Again, this is more of a screenplay problem with actor Marwan Kenzari simply not given much to do as Ishmael Gregor, a militant leader of Intergang who has his eyes on obtaining the Crown of Sabbac, a long buried, ancient item that can grant its wearer great power. Ishmael comes across as such a non-entity that it feels like he must be just a temporary placeholder until the movie's real villain arrives but, no, he's it. It does help that he turns into a demonic creature eventually, complete with horns and a flaming pentagram on his chest, but still, in the adversary department, Black Adam is lacking. 

Where the movie shines is in the enthusiasm that it shows for embracing the DC universe. The core of this movie is the JSA vs. Black Adam and on that count, it entertains. It isn't made clear what the Justice Society's origins are, how long they've been operating, what authority Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) has over them, or what makes them different from the Justice League but Carter Hall, aka Hawkman (Aidis Hodge), has a cool plane that he flies everybody around in and that's kind of all I care about. Yes, this movie could have afforded to be a lot more generous in filling in the details of its characters but they're still fun to see in action. We get to (somewhat) know the JSA on the run as they race from one conflict to the next. 

Once Black Adam starts tearing shit up in Kahndaq, Carter calls in a hand-picked team of JSAers to handle it. He's got two young heroes - the size-changing Atom Smasher (Noah Centineo) and the wind controlling Cyclone (Quintessa Swindell) - and a long time veteran of the JSA, the mystical mage Dr. Fate (Pierce Brosnan). Between the four, there's nice variety of powers and that's an important consideration on a visual level when the majority of the movie is going to center on this team using their powers in one fight scene after another. I'm sure most people who aren't especially into superhero movies regard every one of them as nothing but people in colorful costumes unleashing their powers on each other but Black Adam actually is that. This is the cinematic equivalent of a kid playing with their action figures and just having a ball bashing them together. It's not deep, it's not complex, but (depending on how much of a nerd for these characters you are, I guess) it's a good time.

 

Even though we aren't given much info about the history of the JSA, just seeing them in action helps foster the impression of a broader DC universe that includes a more far reaching menagerie of heroes than we've seen up to now and not just Suicide Squad style cannon fodder, either. 

Hawkman and Dr. Fate are not throwaway characters, they have roots that go back to the Golden Age of comics. While this movie only scratches the surface with them, Hodge ably establishes himself as a credible Carter Hall and Brosnan is every bit as cool as Fate as anyone would have expected. There is an act of sacrifice that takes place involving Fate but given the character's supernatural bent, I don't think it precludes a return. Where and when these characters might actually show up again remains to be seen and with the way Warners/DC operates, you never know if they even have long terms plans for them but come what may it's a treat to see these guys in live action on the big screen for the first time. Hawkman swings a mean mace and Fate gets some flashy spells to cast. That checked off the basic boxes I needed checked off. 

 

For his part, Johnson doesn't do much in this movie other than prove to anyone who comes at him that they don't have a chance. He is rarely, if ever, on the ropes. Watching Black Adam spend this whole movie completely owning everyone it feels like Johnson's main interest in this part was that he just wanted to play a guy who could whip the ass of the whole DC universe. That literally is the be-all, end-all of his character. When they say that Black Adam changes the hierarchy of power in the DCEU, all it means is that The Rock will not lose to any chumps. If he's going to come in to the DC universe, he's going to dominate it. And to that I say, fair enough. Helping Black Adam humiliate his adversaries, director Jaume Collet-Serra teams with Johnson again after Jungle Cruise and he continues to be an adept visual stylist, staging Black Adam's action with flair. 

Black Adam has been hyped as a turning point for the DCEU but while Black Adam as a character is a force to be reckoned with, the real shift in power is behind the camera. Johnson has taken the lack of a driving force in the DCEU as an opportunity to grab the ball and run with it. Black Adam's much talked about mid-credits scene, bringing Henry Cavill's Superman back into the fold, reportedly only came about due Johnson insisting that it happen and it signals that he understands what the DCEU's been lacking. A DC universe that doesn't make Superman a priority is a DC universe that isn't living up to its potential and the fact that Johnson understands that and made the effort to fix it is promising. Black Adam may be an antihero but, in the end, Johnson's firm handle on what the DCEU could be if handled correctly might make The Rock the hero DC fans have been waiting for.  

Say Hi To The Bad Guy

 

In case you hadn't noticed, The Rock is not playing a good guy in Black Adam. That has seemed pretty clear from the start but for those who were still wondering, the tagline on Black Adam's latest poster is here to remove any doubt. Don't make the mistake of thinking this is a superhero movie, people, because "The Time of Heroes is Over." Everyone got that now? As much as I think Black Adam looks like a well mounted spectacle, and as much as I'm rooting for Warners/DC to get their shit together on the movie end, I feel like this tagline perfectly sums up why the direction of the DCEU is so utterly mismanaged. Saying that the Time of Heroes is over when it comes to the DCEU is such a laughable selling point. I mean, help me out here. If you want to say that the Time of Heroes is over, you've got to be able to tell me when the hell it started. I don't think I'm the only one who feels like they're still waiting on that. 

I mean, according to the calendar, the current age of DC movies began in 2013 with Zack Snyder's Man of Steel. But that big relaunch, the movie that was supposed to reestablish Superman as a big screen powerhouse, the movie that was supposed to position DC to really take on Marvel in a big way, ended with Superman murdering his opponent. That this also followed the leveling of Metropolis as Superman and General Zod waged a careless battle that left everything in rubble around them only added to the sense that this was, on a fundamental, core level, a poorly judged take on Superman. This is your reboot of Superman, a movie that's supposed to be the starting point for not just more Superman but for an entire newly minted DC cinematic universe and this is how you want to go with it? Come on now. It's incredible to me that there was no one in the room to say "Wait, this is stupid. What the fuck are we doing?"

Obviously Man of Steel does have its fans but setting aside the technical skill involved in it and whether it is, in and of itself, an interesting interpretation of Superman, the bottom line is that it felt made by people who didn't fully buy into the character. It felt like a rejection of what some might call the inherent corniness of Superman. Coming off of Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy, it seems like the feeling from everyone involved in Man of Steel, including Nolan himself as producer and Dark Knight scripter David S. Goyer who wrote Man of Steel's screenplay after conceiving of the story with Nolan, believed that applying the darkness of Batman's world to Superman was the only viable way to make him work for a modern audience. If someone were to say that Superman is a character who has always seemed too good to be true, the makers of Man of Steel would no doubt be the first to say "we agree!" They didn't so much adapt Superman so much as they diminished him in order to make the character bear the burden of their own cynicism. There's no law against being a cynic but it's probably better that those people not be put in charge of adapting one of the most inspirational characters in fiction. Who knows, they might choose to do something dumb, like turn him into a killer.

Yes, it's true that Superman has killed in the comics before. Most notably, in issue #22 of Superman's mid '80s relaunch, Superman was compelled to execute the trio of Phantom Zone criminals by exposing them to green kryptonite. This was presented as an absolute last resort, though, and only after these remorseless sociopaths had murdered five billion people. Even then it was an extreme outlier event for Superman in course of, what at the time was just over five decades' worth of adventures and, importantly, there was the storytelling space afforded by comics to get into the emotional repercussions of it. A movie, on the other hand, is a whole different beast. Things hit in a whole different way on film and there isn't a ready opportunity to address the fallout of a shocking, out of character turn.

As filmmakers, when you know the story that you plan on telling and you know that the images you're creating to tell that story are all going to be projected on a giant screen, you should pause and ask yourself, even at the screenwriting stage: is Superman breaking a man's neck what we really want to put up there? For Superman to kill evil Kryptonians with kryptonite in the pages of a comic book is kind of grim, sure, but yet it still comfortably resides in the realm of fantasy. He's exposing them to kryptonite radiation, not breaking their necks or strangling them to death. As dark as Batman is, we've never seen him straight up murder someone in a movie. But thanks to Man of Steel, Superman's got blood on his hands. Yes, it's Kryptonian blood but still. I don't think you have to be a hopeless Pollyanna to recognize what a misstep that is. Some will say "But Superman didn't have a choice!" and to that I say, well, Superman didn't write the script. People did. They chose to put the character in a certain situation and then didn't want to work to show him being smart enough to think his way out of that moment without resorting to killing. Everyone involved with Man of Steel, all these fucking grown adults, should have had a moment before shooting even began when they stopped to ask themselves "Oh, for God's sake, what are we even trying to prove here with this edgy nonsense?" But they didn't. And what we got is what we got.

At least if there had been a Man of Steel 2 to follow up on the events of the first film and if it became clear that, yes, there was a plan to deal with this and that it was all part of a carefully laid out character arc, then ok. Fair enough. But that wasn't the case. Man of Steel, and the DCEU itself, is going to turn ten next year and we still haven't gotten a Man of Steel 2. At this point it's pretty clear that we never will. Instead we got more of Henry Cavill's Superman in BvS: Dawn of Justice, a movie where Batman is trying to kill Superman because the destruction Superman caused in Man of Steel convinced Bruce Wayne that Superman was a threat to humanity that needed to be put down. We could have gotten a World's Finest movie instead where Batman and Superman meet and become friends and allies but, um, I guess that never occurred to anyone at Warners. Superman was also seen again in the two different cuts of Justice League, only one of which (the lesser of the two) is actually canon to the DCEU and neither of which gives significant screentime to Superman, with him being (sigh) dead for most of the running times of both versions. 

Point being, Superman has not been well served in the DCEU (that's not to fault Henry Cavill in any way, who did a fine job with what he had to work with) and the bottom line for me is if you can't figure out what to do with Superman, then you're never going to truly figure the rest of it. If you can't wrap your head around Superman, your vision of the DC universe is going to be forever lacking. He's the cornerstone to all of it. There have been some genuinely heroic DCEU highlights like Aquaman and Shazam! (many would also cite the first Wonder Woman but outside of the No Man's Land scene, I don't think the movie works very well) but as far as portraying the kind of shining age of heroes that a fully functioning DC cinematic universe ought to, things have not gone well. 

They botched Superman, they botched the Justice League. And they dropped the ball hard on Wonder Woman in her second outing. What kind of "time of heroes" is that?  A pretty shitty one, in my opinion. Out of the ten DCEU movies so far, three of them - the two Suicide Squad films and Birds of Prey - have already been about antiheroes. So how Black Adam is supposed to represent some kind of bold shakeup for the DCEU, I don't know. In the Black Adam trailer when Hawkman tells Black Adam that heroes don't kill and Black Adam shoots back with "Well I do!" how is this not a ridiculous exchange in a cinematic universe that started with Superman - Superman!! - killing someone?

I'm not saying that I'm not excited for Black Adam or that I think it won't be good. The thought of seeing Golden Age characters like Dr. Fate realized on screen is a cool prospect for this comic fan and Jaume Collet-Serra (Orphan, Jungle Cruise) is a very solid director so I actually have a lot of optimism towards it. If anything, I'd be surprised if it disappointed. I'm just saying it is genuinely confounding to see such a massive effort put into launching an antihero in the DCEU when they still have not gotten the hero part quite right. 

Until Warners/DC realizes that a grim n' gritty DC universe isn't a direction that benefits their characters in the long term, we're going to keep having these short sighted moves to try and establish DC's credentials as the edgy alternative to Marvel. To see the trailers for Black Adam and see his power set in action is to really feel the gap between where DC is and where they ideally should be. You've got a guy doing all the stuff we identify with Superman like flight and super strength and invulnerability but I guess we're supposed to find it all cooler when Black Adam's doing it because he's, like, dark man. He's no hero! It'd be one thing if they really tried with Superman and then decided to go this route but they didn't. Instead they tried to make Superman dark and when that (predictably) didn't work, the answer wasn't to fix their mistakes with Superman and restore the proper luster to this icon, it was to move on to a character that was better suited to being the edgy guy they wanted in the first place.

It says a lot about the DCEU, and none of it good, that "The Time of Heroes is Over" would have fit just as well as a tagline on the posters for Man of Steel as it does on Black Adam's. Even better, I'd say. By rights, Man of Steel should have kicked off a new heroic age for the DC universe. It should have served as a full throated statement from Warners/DC that, hey, we have the real deal here. If you want to talk about superheroes, this is the definitive article and we're going to remind you why that is. Instead it felt made by people who were constantly scratching their heads, asking "Wait, why does anyone care about this guy?" If that actually wasn't the behind the scenes vibe on Man of Steel, you sure can't tell by the movie. 

I don't begrudge Black Adam whatever success it might go on to have but it would just be nice if the movie actually represented the true change of pace for the DCEU that the studio seems to think it does rather than looking like business as usual.