The Flash
Originally published on Letterboxd on 14/05/23
Truly awe-inspiring in the degree of pure incompetence and resignation from everyone involved that it embodies. This is a Grand Guignol carousel of computer-generated abominations, each more conjured with more cynicism than the last. There are moments where it seems truly confounding that any studio, even the one responsible for Whedon’s Frankensteined Justice League film, could let this release in multiplexes across the globe. Much has been made of its monstrously cynical deployment of CGI zombies as a horribly mistaken idea of a tribute, but it makes more sense when we see that the very same ethos of cynicism extends to the whole endeavour, which seems tired of its existence before it even starts.
It seems pointless to ascribe any sort of governing philosophy to anything as ontologically hollow as this, but if there is one, it is one that is wholly necrotic. This necrosis encompasses not only its shamelessly unconvincing facsimiles of the past that should’ve been left untouched and futures that never manifested for a reason- it also extends to its images, which are entirely devoid of the possibility that a human being was on set at all (besides perhaps Miller, whose failure to justify their offscreen criminal endeavours and their dual performance as some approximation of Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man makes you wish they were as dead as the actors who make CG cameos here). There is no scene (though “cutscene” feels like the more appropriate term here) in its endless two-and-a-half-hour runtime where the super-powered characters/Blender assets onscreen do not look like meat puppets, absent of any warmth or just about any distinguishing human features. They linger like video game NPCs, lifelessly expressing some alien approximation of recognition or fear in the most stilted terms possible.
Being a staunch defender of Paul W.S. Anderson’s Resident Evil films, I have no qualms with the worlds of franchise films using the virtuality inherent to their existence as a means to create unreal spaces. What I despise, however, is when these instruments, capable of transcending the limits of the set to bring into existence wholly expressionistic tapestries, are used as thoughtlessly as they are here. The fact that the film invokes the spectre of works that, for all the revulsion expressed towards them by corporate sycophants, are motivated by the hopes and fears of an actual artist like Snyder (as opposed to Muschietti, a proprietor of putrid cynicism whose ambitions begin and end at the word “adaptation”) only makes its failure to leverage the decade-plus of development and innumerable resources worse. The only hope that something such as this film could bring into this world is the hope that every film like it dies a swift, unremarkable death.