The Flash

The Flash is a film that should not exist, barely does exist, and yet contains some of the best superhero filmmaking of 2023 embedded inside the most troubled production in DC history. That combination makes it one of the most difficult films to evaluate fairly.

Director Andy Muschietti, working from a screenplay that went through over fifty drafts across eight directors, somehow assembled a film that is visually inventive, emotionally genuine in its first act, and spectacularly incoherent in its third. The multiverse premise, borrowed from the Flashpoint comic storyline, sees Barry Allen travel back in time to prevent his mother's murder, inadvertently creating an alternate timeline where the DC universe is completely different and General Zod's invasion (from Man of Steel) is now unstoppable without the absent Superman.

The casting of Ezra Miller as Barry Allen is the film's central and inescapable problem. Miller's off-screen behavior, which included multiple criminal incidents, made the film's release a corporate liability exercise rather than a genuine theatrical event. Warner Bros. ultimately kept the film rather than shelve a $220M investment. Whatever you think of that decision, it ensures that evaluating The Flash purely as a film requires a degree of intellectual separation that most audiences cannot perform and arguably should not be expected to perform.

On pure craft grounds: the first act is surprisingly good. Barry's grief over his mother's murder is rendered with genuine emotional weight. Michael Keaton's return as the 1989 Batman is the best part of the film by a significant margin. Keaton slides back into Bruce Wayne with zero effort, delivering lines about age and time that feel genuinely earned. The sequence where young Barry discovers his powers in the alternate timeline has a physical comedy lightness that recalls the best sequences from the original.

The second act collapses under the weight of its own ambitions. The alternate timeline's version of Barry (same actor, different personality) is the film's biggest miscalculation. Muschietti attempts to use the duplicate to show Barry what he would have been without grief, but the character read as irritating rather than illuminating. Two Ezra Millers onscreen simultaneously, given Miller's real-world circumstances, is an uncomfortable experience regardless of the film's intent.

The third act is where the wheels fully come off. The multiverse resolution involves CGI cameos of past DC heroes so uncanny-valley that they look like unfinished video game assets. The logic of what Barry can and cannot change is never properly established, making the emotional stakes collapse. The film ends on a note of resignation about the unfixability of loss that is more existentially bleak than most superhero films attempt.

For conservative audiences, The Flash's values content is genuinely mixed. The film's central theme, that you cannot change the past and must make peace with loss, is a conservative argument against the progressive fantasy of endless revisability. Barry's arc is about accepting that his mother is gone and that his father's innocence can be restored without undoing her death. That is grief work, not revolution.

But the film also arrives with Ezra Miller as its lead, an actor whose off-screen behavior represents a comprehensive rejection of the values VirtueVigil cares about. The decision to proceed with the film rather than recast or shelve it was purely financial. That is worth naming.

The Flash is not a film with a coherent ideology. It is a film that had one, then had it scrambled by production chaos, executive turnover, lead actor crises, and the structural demands of franchise continuity. What survived is fragmentary and inconsistent. The verdict is MIXED because the film earns neither a traditional nor a progressive classification. It earns bewilderment.

Formula: Weighted Score = Severity × Authenticity Multiplier × Centrality Multiplier

🔴 Woke Tropes

Trope	Severity	Authenticity	Centrality	Score
Lead Actor's Real-World Ideology (Ezra Miller)	4	1	1	4
Institutional Collapse and Authority as Absence	3	1	1	3
Multiverse as Infinite Revisability (Progressive Fantasy)	2	1	0.7	1.4
Corporate Reputation Management Over Artist Accountability	2	1	0.7	1.4
TOTAL WOKE				9.8

🟢 Traditional Tropes

Trope	Severity	Authenticity	Centrality	Score
Acceptance of Loss and the Limits of Control	4	0.7	1.5	4.2
Father Vindication as Sacred Motivation	4	0.7	1	2.8
Mentor Respect and Earned Wisdom (Keaton's Batman)	4	0.7	1	2.8
Sacrifice for Others as Ultimate Heroism	3	0.7	0.8	1.68
TOTAL TRADITIONAL				11.5

Score Margin: +2 TRAD