The Flash Just Isn’t a Good Endpoint for the DCEU

Warning: This article contains full spoilers for The Flash.

After numerous delays, director changes, and controversies surrounding its star, The Flash has finally arrived on the big screen worldwide. The tale of getting the film, which was first announced in 2014, to the big screen is nearly as long as the DCEU itself, which officially began 10 years ago with 2013’s Man of Steel, which opened on June 14 of that year. Now that we know the DC universe is getting (sort of?) rebooted with James Gunn’s upcoming film Superman: Legacy, The Flash’s time travel story is essentially acting as a farewell to the DCEU, minus a couple of odds and ends with Aquaman 2 and Blue Beetle (both of which have questionable canonicity in the wake of The Flash’s timeline-altering shenanigans).

But despite aspirations to leave the DCEU going out on a high note, The Flash runs into a lot of the same problems as other entries in the series. Between a thematic arc that stumbles with mixed messaging, hollow narrative connections to Man of Steel, and a pervasive feeling of being an overreaction to criticisms of previous DCEU movies, The Flash struggles to bring this embattled franchise to a satisfying conclusion. How did this happen? Let’s take a look.

Barry Allen’s Arc and a Confused Message

To start on a positive note, The Flash is not totally without merit. There are a few good comedic moments, some well-conceived action beats involving the Flash’s powers, and a heartfelt finale with Barry saying goodbye to his mother as he finally accepts that he needs to let her go. However, the movie doesn’t come together as a cohesive whole because what it’s trying to say – that Barry needs to understand that he can’t fix everything and that our pasts are part of what makes us who we are – completely runs counter to what the movie is actually doing: resetting the DC film franchise and excising elements the studio thinks “didn’t work” as they set the table for Gunn’s relaunch. It’s startling to hear Ben Affleck’s Batman tell Barry in no uncertain terms that changing the past will only make things worse in a movie that erases him from continuity.

The bigger machinations around what the studio wants often crowd out what Barry’s story needs. Michael Keaton’s much-promoted return as Batman feels like a plea for attention, as if Flash wasn’t enough of an attraction for his own movie. The romantic “subplot” (we’re using that term generously here) with Iris West seems to be banking on audience investment that the movie never earns. And at a critical point in the finale where we’re supposed to be horrified at what Barry has become in the form of Dark Flash, the moment gets torpedoed by a collection of grossly inappropriate CG cameos including the likes of Christopher Reeve, Adam West, and Nicolas Cage. What are clearly supposed to be attempts at crowd-pleasing fan service are instead misguided and clogging up one of the (theoretically) most dramatic scenes in the movie.

It’s startling to hear Ben Affleck’s Batman tell Barry that changing the past will only make things worse in a movie that erases him from continuity.

In many ways, the meta-narrative regarding the DCEU’s current state and how it impacts the finished product is simply impossible to ignore. Warner Bros. appeared to latch onto The Flash as an opportunity to give their superhero universe a mulligan by announcing that it was adapting the popular 2011 storyline Flashpoint, after multiple directors had already signed on and left the project amidst numerous shifts in direction at the executive level. Setting aside the oddity of using Flashpoint as the basis for the first-ever solo Flash film, anyone with even a cursory amount of outside knowledge about this film’s development history would have a hard time forgetting that what’s supposed to be an emotionally involving story about a young man wishing he could find a way to save his mother is also one giant exercise in brand management.

Revisiting Man of Steel in The Flash

The main conflict after Barry alters the past is that he’s created a world where most of the Justice League members no longer exist, which means there’s no one to defend the planet once General Zod, the villain from Man of Steel, arrives to terraform Earth. As the finale of the DCEU, it’s fitting that The Flash tries to bring things full circle by revisiting the narrative of the film that started the franchise back in 2013. However, upon closer examination, the connective tissue to Man of Steel rings hollow because of The Flash’s lack of willingness to engage with its story or characters in the same way that Snyder’s film did. Instead of effectively closing the loop with the first film in this universe, The Flash invokes Man of Steel but then doesn’t do much with it.

As a movie, Man of Steel has some tonal and structural issues, but at the very least it had a clear interest in engaging with the idea of its superpowered characters as mythological figures. Many elements of Kal-El’s story in that film turned him into an unmistakable Christ allegory, and the Kryptonians acting essentially as gods battling in the world of mortals and how that would affect humanity’s perception of their place in the universe was a throughline that carried from that film into subsequent entries in the series. Unfortunately, The Flash doesn’t pick up on any of these themes. The threat of General Zod and his fellow Kryptonians, the World Engines, and the reveal of Kara Zor-El as Supergirl all feel purely mechanical in their function, and what they’re supposed to mean to the world of this film never goes past the surface.

The Flash never justifies spending so much time calling back to Man of Steel, robbing the film of the weight a meaningful finale to the DCEU should have.

General Zod is used as little more than a boss fight for the heroes to confront, with no attempt to offer any depth or new insight into his character. Michael Shannon even admitted as such on the film’s promo tour, saying “I’m basically there to present a challenge.” As for Supergirl, while Sasha Calle has good screen presence, nearly all of her scenes are in the film’s trailers, and she simply does not have enough screen time for the audience to become emotionally invested in her. The movie even mentions one of Man of Steel’s incomplete threads, the Kryptonian Genetic Codex, and reveals that it’s implanted in Kara’s DNA instead of Kal’s in this universe. But the movie still doesn’t really explain how the Codex affects someone either physically or psychologically, nor does it wind up adding anything to the conflict aside from giving Zod a reason to kill Kara. Without a strong narrative motivation for doing so, The Flash never justifies spending so much time calling back to Man of Steel, robbing the film of the weight a meaningful finale to the DCEU should have.

A Reactive DC Universe

Some of the other moments where The Flash revisits material from Man of Steel also play into what has been the DCEU’s major Achilles’ heel almost from day one: the unshakable impression that these movies are made from a reactive standpoint, often trying to over-correct in response to criticisms of previous films. This movie reveals that a younger Barry Allen who was just starting out as a superhero was present in Metropolis during Zod’s attack, and shows a flashback where we see him saving a child from the World Engine but failing to save the child’s father. Yes, it’s a key character moment for Barry because it reflects the death of his own mother, but it also can’t help but feel like a response to the controversy about Superman causing too much destruction in Man of Steel.

Perhaps we can give that one a pass because it’s ultimately an effective scene. But consider how the location of the final battle with Zod is changed from the heart of Metropolis to… a random desert in the middle of nowhere. Sure, it raises the question of what the hell the two sides are even fighting over, but at least there aren’t any pesky civilians to hurt or buildings to damage. Changing the battle to this kind of location is a creative decision that doesn’t feel motivated by character or world-building, but by an attempt to curtail discourse before it begins. Yes, Man of Steel was far too liberal with Superman and Zod falcon-punching each other through skyscrapers, but there has to be a reasonable middle ground between “fighting in an empty field for no reason” and “leveling Metropolis.”

All of the major “mythology” films in the DCEU have followed this pattern of overreaction. It’s difficult to say with absolute certainty because we aren’t privy to everything about the behind-the-scenes process, but comparing the films to each other as you move down the chain is an illuminating exercise. Man of Steel’s overly violent approach to Superman feels like a response to complaints that the pre-DCEU Superman Returns had too little action. Batman v Superman feels like a response to complaints about Man of Steel’s violence, with both Batman and Lex Luthor’s motivations (and really the entire plot) being a relitigation of how MOS’s third act was received. The theatrical version of Justice League’s playful tone and Crayola color palette was a response to complaints about BvS being too grimdark, Zack Snyder’s Justice League’s release was a response to complaints about the theatrical cut, and now we have The Flash, which feels like a response to an entire decade’s worth of complaints about this franchise and an admission from the studio that they have never once truly understood what they wanted the DCEU films to be, only what they wanted them not to be. In a roundabout way, this makes The Flash an on-brand end for this series, but it certainly doesn’t make it a good one.

For more on the film, check out our The Flash ending and post-credits scene explainer.

Carlos Morales writes novels, articles and Mass Effect essays. You can follow his fixations on Twitter.