Is It Really That Bad?
I don’t think I’ve ever felt like the universe actively conspired against something until I witnessed the production of The Flash.
Since 1991 there have been quite a few proposals for Flash movies, but they never really got off the ground for whatever reason. Following Barry’s debut in Justice League, a movie finally was announced before multiple delays due to rewrites, in particular to cut Ray Fisher’s Cyborg from the story after he went public about the awful shit he had to deal with under Joss Whedon. Things seemed hopeless until It director Andy Muschietti came onboard, at which point production on the film finally started to go smoothly. Sure, there were rumblings about Ezra Miller having episodes on set, but that’s just typical actor nonsense, right? Surely it couldn’t get any worse!
Look, I’m here to review a movie so I’ll keep this brief: Miller committed crimes. Lots of crimes. So many, in fact, you’d think they were method acting for the role of Reverse-Flash. The thing is, despite all of this, Miller was basically given a slap on the wrist by the studio, being forbidden from doing promos and press tours (oh no! The horror!). And as if the situation wasn’t already a fucking mess, while Miller’s crime spree was ongoing WB canned the nearly-complete Batgirl movie that featured Michael Keaton and Academy Award-winning actor Brendan Fraser while simultaneously inflating The Flash’s budget to nearly $300 million with reshoots. It seems baffling to cancel a movie that was nearly done and that people were marginally interested in for the sake of a movie that people were losing interest in quickly due to its star’s erratic behavior, but remember: Leslie Grace isn’t white, while Ezra Miller is. WB is never beating those racism allegations at this rate.
With a normal movie, this is where the nonsense ends. BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE!
This film was meant to smooth out the clusterfuck continuity of the “Snyderverse” with a soft reboot, with Henry Cavill filming a end-of-movie cameo alongside Miller, Gal Gadot, Keaton, and Supergirl’s actress Sasha Calle to establish the new direction of DC going forward. Unfortunately, the hierarchy of power at DC changed, and Gunn shot that down. While this meant the ending would probably not get people confused with regards to upcoming projects, it also meant the movie wasn’t going to really have any closure for the old universe. Affleck, Cavill, and who knows who else are just gone, and the future is just a big old question mark. At least Aquaman is safe, maybe?
Literally none of this news was very reassuring to fans. Nothing above is any good for a film’s perception to audiences under normal circumstances, but here we have all this news coming to a fanbase that genuinely did not want this fucking movie. The DCEU was already divisive when the film was announced, and Miller’s portrayal of Barry doubly so; the fact it was adapting Flashpoint was seen as lazy and uninspired, not to mention its not really a story that lets Flash stand on his own merits, making it seem more like this movie was just an excuse to reboot; it was a multiverse story in a day and age with an abundance of such stories, and it was releasing around the same time as Across the Spider-Verse to boot; and Gunn’s reboot plans meant this story was likely a narrative dead end. This movie had an uphill battle the likes of which haven’t been seen since Sisyphus.
But much like that mythological figure, the boulder came crashing right back down when the numbers came in. The movie would likely need to gross $500 million at minimum to break even after factoring in the reshoots and advertising, and it only managed half of that with a pitiful opening weekend followed by a massive 73% drop. It now sits alongside films like The Lone Ranger and Mortal Engines as one of the most expensive bombs in history, to the point where WB would have saved more money by cancelling it like they did with Batgirl. And despite glowing praise from the likes of Tom Cruise and Stephen King, it received middling reviews from mainstream critics.
Audiences haven’t been any less mixed, but considering most people weren’t particularly excited or invested in this film’s existence this is basically a miracle. Sure, there’s plenty of people out there saying this is the “worst comic book movie ever” like they do every time a new superhero movie drops, but even more people are saying they enjoyed the film… although even they tend to have some severe criticisms.
Even though I knew most of what was going to happen in the movie going in, I wasn’t really sure what to expect given everything surrounding the movie. But you know me, I’m willing to give almost any movie a chance, and bombs this big don’t happen every day, so even before it was voted on I was trying to make time to check it out. So sit down, microwave yourself a snack—
—and watch as I try and determine if The Flash is really that bad.
THE GOOD
The biggest shock of this film is that Ezra Miller is actually really good here.
Their Barry is still a bit of a goofball, but he’s clearly matured as a character since his precious appearances. They managed to make him much more charming and likable than he ever was, and this gets compounded when he interacts with the younger Barry and gets confronted with how annoying he was before. I think young Barry could have come off as really insufferable, but the fact he annoys everyone around him and also ends up maturing makes him a lot more endearing.
Miller really kills it with the emotional moments, particularly the ending encounter with Barry’s mom and the scene where old Barry snaps at young Barry. The film is really carried by the dramatic, emotional moments far more than any of the superheroics, and Miller manages to sell a lot of it very well. It was to the point where I started thinking, “I really wouldn’t mind if they stick around.” Then a scene where Barry says the Justice League has no real psychiatric help or where his younger self ends up repeatedly exposing himself in public by accident happens, and then I remembered, “Oh yeah, aren’t they a mentally unwell criminal?”
Unsurprisingly, Michael Keaton absolutely kills it in his role as Batman, but much more shockingly is that Ben Affleck's brief return as Bruce is pretty great as well. I always thought Affleck, much like Henry Cavill, was desperately trying to give a great performance while weighed down by bad writing; here, he gets an actual poignant scene where he talks to Barry about how dwelling on tragedies isn't the way to do things, and you should try and move forward instead. It shows he really could have been great if given better material to work with.
Okay, enough being nice to Affleck, I wanna talk about Keaton again. As much as the marketing hyped him up and as much as he is obviously the most blatant fanservice possible, it's still so cool to see him in the suit again. I am not immune to nostalgia pandering, and as corny as it could have been from anyone else, the zoom into his face when he says The Line really is a highlight of the movie. Keaton has a great deal of charisma, and while there are issues with Batman they aren't his fault at all. Most impressively, he doesn't steal the show away from Miller like I thought he would; he enhances the scenes he's in without stealing the spotlight completely from their performance. I feel like this is a problem in a lot of movies like this, where the lead gets overshadowed by a hyped up character, but somehow The Flash of all things managed to avoid this.
And as bad as the cameos could get, this movie gave two of the greatest cameos ever put to film with the return of the GOAT George Clooney Batman and, best of all, Nicolas Cage Superman from the unmade Superman Lives, fighting a giant spider to the death just as God intended. I am not immune to the charms of Nicolas Cage.
Overall, this movie presents us with a solid story, plenty of fun moments, great character dynamics, and more... for the first two acts, anyway.
THE BAD
Once this movie hits the third act, it basically just loses any and all focus and becomes a big dumb video game-esque battle against Zod and his forces in a bland desert landscape. While both Barrys admittedly get some pretty cool moments sprinkled in and Keaton’s Batman’s second death is actually a well done emotional moment, Supergirl ends up being completely wasted, with her sole role being to angrily scream and then die repeatedly.
This actually highlights the problem with Kara in this movie: She’s basically nothing but a plot device and has zero personality, and a good 80% of her dialogue is just angry screaming. As hot as Sasha Calle is and how much she obviously wants to make Kara compelling, she is given so little to work with that her efforts end up being fruitless. She does nothing of consequence after helping Barry get his powers back, and could be replaced or written out of the story and it would still make perfect sense.
Zod’s inclusion is pretty baffling as well, especially since they chose to water down one of the only good things from Man of Steel into a boring, generic doomsday villain. You can really feel that poor Michael Shannon would rather be doing anything else, and his bored performance just highlights how poorly implemented Zod is in the plot. Like, the Fladh has some of the best and most colorful DC villains in his rogues gallery, one’s that are often overlooked because Batman’s villains sell more toys. Why not highlight some of them instead of taking a Superman villain and stripping him of all personality to the point the actor clearly has no passion for the role? Cutting Zod would make cutting Supergirl even easier, and then two of the biggest problems with the movie are gone!
The third act does manage to mostly rerail itself once it goes back to Barry trying to unfuck the timeline, with only a disgustingly egregious bit of fanservice that I’ll discuss in the next section hampering it. But at the end, despite the incredibly based George Clooney cameo, there’s just so many unresolved and unanswered questions, with the biggest one being who killed Barry’s mom? Considering her death is what kickstarted the whole plot, you’d think this might come up, but it never does. A lot of other things come up and get dropped too, like whatever was going on with Batman in the opening, but maybe I’m just crazy for wanting elements introduced in a plot to have significance beyond just being there to be cool.
Even beyond that, there’s the fact that Supergirl and Keaton!Batman’s final fates are never really resolved, something that apparently wasn’t a problem in early versions of the film since they showed up alive in the final scene. As much as I loved seeing Clooney, I think trading him for getting some closure for Keaton and Calle would have been more satisfying.
Everyone harps on how bad the CGI is—and it absolutely is, don’t get me wrong—but for the most part I found it endearingly bad. Like the opening with the CGI babies? That’s too goofy for me to hate. But once the movie revolves into bland grey and black CGI bad guys and creepy deepfake celebrity cameos, I stop being quite so forgiving.
Oh, and on the subject of cameos, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen one as pointless and unfunny as Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman showing up out of nowhere (complete with theme music) to make Bruce and Barry look like dumb assholes. Imagine thinking this was a good idea.
THE UGLY
The biggest point of contention surrounding this movie is the CGI necromancy used in the aforementioned cameo clusterfuck from the climax, which gives us George Reeve, Christopher Reeves, and Adam West posthumously reprising their DC roles in non-speaking appearances (there’s archived audio from West, but his cameo isn't really focused on to the point you can barely tell it's him) where they just stand there before the camera swoops around like in that Saul Goodman gif.
I think this is one of the very few times where I actually think the outrage is mostly justified. To be clear, I’m not getting mad on behalf of dead celebrities I never knew, and as long as the filmmakers went through the proper channels and the estates of these stars were properly compensated, I don’t have any legal objections. All of my distaste is coming from a subjective, moral standpoint.
I have never liked this CGI necromancy ever since Rogue One popularized it. I find it really gross and distasteful, and in most cases I think finding a lookalike actor would be preferable than playing Weekend at Bernie’s with a computer generated facsimile of a dead person. In The Flash, I understand having lookalikes would diminish the wow factor of the crossover, but there was an extremely easy workaround to this: Have cameos from all the living DC stars.
Was Brandon Routh not available to put on the Superman tights? Would it have been so bad to let Grant Gustin pop in for a cameo? They acknowledge Helen Slater, so why not Melissa Benoist? Hell, if you want to reference bad, campy movies, have Shaq show up as Steel or Josh Brolin pop in as Jonah Hex! Or even Ryan Reynolds, I’d bet he’d be down to return if you gave him a real suit this time!
Like there’s just no excuse for ghoulishly parading around dead guys when there’s so many alive guys you could use instead. People can complain all they want about the fanservice and cameos in the past few Spider-Man films, but at least they only had returning characters played by living actors. And when this movie already has the niche, out-there Nic Cage Superman cameo, proving they were down to do things as out there and inoffensively creative as reference unmade movies, it’s really just inexcusable. It doesn’t ruin the movie for me, but it makes me lose a bit of respect for the people who okayed this over less offensive cameo ideas.
IS IT REALLY THAT BAD?
To my surprise, this film actually turned out to be pretty good. Not “great,” not “the best superhero movie ever,” but genuinely mostly good and enjoyable.
My opinion is that the movie is good in spite of itself. The third act is truly a hot mess, the stupid desert battle against Zod is awful and boring, Supergirl is depressingly pointless, so many plot points are just dropped or otherwise forgotten, and the CGI necromancy is nothing short of ghoulish. But the rest of the movie is truly a lot of fun. Barry and his younger self have a fun dynamic, Keaton really manages to take what little he’s given and show that he’s still got it as Batman, the Clooney and Cage cameos were delightful, and most importantly the emotional moments are actually effective.
I think with a bit more polish this film could have actually lived up to the hype around it. There is a great movie in here being suffocated by fanservice and CGI but still managing to get a few gasps of air regardless. I think if they’d kept the conflict more grounded or made Reverse-Flash the primary antagonist, things might have turned out better.
I think its score is pretty fair. My friend @huyh172 described this as “the worst good DC movie,” and it’s an assessment I fully agree with. It’s not as good as Aquaman, Wonder Woman, The Suicide Squad, the Snyder Cut, or Shazam!, and it’s definitely not as bad as stuff like Wonder Woman 1984 or Josstice League. It’s also a bit too enjoyable to be mid. It’s just a really solid movie held back from true greatness by some damning flaws… and really, that makes it the perfect capstone to the "Snyderverse," a cinematic universe that had some solid movies but was held back from greatness by incredibly bad ones.
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because sometimes there are invisible tests and invisible rules and you're just supposed to ... know the rule. someone you thought of as a friend asks you for book recommendations, so you give her a list of like 30 books, each with a brief blurb and why you like it. later, you find out she screenshotted the list and send it out to a group chat with the note: what an absolute freak can you believe this. you saw the responses: emojis where people are rolling over laughing. too much and obsessive and actually kind of creepy in the comments. you thought you'd been doing the right thing. she'd asked, right? an invisible rule: this is what happens when you get too excited.
you aren't supposed to laugh at your own jokes, so you don't, but then you're too serious. you're not supposed to be too loud, but then people say you're too quiet. you aren't supposed to get passionate about things, but then you're shy, boring. you aren't supposed to talk too much, but then people are mad when you're not good at replying.
you fold yourself into a prettier paper crane. since you never know what is "selfish" and what is "charity," you give yourself over, fully. you'd rather be empty and over-generous - you'd rather eat your own boundaries than have even one person believe that you're mean. since you don't know what the thing is that will make them hate you, you simply scrub yourself clean of any form of roughness. if you are perfect and smiling and funny, they can love you. if you are always there for them and never admit what's happening and never mention your past and never make them uncomfortable - you can make up for it. you can earn it.
don't fuck up. they're all testing you, always. they're tolerating you. whatever secret club happened, over a summer somewhere - during some activity you didn't get to attend - everyone else just... figured it out. like they got some kind of award or examination that allowed them to know how-to-be-normal. how to fit. and for the rest of your life, you've been playing catch-up. you've been trying to prove that - haha! you get it! that the joke they're telling, the people they are, the manual they got- yeah, you've totally read it.
if you can just divide yourself in two - the lovable one, and the one that is you - you can do this. you can walk the line. they can laugh and accept you. if you are always-balanced, never burdensome, a delight to have in class, champagne and glittering and never gawky or florescent or god-forbid cringe: you can get away with it.
you stare at your therapist, whom you can make jokes with, and who laughs at your jokes, because you are so fucking good at people-pleasing. you smile at her, and she asks you how you're doing, and you automatically say i'm good, thanks, how are you? while the answer swims somewhere in your little lizard brain:
how long have you been doing this now? mastering the art of your body and mind like you're piloting a puppet. has it worked? what do you mean that all you feel is... just exhausted. pick yourself up, the tightrope has no net. after all, you're cheating, somehow, but nobody seems to know you actually flunked the test. it's working!
aren't you happy yet?
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Is It Really That Bad?
When it comes to infamous animated films, few are treated with quite as much revulsion as Mars Needs Moms. Based off of Bloom County creator Berkley Breathed’s storybook, brought to life by ImageMovers Digital (who created The Polar Express, that...beloved?… Christmas classic), distributed by Disney, and produced by Robert Zemeckis, the film really had the deck stacked in its favor… and yet, it quite infamously fumbled.
It released to become the 12th worst opening for any film in three thousand or more theaters, netting only $6 million on debut, and then proceeded to only gross $39 million dollars worldwide—and that’s including 3D theaters. With a budget of over $150 million, this cause a net loss of over $110 million dollars, which unsurprisingly led Disney to cut their losses and shut down ImageMovers Digital… which is what I would really rather say, but the depressing fact is that Disney nuked the studio before the movie even came out, as if they knew they had a massive bomb on their hand and wanted to punish the studio ahead of time.
As divisive as the studio’s animation was, it’s never really fun seeing an animation studio get scrapped like that. With its death, we lost some interesting film concepts, such as a remake of Yellow Submarine (which would have probably been even trippier with the motion capture animation), Roger Rabbit sequel, and a kaiju throwback film by Michael “Trick ‘r Treat” Dougherty called Calling All Robots. Say what you will about the studio’s output, but it’s genuinely a damn shame these ideas never came to fruition.
Over the years, just about every animation critic worth their salt has given this movie shit, from Mr Enter to the Nostalgia Critic, and Disney has largely seen fit to sweep this under the rug and pretend it never happened. But I can’t do that, can I? Y’all voted for me to watch this for the first time over a decade after it came out, and see if it’s really that bad. Did this movie manage to prove far better than its infamous reputation, or am I gonna have to put myself in a Martian memory extractor?
THE GOOD
Milo is actually pretty believable as a kid. I know some people find this character really annoying, or bratty, or obnoxious, but… that’s just how kids are. He’s a little bit of a shit and doesn’t understand the gravity of things he says sometimes, but he has a good heart and when it gets down to it he does all he can to save his mom. Like he’s just a child in need of harsh life lessons, typical of any fantastical family film. In a movie brimming with awful characters, he’s easily the least worst. Joan Cusack as the mom is pretty good, getting some funny line deliveries, and I’m sure she’s made someone’s list of “Hottest Animated MILFs.”
I think the core ideas behind the Martian society are really fascinating. Here we have a fascist, sexist dystopia. Every quarter of a century children are hatched, and females are passed off to nanny-robots to be raised while males are tossed down the garbage chutes to become feral, hairy wild men. The nanny-bots are programmed with the memories of abducted human women, memories which are forcibly extracted in a very fatal process. The women are then made to serve as the enforcers of the fascist regime, ruled over by an aging ruler who governs with an iron fist and doesn’t accept deviance from her desires, desires stemming from a deranged belief she is bettering society with her straw feminist viewpoints. On paper, it’s all very deep, dark, and intriguing.
The operating phrase, of course, being “on paper.”
THE BAD
Let me just get this out of the way: The animation is awkward, uncanny, and unpleasant. This is not a new or interesting observation, so I just wanted to get it over with as soon as possible, though it does feed into a few other issues, particularly the design of Ki.
Ki is just absolutely aggressively female in her design. Like, she’s pink, she has those curvy hips, she’s just really in your face about being a girl Martian. And yeah, the girls are the ones we see a lot of because of how the society is structured, but she’s so glaringly feminine it’s kind of obnoxious. Like she’s clearly given this overly polished design because she’s the beautiful, heroic lead character; other Martians do not look nearly as pleasant as she does. That’s not even getting into the obnoxious decision to have her speak in outdated hippie slang, a decision that’s about as pleasant as jamming splinters under your fingernails.
She’s not even the most annoying character, though. That would be Gribble, played by Dan Fogler, the fat dude from Fantastic Beasts. You’d think that because he was the best part of those flaccid spinoffs he’d be the best part of this movie, but you’d be absolutely wrong. He’s every annoying comic relief trope smashed into one incredibly obnoxious character, and considering almost no one else in this movie is likable at all he really sticks out as being unpleasantly annoying. It doesn’t help that the single moment they try and give him depth—when he recounts to Milo the harrowing experience of watching his mother die as her memories were extracted, so close to saving her and yet so far—is immediately followed by Ki showing up and Fortnite dancing and spitting out some more of her obnoxious slang.
And that right there really highlights what’s wrong with this movie: It is tonally inconsistent to an absurd degree. With a title like “Mars Needs Moms” and the general atmosphere of the opening as well as the marketing really lead you to believe this will be a simple, silly family comedy where a kid learns to appreciate his parents a la Jimmy Neutron. But then we get into the Martian dystopia, the explicit mass murder of moms, the grim visuals, the constant peril, and it’s pretty obvious the film wants to be serious and say something as well… all while keeping the funny wisecracking fat guy mentor, the Fortnite dancing monkey Martian men, and the pink and perky alien hippie graffiti artist who loves to talk like she just stepped out of Woodstock. It’s not impossible to handle two wildly different tones in a film, but to say this movie bungles it is an understatement; it ultimately causes the film to lack any sort of identity and just dissolves into an ugly mess of interesting ideas and confused writing that is impossible to take seriously.
IS IT REALLY THAT BAD?
The short answer? Yes, this movie is really, truly awful. But a short answer is pretty unsatisfying, isn’t it?
I was honestly, genuinely hoping going into this that the critics were wrong and maybe there was something to like here… and yeah, there were a couple of things I thought were done pretty decently, but overall the movie is just an incredibly sloppy and tonally inconsistent mess that never really settles into what it wants to be. It actually had me thinking about another movie while watching it, and that movie is The Guyver. While I’m saving a full review of that for when I bring back Michael After Midnight, the film had the same sort of wild tonal whiplash that Mars Needs Moms does, a sort of dissonance in the story where it can’t decide if it wants to be dark and edgy or lighthearted and goofy. But while I don’t think either film is particularly good, I think the fact I find The Guyver to be infinitely more valuable as a film highlights the strength of live action cinema over animation. Jarring tonal inconsistency is just so much easier to swallow when you don’t have to look at some of the ugliest animation you’ve ever seen, y’know?
Mars Needs Moms is honestly quite a bit worse than that score would suggest. This is definitely one of the worst animated movies ever made, unlike what happened with The Emoji Movie, I don’t think the overwhelming revulsion towards the film is over-exaggerated by much. Like, yes, this isn’t the worst movie in human history, nor even the worst animated movie, but the fact that it’s not only bad but bad enough to ruin an entire studio makes it kind of legendary in terms of badness. At least Sony Animation was able to put out the two best Spider-Man movies ever made after The Emoji Movie flopped; ImageMover Digital got no such second chance, and not only went under but dragged the entire motion capture animation style down with it. I think it tarnishing an entire style alongside everything else (and thus probably being partially responsible for the lack of a Tintin sequel) really seals the deal on this being a piece of shit.
I’d honestly drop this film into the low 2s at best. It’s a bottom 100 contender for sure, and it’s far worse than some of the movies on there. Gigli? This movie is way worse than that. Cats? That movie is way campier and has far funnier use of uncanny valley animation. The Room and Trolls 2? Those are both way too funny to be worse than Mars Needs Moms. Fucking Batman & Robin? That’s an actual solid movie, how is it rated lower than this? Hell, I’d even say The Emoji Movie is better, because at least it doesn’t hurt to look at.
The thing is, while I think it’s objectively awful, I can’t say I can personally muster up too much hate for it. It’s so confused tonally that it’s almost fascinating to watch. If you’re a bad movie connoisseur like I am or just generally fascinated by bombs of this magnitude, it’s worth a watch. But outside of that, this movie is just too messy to really find even a cult audience. So if you don’t fall into that weird niche of people who watch bad movies for some reason, don’t bother. You’re not really missing anything valuable.
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