2023 is shaping up to be the year that giant Hollywood franchises try to tell us that they are too sprawling and layered and beholden to their fanbases for their own good. It’s like they are crying out for help.

Between Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse declaring the canon to be an existential threat to multiversal stability and The Flash gaudily colliding planets worth of continuity against one another (both examples are literal at the textual level), both Marvel and DC film properties can’t help but be gasping for breath under the massive weight of unbearable, multi-dimensional lore-making.

And yet, both Marvel and DC want to have their cakes and eat them, too, as they make laborious nods to the unwieldy Gordian knots of their own creation while also reveling in the synergistic team-ups and nesting doll-like allusions that made both franchises box office draws in the first place.

If it sounds like I’m being overly cynical, let me assure you I am not aiming to be. This is simply the reality of our present moment — the biggest Hollywood blockbusters are elaborately constructed arrows pointing back to the past. This is not inherently a bad thing. But it is a trend that has been building up long enough that the fabric of space-time is beginning to split within the confines of some of these multi-billion dollar enterprises (for better, in some instance, and in others…)

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is angling to become one of my favorite animated films of all time. It contains some of the most exquisite computer animation I’ve ever experienced in a cinema. The voice acting is fairly stellar across the board. And there is no shortage of personality to the art direction, the character building, the banter in the script, etc.

One of my few hang-ups about the film, counter-intuitively, is embedded in its central and titular premise. The least engaging sequence in the film, for me, is the one that is dressed up to be its most elaborate and sensory stimulating. The seemingly endless stacking of differing Spider-People from various realities (some being giant neon arrows pointing to the past) all running around in a bombastic chase caused my eyes to glaze over. In a nearly two and a half hour movie whose aesthetic is predicated on excess and sensory overload, my eyes had been more than happy up to that point.

Across the Spider-Verse, to its benefit, weaves the light metatextuality of its canon-defying multiversal escapades into the text itself, by linking it directly to the lived experience of its characters. This adds substantive weight and stakes to what in other films gets reduced to hollow, self-referential nostalgia-baiting. This, in a media environment that struggles to escape the binds of nostalgia, is what gives Spider-Verse a feeling of newness in spite of its identity as a massively money-making IP.

The Flash, also to its benefit and credit, works toward having the same substantive weight of the metatextual bear down on the text itself. Perhaps the resounding difference between it and Spider-Verse is that one of the two is pleasing to look at and the other is a visual mess. “The Flash entering the speed force” might have been the Oscar’s “most cheer-worthy” moment, but what was drowned out among those cheers, apparently, was how plastic and uncanny valley the interior of the speed force appears.

The Flash sees its title character, Barry Allen (Ezra Miller), use his super-human speed to run faster than the speed of light in order to go back in time and prevent his mother (Maribel Verdu) from being killed, a murder that was unjustly pinned on Barry’s father (Ron Livingstone). As with any time travel plot, this alteration is not as simple as picking up a can of tomatoes. In changing the past, Barry creates a new timeline, one in which his mother lives but also in which there is no Justice League that can stop the planetary threat posed by evil alien Zod (Michael Shannon).

Within this framework, as in the multiverse premise of Spider-Man: No Way Home (another massive blockbuster grappling with an over-abundance of canon), new versions of old characters and old versions of old characters combine into a gumbo of DC IP. It is not as unwieldy as it might sound, though, as the story is usefully grounded in Barry’s motivation to save his mother. This aspect of the plot is well-constructed, culminating in a resolution that left some in my audience audibly choked up.

As for the planetary threat part, the reintroduction of Zod feels like a B-plot-sized MacGuffin to get us to a climactic battle against the inevitability of time itself. As a result, the stakes of most action sequences in the final act feel weightless despite some engaging cinematography. The clunky CGI these sequences rely on don’t do them any favors, either.

The Flash has enough going for it in the action, comedy, and nostalgia departments to appease both DC fans and general audiences (although, the latter may want to Google “What’s a Zod?” before they arrive at the theater). At the same time, I found it all to fray at the ends. The humor may work within the scene it occurs, but it doesn’t cohere with the dramatic stakes of the plot. There is sufficient action, but it doesn’t feel tangible. And the nostalgia — something I’m rarely a fan of — comes off noticeably lazy.

The Flash: C+

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As always, thanks for reading!

—Alex Brannan (Twitter, Letterboxd, Facebook)