In Superhero Movies Like The Flash, the Greatest Villain Is a Better Future

Warning: Spoilers follow for The Flash.

Many superhero movies feature villains who are a dark reflection of the hero. The Flash cuts out the middleman — the movie’s antagonist is Barry Allen (Ezra Miller), or rather his inability to accept things as they are, personified by the Dark Flash. Like in the movie’s primary comic inspiration — Geoff Johns and Andy Kubert’s Flashpoint — Barry uses his superspeed to race back in time, changing history to save his mother’s (Maribel Verdú) life and prevent his father Henry from being scapegoated for her murder. What’s good for Barry turns out to be catastrophic to the rest of the world.

Barry is warned by two different Batmen (Ben Affleck and Michael Keaton) of the consequences of living in the past, literally or metaphorically. Nora Allen likewise warns her son that some problems just don’t have a solution. But wait — isn’t acquiescence an odd theme for a superhero movie? This is a genre built on aspiration; superheroes not only do the impossible themselves, but they inspire us to be better. In Man of Steel (which The Flash pulls heavily from in an Avengers: Endgame style redux), Jor-El tells his only son: “You will give the people of Earth an ideal to strive towards. They will race behind you, they will stumble, they will fall. But in time, they will join you in the sun.”

Granted, returning things to the way they were is a common hook in time travel stories. By using it, though, The Flash exposes a common thread in comic book movies: The heroes’ main goal is upholding the status quo.

Conservative Heroes, Revolutionary Villains

Wonder Woman 1984 was co-written by Geoff Johns and it shares the same thesis as Flashpoint and, thus, The Flash. The villain is Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal), who operates under the slogan “Life is good… but it can be better.” Lord soon gains the power to grant other people wishes, at a cost. Diana (Gal Gadot) gets back Steve Trevor (Chris Pine), but loses her Amazonian power. Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig) gets strength, but loses her humanity. In the film’s climax, Lord offers everyone in the world their greatest desire — and it results in chaos. The message? Wanting too much causes disaster. It might be meant as a commentary on the excesses of ’80s consumerism, but in practice the message comes off as “settle for what you have.”

This isn’t to pin this trend just on DC, for Marvel is plenty culpable too. If you look at their films, you’ll notice a recurring villain archetype — the misguided revolutionary, one who believes in a noble cause but has methods that are just too violent. So the hero must stop them.

Take Thanos (Josh Brolin), whose goal of culling half of the universe is monstrous. But the Avengers never push back on the point that he’s doing it to prevent overpopulation, nor do they offer an alternate solution. Of course, the Avengers can’t allow half the population of the universe to be snapped out of existence, but the fact that they never attacked Thanos on the merits of his plan makes him feel more reasonable than he is.

If you look at Marvel’s films, you’ll notice a recurring villain archetype — the misguided revolutionary.

Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan) in Black Panther wanted to end the oppression of Black people around the world. The Flag-Smashers in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier wanted fair treatment for refugees. Arthur Harrow (Ethan Hawke) in Moon Knight wanted to stop evil before it happens. All of them want to change the world for the better, but take the most violent route possible in achieving their goal. The heroes who face these villains thus avoid addressing the larger problems the villains point to and settle for just stopping them. This allows Marvel films and TV to neatly sidestep any ideological conflict, but it results in heroes who fight for the preservation of the status quo.

The only MCU film to reckon with this is Avengers: Age of Ultron. The eponymous villain tells the Avengers, “You want to protect the world, but you don’t want it to change.” While Age of Ultron poses this question about the Avengers’ function, it doesn’t really have any answers. The people of Sokovia initially see the Avengers as just another flavor of American militarism, but when they’re rescued by SHIELD in the climax, Quicksilver (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) shrugs, “This is not so bad.” Ultron and Vision’s last conversation, where they agree humanity is doomed, is especially fatalistic.

In reality, change doesn’t happen without upheaval. Superheroes can’t condone such upheaval because it’s contrary to their very purpose as characters, in movies and comics alike.

The Comic Book Illusion of Change

A quote attributed to Marvel Universe godfather Stan Lee is that comic books run on “the illusion of change.” Character relationships might be disrupted, but the fundamentals remain. Even moments of genuine change wind up smoothed over. The death of Gwen Stacy only resulted in Peter falling for Mary Jane Watson. Wally West went from Kid Flash to Flash after Barry Allen’s death, but the premise of The Flash comic — the Scarlet Speedster fighting supervillains — remained in place. The players can be different, but the game is the same.

Why the “illusion of change”? It goes back to serialization. Comic readers can’t buy a new Spider-Man issue every month if Peter Parker quits being Spider-Man. In turn, the comics have to reflect the reader’s reality. Despite, or perhaps because of, how dense comics’ continuity and lore can be, the larger setting has to remain familiar. Notice how in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, their world is largely the same as ours even though they’ve had public superheroes for more than a decade now; everyone makes the same pop-culture references, uses mostly the same technology as us, etc. Since superhero stories have to reflect the contemporary world, that means their characters stay frozen in time, not aging despite decades passing them by.

The original superhero deconstructions, courtesy of Alan Moore and Frank Miller, were about acknowledging time and the change it brings. In Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, a 55-year-old Bruce Wayne had aged out of being Batman; the influence of this story on Michael Keaton’s Batman in The Flash is obvious. Moore’s Miracleman/Marvelman, a 1980s follow-up to Mick Anglo’s 1950s British Captain Marvel reimagining, was about middle-aged Michael Moran discovering he is the titular superhero. The series ends with Miracleman and his allies as benevolent dictators, creating a world without money or war, where evil people are rehabilitated and everyone can be a Superman. Miracleman forces mankind to accept a utopia they could not create. Watchmen, Moore, and Dave Gibbons’ seminal 1986 comic depicted a world where costumed crime fighters had been the norm in the 20th century, but the world was still locked in a cold war. Here, superheroes’ inability to affect change was spun into a sign of their ineffectiveness. 

Can Change Save Superheroes?

Superheroes are now characters of the screen even more than the page, so it’s fitting that the most biting genre deconstruction right now is a TV show. In The Boys, adapted from Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson’s comic, “supes” are like cops, politicians, celebrities, and CEOs rolled into one — all types of people who enforce the status quo and reap the benefits. The Boys has taken note of how superhero stories argue for stasis and twisted it into both social and genre critique. Showrunner Eric Kripke has said, “When the status quo is problematic, suddenly [superheroes] become adversarial … Because they’re protecting a world that doesn’t and shouldn’t exist.”

Have any mainstream, serialized superhero stories taken note of? When Jonathan Hickman and Pepe Larraz relaunched the X-Men comics with House of X/Powers of X in 2019, they had the mutants of the world come together and found the nation of Krakoa. No longer would mutants hide from a world that hates and fears them; instead, they would create a new one. Obviously, there’s no Krakoa in the real world; this change was a rejection of both the previous X-Men status quo and the comics’ need to abide by reality.

Maybe the change that could revitalize Marvel and DC’s films is accepting change itself isn’t always a bad thing.

Superhero movies still have a ways to go. Unlike the Flash, we can’t go back and change history, nor should that be the solution. Accepting change means accepting the uncertainty of what it could bring. Marvel and DC’s movies have started getting stale because we know what to expect from them. Maybe the change that could revitalize them is accepting change itself isn’t always a bad thing.

For more on The Flash, check out our ending explained, every cameo in the film, and how time travel works in the movie.