marvel movie | A Screenwriters Perspective: Current and Past Movies.

All science fiction/action movies that involve time travel take the risk of creating a timeline and/or a storyline that has a high chance of becoming ridiculous very quickly. The case of the new Marvel movie “The Flash” is about a Marvel character who can move at the speed of light and can also run faster than the speed of light (not possible within any natural law of Physics). The Flash got his incredible speed from a combination of being struck by lightning while being drenched in toxic chemicals. An off the wall crazy idea that I thought should have come from a better explanation.

When the Flash, played by actor Ezra Miller, runs faster than the speed of light, he has the ability to go back in time. This is the part of this story that does not work because the time travel is way overdone and mostly makes no sense. The time travel within this story brings back superheroes from other times in history, including Christopher Reeve, and George Reeves as Superman, using archive footage, and even Ben Affleck, Michael Keaton (the original Batman from 1989), and Adam West, the original Television Batman from the 1960s. The main message within this movie about time travel and superheroes are that if you make even one tiny change in what has happened in the past, the entire universe can come to an end, with possibly no way of fixing this corruption of time. In this story, due to a tiny event involving a can of tomato sauce, Barry “The Flash’s” mother is killed and his father is falsely arrested for her murder. Undoing this injustice is the majority of the plot of this film.

This movie includes the addition of a new movie Super Girl, played by newcomer Sasha Calle, who makes her first appearance about 75% into this story. As with all Marvel action movies like this one, the special effects are once again spectacular with the same idea of CGI first, story refinement is always less important.

Overall the acting is good and there are some genuine moments of humor, but not quite enough to save this film for a recommendation. I agree with the low 66% ratings on Rotten Tomatoes and do not recommend The Flash.

Anyone who is not a bankable actor or star in the movie industry, has to wonder at times what it must feel like to accept a role in a Marvel movie, or any movie that requires you to dress up in ridiculous costumes and recite what at times can be equally ridiculous dialogue. There are actors out there, that regardless of their relative success, probably refuse to make movies like “Eternals”, thinking they would hate looking so ridiculous or might laugh when it was time for their speaking parts.

The first and most important part of the new and anemic Eternals movie is that at 2 hours and 37 minutes, it is way too long. There is no reason that a movie like this, about aliens called eternals who arrive 5000 years ago to protect the planet earth and fight killer aliens called the Deviants, should be this annoyingly long. We did not need to see what happened 1000, 2000 and 5000 years ago, so often during this mostly boring and bad movie. It seemed at times that the screenwriter and director thought that the way to make this movie better or more relevant was to pad it another 45 minutes, causing most of the people in the audience I was in, to constantly check their watches. Enough already.

Some critics have said that Eternals is the worst movie in the entire Marvel series and unfortunately I do agree with this opinion. This film as a number of well known actors including Angelina Jolie (who has a surprisingly small part), Salma Hayek, Kit Harington, Brian Tyree Henry, Harry Styles, Salma Hayek, Kumail Nanjiani and Richard Madden. The obvious plan here was, we have a weak script about another Marvel comic book series, lets throw many big named stars at it, to get people in the theaters. We have all seen this idea fail many times in the past, this movie will have the same result because a bad screenplay will always result in a bad film. Some of the special effects were very good, including the creation of incredible looking Deviant creatures, but there were too many boring and dead areas in this story, and I was surprised I did not doze off during some of these unnecessary long drawn out parts.

The Rotten Tomatoes ratings for Eternals is an understandably and correctly low 48%, my rating is about the same, and I cannot recommend this long and mostly boring Marvel movie.