If someone was to ask you what genre a big budget blockbuster starring two versions of Batman, one Scarlet Speedster and a Supergirl occupies, the likelihood is very high that you’d say it sounds an awful lot like a comic book movie, which is completely understandable when that’s exactly the case. However, The Flash cinematographer Henry Braham doesn’t think it’s quite as simple as that.
So far, all we know about the project for sure is that Ezra Miller’s title hero and Ben Affleck’s Batman will end up going on a multiversal adventure, one that brings them into contact with both Michael Keaton’s grizzled Bruce Wayne and Sasha Calle’s Kryptonian. Everything outside of that remains entirely speculative and unconfirmed, but we can guarantee there’s going to be big ideas, bigger action and some showstopping uses of alternate realities as a storytelling device.
Braham is no stranger to the genre himself having worked with James Gunn on Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 and The Suicide Squad, but in a new interview the veteran DP explained why he believes The Flash isn’t going to fit into what audiences have come to expect from spandex-clad crimefighting shenanigans.
“The Flash is going great. I mean, it’s a complex movie, and it’s a fantastic concept of bringing in the generations of these kind of comic books. Again, it’s not really a comic book movie. It’s not based in reality, but it’s a much more kind of technically complex, I think all the filmmakers are really keen that the technical complexity of the storytelling doesn’t get in the way of just good quality filmmaking. Hopefully, I don’t think it’ll ever come across as a superhero movie. It will come across as a movie, and that’s what it is. I think that’s the way these things need to go. We need to be making great, great, great films that happen to have superheroes who have truthful characters behind them, with all the character flaws that we find in humanity.”
Again, it certainly sounds like he’s describing a comic book movie, despite outlining that The Flash isn’t really a comic book movie, even though it is. You get the point he’s trying to make, though, and while in the wrong pair of hands the multiverse and two Batmen could easily end up being nothing more than a gimmick designed to generate hype, director Andy Muschietti’s first foray outside of horror has enough talent on either side of the camera to live up to the undoubted potential of the premise.
