First, The Flash was a genuinely good movie, as superhero movies go, and I was overall quite impressed with it. I also like to note that I am an old DC fanboy and I have a lot of history with the IP in general, so it would have been hard for this movie to fail with me. That said....Ezra Miller was great in the movie, and it was fun to see Michael Keaton back as a retro Batman again. The core conceits of the movie captured the entire Flashpoint concept of the DC multiverse quite well. It had some rough spots, but overall this was a more generally enjoyable movie of its sort than the last few I have seen (with the caveat that Guardians of the Galaxy is unique in its role as a film that transcends its own medium).
The week before we also caught Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. I spent a lot of that film's runtime just mildly bored as I watched the director try to merge the Michael Bay style of excess with the more human level of development found in the Bumblebee movie. It sort of fails at both styles as a result, but that's okay, because about 20% of the way in to the movie I started cataloging all of the little "childhood" logic moments that basically made this a kid's movie (or at least a teen film). It was operating on the fuel of a story told for kids, with the logic that makes sense to kids (and audiences with mild expectations).
In the end, the new Transformers movie was a bust for me personally but it entertained my son (a bit; he's not really in to the Transformers). My wife liked it, but she is a bit younger than me. My entire Transformers experience is encapsulated in a time period from about 1983-1988 and is especially focused on those old "original generation" cartoons and the Marvel comics of the time. Anything after that point is more or less lost on me. She, however, grew up loving Beast Wars Transformers or whatever it is called, so she was looking forward to seeing more of those characters (even though all but two got precious few lines in the film).
Anyway.....I realized that the Transformers film was destined to fail for me because my nostalgia for the giant transforming robots is limited to a roughly 5-6 year window in my youth, after which I effectively left it behind. Indeed, my general lack of excitement for the modern movies is probably due to this; no modern conception of the film is going to come close to embracing my recollection of those early days, which is clouded by my own Transformers headcannon of collecting all those figures. The movies today need to reflect decades of the franchise, and the totality of a vast audience with many, many different takes. The only certainty is that they have successfully captured the inherent lack of overall logic or consistency in the many, many variations on The Transformers. It was never, ever the most consistent or plot-hole-free series (though the old comics certainly made an effort).
Meanwhile, The Flash is reflective of my obsession with both comics in general and DC in particular, especially Batman, which started when I was a tiny kid dressing up as the caped crusader, all the way to my thorough embrace of collecting DC following the Crisis on Infinite Earths, and my largely (mostly) successful effort to collect various DC comics for going on four decades now. My familiarity with the vast range of stories, characters and variations used to construct, like Frankenstein's monster, a movie out of the DC comic universe makes more sense to me. Seeing a return to an aged version of Batman from the 1989 film, now a reflection of a broken timestream by Barry Allen, is a genuine treat, as that movie informed much of my entertainment experience in 1989, along with the increasingly amazing Batman comics of the day, such as Dark Knight Returns and Arkham Asylum, both of which I used to write multiple papers on the transition of comics to film back then in one of my college classes, as well as an argument for how film noir had informed comics as a medium and Frank Miller in particular. So yeah, The Flash is not only better able to capitalize on the long history of its own universe, but I am also better suited to embracing it due to my own immersion.
It also helps that The Flash was just a better overall story with more vivacious actors who were given better lines (and Ezra Miller effectively steals every scene except when Keaton is present). If Transformers had better writing, I might be thinking more about how I enjoyed it.....but alas, it did not.
Anyway, take this as a positive review of The Flash and if you are not a DC hater or burned out on superhero films I give it an A+! But for Transformers....go see if it you have kids who want to see it, too, but I can't say its really all that worth watching, except as pure family entertainment.
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