The 'Multiverse' Is a Goddamn Mess

My kingdom for a coherent movie plot.

Warner Bros. Pictures/YouTube

This is a submission to our Complaints Department, the place where we collect all the stuff we just want to complain about.

Some time into the 2022 awards darling Everything Everywhere All at Once’s 2 hours and 19 minutes—after we’d cycled through parallel universes where the main character had hot dogs for fingers, was a martial arts star, was animated, and on and on—it hit me like a rock with googly eyes to the head: This movie had stopped making any goddamn sense.

The same intrusive thought hit me while watching The Flash in theaters last week (official runtime: 2 hours and 24 minutes). The Flash/Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) has run so fast that he’s figured out how to travel back in time so, naturally, he does so in an effort to save his mom from being murdered. Things get wobbly from there: he meets his past self (this Barry Allen has longer hair to make things slightly easier on the eyes), and they team up with Batman (played by Ben Affleck for five minutes in the original timeline but Michael Keaton for the bulk of the movie), and eventually an alternate-timeline version of Superman (Supergirl, naturally). When Keaton-as-Batman provides the quick and dirty explanation of the whole “multiverse” thing, he slops spaghetti noodles and red sauce in a bowl to explain the carnage this time travel has already wrought, and says, “It’s a mess.” I couldn’t agree more! The multiverse is a mess. It’s turning movie after movie into incoherent gibberish, and it’s a concept that needs to be snuffed out of our (one) entertainment universe.