New The Flash Trailer Seems to Evoke Christopher Nolan’s Batman Movies

All that being said, the concept of timelines and various strains of the multiverse merging is still crucial to The Flash, and we suspect the film may be attempting to evoke more than just the Keaton Batman. Because if you really look at that Batcave… it has more in common with the one occupied by Christian Bale in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight trilogy than it does Burton’s.

Consider the below photos, and recall that in Nolan’s films the Batcave was hidden behind a waterfall at the floor level. And by the third movie, Bruce Wayne had even built a platform that raises and vanishes beneath the deep pool. He even parks the Bat-plane (or just “the Bat”) on that platform.  Now consider the Batcave from Keaton’s Returns era. Admittedly, the Batcave’s appearance shifted a lot more creatively between Burton’s films, but in both it was situated on vast cliff faces and rock formations, raised high above a seemingly bottomless pit. The entrance in the ’89 film also was revealed to be a fake stone wall that responded to remote control like a high falutin’ garage.

This is obviously getting into the nerdy minutiae, however it seems that the Batcave in The Flash is meant to evoke the Nolan era as much as Keaton’s Batsuit may recall the Burton years. This is a deliberate choice. Perhaps it’s simply because the filmmakers or studio wish to echo the last time Batman movies could gross $1 billion worldwide. Still, we’d like to posit there could be a narrative reason for this too.

While Keaton definitely is playing his beloved version of the character from 30 years ago in The Flash, he is not occupying Burton’s vision of that character or his world. There are no expressionistic sets, nor any brutalism-meets-art deco aesthetics. Heck, most of the scenes we have of Keaton’s Batman is him leaving the cave during daylight hours(!), an absolute nonstarter for Burton. In fact, this Batman’s world doesn’t appear to be based on Keaton’s Gotham at all… but rather Zack Snyder’s Metropolis.

Indeed, on the other end of DC fandom, the Snyder fans appear to be at least obligatorily serviced by the return of Michael Shannon as General Zod, as well as a reprise of his apocalyptic “world engines,” those giant flying space devices that are used to terraform Earth by wrecking maximum havoc on our cities and oceans. These were the tools that Snyder used to reverberate the shadows of 9/11 in Man of Steel (2013). Apparently, this will be the big bad threat again in The Flash, suggesting that by changing the past, Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) has forced himself to relive the events of Snyder’s first DCEU movie.

… Except that while this looks like Snyder’s Metropolis, and it is definitely his Zod, that is definitely not the Superman we came to know a decade ago. Instead we have an all new version of Supergirl played by Sasha Calle who will be the Last Daughter of Krypton, ready to stand up against Zod.