When Miller enters what he believes is "the past" (it's actually an alternate timeline), he not only encounters another version of himself with an intact, happy family but befriends and mentors the other Barry, discovering along the way how annoying he can be to others. Anybody who's seen a time travel movie (or read Ray Bradbury's short story The Sound of Thunder) knows it's not that simple.ĭirected by Andy Muschietti (" Mama," both " It" movies), from a script by ace genre screenwriter Christina Hodson ("Birds of Prey," " Bumblebee"), "The Flash" deserves credit for taking its ideas and the pain of its characters seriously without devolving into glum, colorless machismo. Barry surmises that he can use his Flash powers to return to that fateful day, add a can of tomatoes to Mom's supermarket basket, and save both parents. When little Barry hears a commotion and comes downstairs, he finds Mom on the kitchen floor with a knife jammed into her bloody chest and Dad weeping over her corpse with one hand on the hilt. Mom ( Maribel Verdú) sent Dad ( Ron Livingston) to the local supermarket to fetch a can of tomatoes she needed for a recipe. If you read all that, you know whether to keep going or put the rest of this piece aside for later.įor those still reading: Remember the ending of the original 1978 "Superman: The Movie," where Christopher Reeve's Superman has to choose between stopping a nuclear missile headed for Miss Tesmacher's home state and preventing his great love Lois Lane from getting killed by an earthquake, tries to do both, loses Lois, then turns back time to resurrect her? Well, that sequence has been expanded into an entire film and merged with the " Back to the Future" series, courtesy of Barry's decision to try to go back in time and change one detail on the day his family was destroyed. supplied the photo at the top of this review) and on Wikipedia. Here, again, in this very review, we encounter a double bind characteristic of "The Flash": it's poor form to discuss the meatier parts of the movie because you can't do that without describing the plot in detail, and yet at the same time, a lot of it has already been "spoiled," not just on social media and online forums but in the film's own trailers and marketing material (Warner Bros. From start to finish, it suffers the double misfortune of being its own worst enemy, despite real thoughtfulness and an intriguingly unstable cocktail of genres (slapstick comedy, family drama, heavy metal action flick, philosophically driven science fiction adventure) and also arriving on screens right after the release of "Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse," a high watermark for both superhero movies and major studio animated features that explores most of the same concepts as "The Flash" in a more aesthetically innovative way.Įzra Miller, whose offscreen brushes with the law make some of the film's raunchier comedy land poorly, stars as twentysomething forensic scientist and secret superhero Barry Allen, who feels like the "janitor" of the Justice League and is still grappling with the impact of his mother's murder and his father's wrongful imprisonment for the crime. Then it hits the reset button and starts again-which, come to think of it, is what "The Flash" keeps doing over and over again narratively, with time, parallel universes, and the question of whether "canonical" events in the life of a person or a whole dimension can be altered. Like its sincere but often hapless hero, it keeps exceeding every expectation we might have for its competence only to instantly face-plant into the nearest wall. It features some of the best digital FX work I've seen and some of the worst. One of the most spectacular and frustrating mixed bags of the superhero blockbuster era, "The Flash" is simultaneously thoughtful and clueless, challenging and pandering.
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