“The Flash” is one of the most spectacular and frustrating mixed bags of the superhero era and at the same time thoughtful and clueless, challenging and flattering. It offers some of the best digital effects work I’ve ever seen, and some of the worst. Like his sincere, but often unhappy hero, he continues to exceed all the expectations that we might have about his ability to immediately throw himself into the next wall.
Then he presses the reset button and starts all over again—which “the Flash” does over and over again narratively, parallel universes and the question of whether “canonical” events in the life of a person or an entire dimension can be changed. From beginning to end, he suffers from the double misfortune of being his own worst enemy, despite real thoughtfulness and a strangely unstable genre cocktail (slapstick comedy, family drama, heavy metal action movie, philosophical science fiction adventure).; and also comes to the screens right after the release of “Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse”, a high watermark for superhero movies and large studio animation films, which explores most of the same concepts as “the Flash” in a more aesthetically innovative way.
Ezra Miller, whose offscreen contacts with the law cause some of the movie’s hottest comedies to land badly, plays 20-year-old coroner and secret superhero Barry Allen, who feels like the “janitor” of the Justice League and is still struggling with the effects of his mother’s execute and his father’s wrongful detention for the crime. Again, in the same review, we come across a double limitation characteristic of “the Flash”: it’s a bad form to discuss the more fleshy parts of the film, because you can’t do this without describing the plot in detail, and at the same time a lot of it has already been “spoiled”, not only on social media and online forums, but also in the trailers and marketing materials of the film (Warner Bros. provided the photo at the top of this review) and on Wikipedia. If you are reading all this, you will know whether to continue or put the rest of this article aside for after.
For those who are still reading: remember the ending of the original “Superman: the Movie” from 1978, in which Christopher Reeves Superman has to decide to stop a nuclear projectile on Miss Tesmacher’s home state and prevent her great love Lois Lane from being finished by an earthquake. Well, this sequence was expanded into a whole movie and merged with the series “Back to the Future”, thanks to Barry’s decision to go back in time and change one detail on the day his family was finished. Mom (Maribel Verdú) sent dad (Ron Livingston) to the local supermarket to get a can of tomatoes she needed for a recipe. When little Barry hears a commotion and comes down, he finds mom on the kitchen floor with a knife in her bloody chest, and dad crying over her corpse with one hand on the handle. Barry assumes that he will be able to use his lightning powers to return to that fateful day, put a can of tomatoes in mom’s supermarket basket and save both parents. Anyone who has seen a time travel movie (or read Ray Bradbury’s short story the Sound of Thunder) knows that it’s not that easy.