The day of the trial for the father of Barry Allen is approaching, who has been in prison for years for the murder of his wife. The boy, who is actually also the superhero The Flash, tried in every way to prove his innocence, but even with the help of Wayne Enterprises and his superpowers he couldn’t find how to exonerate him. Out of desperation he runs faster than he ever has before, until he reaches some sort of wheel of time. But he soon discovers that traveling to the past doesn’t just change the present and the future: in this world, in fact, his friend Batman is very different and there seems to be no trace of Superman. On the other hand, the Barry of this reality lives happy with his parents, but to protect his life, the original Barry will have to turn it upside down and, in doing so, will end up losing his powers …
Yet another space-time adventure which is above all a story about destiny and our difficulty in accepting it. Unfortunately, however, most of the film is dedicated to a specious digression that has little or nothing to do with the life of The Flash.
As can already be seen from the trailer, the main threat that must be averted is the arrival of General Zod, but in a world without Superman how will it be possible to stop him? It is certainly a concrete threat, but if its ultimate goal in the story is to put the protagonist in front of a temporal wall, there really was no need for such a specious thing to end up eating up half a film.
Groundhog Day and its epigones, including the Russian Doll series, teach us that even much more trivial events are enough to put the characters in front of the impossibility of altering fate and that these things work all the more when they are linked to life and to the protagonist’s past.
In The Flash instead you choose to dust off the events of Man of Steel, i.e. the first film of the so-called DC Expanded Universe, in which, however, Flash had never participated. We will discover in a flashback that the young runner had actually arrived in Metropolis to save civilians, but it is a false element and that in any case it is not enough to tie him to Zod. The film therefore, rather than working on its protagonist, who by the way had never been at the center of a feature film, chooses to rewrite the DC Comics continuity in the cinema in general.
On the one hand, it is appreciated that he does it with a tragic gravitas unusual for the genre, on the other hand, the quality of the CGI of many scenes is disgusting. In particular, what should be a tribute to the history of DC superheroes in the cinema and to the beloved Christopher Reeve is among the most unwatchable.
But in general, the whole wheel of time uses versions of the characters that seem to come from a console of the past generations, and the use of digital actors does not even work in many action scenes. So much so that the elaborate sequence shot in which Supergirl faces the guards of a military base is very, very fake, precisely because of a digital version of the actress that is anything but convincing. A sort of total short-circuit with respect to the profound meaning of the long shot, identified by excellent film scholars from Bazin down.