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DC Movies - To Infinity and Beyond

I think people are too focused on whatever Snyder and I think some promotional tie-in comic said vis-a-vis that open pod and Supergirl. Nothing in Man of Steel the actual film is suggestive of that. Plus that Kryptonian craft had been buried for umpty-ump bajillion years, whereas Kara here is obviously young (physically younger than Cavill's Clark). I suspect she will have some variation on a more traditional comics origin (e.g., launched from Krypton before its destruction but trapped in stasis for a while), with the main difference being that she was captured and imprisoned upon her arrival on Earth.
Maybe she was in stasis for a longer period. In MoS she woke up centuries earlier.
 
I think they keep reusing the "Barry screws up history to save his mom" story the reason they keep reusing "Dark Phoenix" for Jean Grey...

...It's one of the ONLY distinctive stories either character has ever had. Barry doesn't really have a lot of great plots to his name.

Flash of Two Worlds in the Silver Age
Pulling elements of various stories for a Rogues movie
Iris Allen's Death
The Trial of the Flash
 
How did it affect Wonder Woman and Aquaman in the main comic. Ripples in the timeline.
That was my biggest issue with the comic story. There had been constant time travel in the DC Comics Universe before Flashpoint. There already were established rules to time travel and how changes affect the timeline. The ripple effect going backwards in time didn't work with those established rules.
Now, the movie is set in the DCEU, and there are no established time travel rules in this universe, so I'm fine with it there.
 
Whenever time travel is involved it all goes to crap soon. By its very nature no one can establish rules and make them logical or constantly follow them to the letter, sooner or later there will be plot holes.

I have made it a rule not to think about any particular time travel rules or discuss them too much, just turn off your brain and enjoy the story if it's good.
 
The Flash trailer was pretty cool. As annoyed as I was that they were redoing Flashpoint, it looks like they're taking a very different approach from the TV version, so at least it won't feel like we've seen it before.

One problem with the TV version is that the bulk of the story in the comics is about how the entire DC Universe is altered in a cataclysmic way, and the story is largely about exploring all those alternate versions of Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, etc. The TV version was done back when the Arrowverse only had a couple of shows, so it was focused pretty exclusively on Barry's life with a glimpse at the Arrow characters. So with all that extra stuff stripped away, it was just another iteration of the overused "City on the Edge of Forever" premise where the hero makes things worse by trying to fix the past and has to undo it in the end.

I was going to say that made it not very interesting, but then, I didn't find the full-on DC-continuity version in the animated movie The Flashpoint Paradox to be much more interesting. I just generally don't like the story.

Zod being such a big part of the movies I surprise, I think I do remember hearing about Micheal Shannon being back, but I just assumed it would be for some kind of small cameo.

Is he really a big part, though? All the shots of him seem to be from one sequence, where Kara confronts his forces. It seems like a fair amount of the story takes place in a timeline where he had no opposition from Superman, but the focus might be more on the consequences of his invasion than on Zod himself.



Whenever time travel is involved it all goes to crap soon. By its very nature no one can establish rules and make them logical or constantly follow them to the letter, sooner or later there will be plot holes.

The laws of physics and logic establish clear rules of how time travel would and would not work, rules that were more or less followed by Avengers: Endgame, or by fixed-timeline stories like The Final Countdown and 12 Monkeys (film, not series). Basically, no event that's happened can be "erased", which is a physical impossibility and a logical contradiction, so any time travel into the past must either be part of what the original history was all along, or else creates a parallel timeline that coexists alongside the original rather than replacing it. There are plenty of time travel stories that follow those rules (including every non-Star Trek time travel story I've ever written).

The model where a new timeline replaces/erases the old one is the version that falls apart logically if you think about it too much, but it's the one that's generally preferred in fiction because it creates higher stakes if the characters' existence or the world as they know it is in danger of eradication, or creates moral dilemmas if the characters have to choose only one of two competing timelines. Fixed-timeline or parallel-timeline stories are more limiting, but those limitations can be used creatively and effectively (see the Gargoyles animated series, for example, or the aforementioned 12 Monkeys).
 
The Flash trailer was pretty cool. As annoyed as I was that they were redoing Flashpoint, it looks like they're taking a very different approach from the TV version, so at least it won't feel like we've seen it before.

It is unlikely DCEU fans will ever think of Berlanti TV series as anything to compare the films to, if they watched the Berlanti stuff at all.

Zod being such a big part of the movies I surprise, I think I do remember hearing about Micheal Shannon being back, but I just assumed it would be for some kind of small cameo.
So it looks like this is a universe with just Supergirl and no Superman. I wonder if they'll address whether Kal-El existed in that universe and something stopped him from coming to Earth or if he just never existed at all.

Cavill did shoot pick-ups for the Flash movie, but the scene(s) were cut, so there was a point where Superman existed in the alternate universe, or at least traveled there. Wrongheaded shenanigans that ended with Cavill's removal from the film aside, it seems clear that the new intention was not to see two Kryptonians in the film, but to establish a universe for Supergirl to shine independently in the hope (probably now dashed) that she would end up in her own film. Still no guarantee that will happen, now that the DCEU is dead.

Flash of Two Worlds in the Silver Age
Pulling elements of various stories for a Rogues movie
Iris Allen's Death
The Trial of the Flash

^ This. The Flash had major arc before COIE or Flashpoint. If there's an issue, it rests with filmmakers never adapting any of the named Silver and Bronze Age arcs.
 
I'm currently undecided on how I feel about The Flash and Shazam! Fury of the Gods because I'm torn between continuing to support the MoS Shared Continuity Universe to its conclusion or just bowing out now since we already know that it's a narrative dead end.

I consider myself a DCEU fan, and I enjoyed most of Berlanti's DC TV, including Grant Gustin's Barry Allen.

Same.
 
or just bowing out now since we already know that it's a narrative dead end.
This again?

There was a time, before shared universes and endless sequels became the be-all and end-all, when most stories were "narrative dead-ends."

If these films are worth squat to begin with, they're worth watching for their own sakes, regardless of whether their fictional universe continues into perpetuity or not.
 
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This again?

There was a time, before shared universes and endless sequels became the be-all and end-all, when most stories were "narrative dead-ends."

If these films are worth squat to begin with, they're worth watching for their own sakes, regardless of whether their fictional universe continues into perputuity or not.
*applauding intensifies*
 
This again?

There was a time, before shared universes and endless sequels became the be-all and end-all, when most stories were "narrative dead-ends."

If these films are worth squat to begin with, they're worth watching for their own sakes, regardless of whether their fictional universe continues into perputuity or not.
Come now. We all know Jaws only became worth watching once the sequels came around to tell us what happened next.
 
This again?

There was a time, before shared universes and endless sequels became the be-all and end-all, when most stories were "narrative dead-ends."

If these films are worth squat to begin with, they're worth watching for their own sakes, regardless of whether their fictional universe continues into perpetuity or not.

My uncertainty about investing time and energy into something that will ultimately have no payoff is a universal conundrum that applies to more than just the MoS SCU.

It's the reason why I haven't rewatched the BSG spinoff Caprica, watched the B5 spinoff Crusade, finished GLOW, watched the live-action Cowboy Bebop or WinX series, or bought Batwoman Season 3 or Legends of Tomorrow Season 7.

Unfinished stories or stories that I know ultimately won't have sufficient conclusions hold little appeal for me in general.
 
My uncertainty about investing time and energy into something that will ultimately have no payoff is a universal conundrum that applies to more than just the MoS SCU.

It's the reason why I haven't rewatched the BSG spinoff Caprica, watched the B5 spinoff Crusade, finished GLOW, watched the live-action Cowboy Bebop or WinX series, or bought Batwoman Season 3 or Legends of Tomorrow Season 7.

Unfinished stories or stories that I know ultimately won't have sufficient conclusions hold little appeal for me in general.
I get my “payoff” at the end of most movies. That story is finished when the credits roll.
 
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