Spoilers The Flash (2023) -Review and Discussion Thread
- Thread starter thribs
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I've zeroed in on things that bother me about the final act in this movie.
First, it seems like the mode of time travel totally changes after Batman and Supergirl are killed the first time. When the two Barries go back to change things, why don't we end up with four Barries? ( In fact, it visually looks as if there are four at first, but this isn't borne out. ) I guess this kind of thing is called "temporal reversion" in the TV show? Unless there would somehow be difficulty in getting the different versions to work together, you'd think the time travel mechanics as seen earlier in the film would enable an increasing number of Barries. You'd end up with an army of speedsters, and how could such an army lose?
And that's the thing: the film expects us to believe that the battle against the Kryptonians is somehow unwinnable, but how could that be the case? Even if we're restricted to a grand total of two Barries, the tools to defeat Kryptonians are right there on screen, not exactly hidden from the audience. We're shown how Kryptonians can be deprived of their armor, and we're shown that they can be killed by Kryptonian metal. Don't we even see one of the Barries phase-kill a Kryptonian? ( Never mind that we had just been told that they couldn't kill them. ) With all that, how can defeating Zod be impossible?
Also, the older Barry is always conspicuously absent when Supergirl is being killed. The first time around, fine. It's easy enough to assume that the Barries initially didn't think things would turn out so badly. But the second time around, what's the excuse? By that point they know Kara is facing death, so why isn't original Barry on hand to help her in the fight? Instead he shows up afterwards, as if he was doing something really important that required his presence elsewhere. But what would that be? It only takes a few moments to tell Batman "don't waste your time attacking the spaceship, it has a deflector shield", so why wasn't he at Kara's side after that? It seems like protecting Kara should have been top priority once the gravity of the situation was apparent. Batman took out two of the Kryptonian ships but after that the only thing he accomplished was getting himself killed. Then older Barry simply gives up after two tries!
And then there's the Dark Flash thing. How do we end up with both young Barry and an older version of young Barry at the same time? If that's how things work, why wasn't there an additional Barry generated each time alt-Barry went back? In other words, whatever the reason is that our two Barries don't become four Barries, then eight Barries, et cetera, how does that ultimately allow for three Barries?
Basically this whole part of the movie makes no sense to me.
First, it seems like the mode of time travel totally changes after Batman and Supergirl are killed the first time. When the two Barries go back to change things, why don't we end up with four Barries? ( In fact, it visually looks as if there are four at first, but this isn't borne out. ) I guess this kind of thing is called "temporal reversion" in the TV show? Unless there would somehow be difficulty in getting the different versions to work together, you'd think the time travel mechanics as seen earlier in the film would enable an increasing number of Barries. You'd end up with an army of speedsters, and how could such an army lose?
And that's the thing: the film expects us to believe that the battle against the Kryptonians is somehow unwinnable, but how could that be the case? Even if we're restricted to a grand total of two Barries, the tools to defeat Kryptonians are right there on screen, not exactly hidden from the audience. We're shown how Kryptonians can be deprived of their armor, and we're shown that they can be killed by Kryptonian metal. Don't we even see one of the Barries phase-kill a Kryptonian? ( Never mind that we had just been told that they couldn't kill them. ) With all that, how can defeating Zod be impossible?
Also, the older Barry is always conspicuously absent when Supergirl is being killed. The first time around, fine. It's easy enough to assume that the Barries initially didn't think things would turn out so badly. But the second time around, what's the excuse? By that point they know Kara is facing death, so why isn't original Barry on hand to help her in the fight? Instead he shows up afterwards, as if he was doing something really important that required his presence elsewhere. But what would that be? It only takes a few moments to tell Batman "don't waste your time attacking the spaceship, it has a deflector shield", so why wasn't he at Kara's side after that? It seems like protecting Kara should have been top priority once the gravity of the situation was apparent. Batman took out two of the Kryptonian ships but after that the only thing he accomplished was getting himself killed. Then older Barry simply gives up after two tries!
And then there's the Dark Flash thing. How do we end up with both young Barry and an older version of young Barry at the same time? If that's how things work, why wasn't there an additional Barry generated each time alt-Barry went back? In other words, whatever the reason is that our two Barries don't become four Barries, then eight Barries, et cetera, how does that ultimately allow for three Barries?
Basically this whole part of the movie makes no sense to me.
You're right.
But it may have something to do with hero Barry being thrown hard into a deeper time line, rather than idiot Barry running in there to 5 minutes ago because he has a bad plan.
Also old evil Barry could be cleaning up his origin by murdering extraneous doppelgangers on the sly, so that when he was young, idiot Barry doesn't trip over his own dick, and ruin everything, which shouldn't be a problem since hero Barry is already a Paradox who should not exist because young idiot Barry is the wrong Idiot.
...
The deleted scenes.
The sphagetti analogy is bullshit.
There are dozens of time travelers with a yen for time travel, who will always find a reason to invent and use time ASAP... So when Barry jiggles time, at least 12 other humans who live near his time/space also f%ck time, and together all those time fiddlers cross multiply their damage to the past.
Because...
Batman is the Red Death.
