It was pretty good. A promising start, and Gustin is very good. The writing got a bit hokey a couple of times, particularly Oliver's scene. "It chose you?" Come on. But while the reuse of "Run, Barry, run!" in the climax, setting up Harrison Wells as a surrogate father figure for Barry, was definitely hokey, it was actually kind of effective.
Some definite parallels with the '90 series, like the costume originating as a STAR Labs prototype and being needed to protect against air friction, the ear thingies being radios, the Flash having support from STAR scientists who test out his speed on a track (or in this case a Ferris Air runway), etc.
Not sold on Iris yet. Patton is fairly attractive, but her character is a little annoying with her aggressive scientific illiteracy, which makes her come off as rather dim.
The show is definitely following the accelerated pacing of
Arrow's plotting, and then some.
Smallville had someone new find out Clark Kent's secret maybe every couple of seasons.
Arrow's first season had it happen just about every four episodes. Here, Barry starts out with three people knowing his secret, and in his
very first outing in costume, he's unmasked and exposed to his surrogate father. I was really expecting they'd keep Det. West in a mildly antagonistic role as the guy who's skeptical of Barry's theories, but they short-circuited that right off the bat. Maybe they didn't want him to be too similar to Quentin Lance.
I'm trying to think of how they could have made the running effects better.
It always annoys me in things like this when in the long shot you see the speedster zooming by at huge speed, but then you cut to the mid-closeup and their arms and legs are pumping at normal running speed. Even many animated versions of the Flash do this. By all rights, his arms and legs should be a blur, unless we're in super-slow motion. (
Smallville actually did quite well with the latter.)
I did like one scene when he was running against the tornado though.
I'm never crazy about tornado effects because they almost always get the fundamental nature of a tornado wrong. They assume the visible funnel is the entire thing, the only part that does damage -- as in the aftermath here where the hole in the barn was only as wide as the funnel cloud. But the cloud is just the part you can see. The majority of the tornado is the much wider column of rotating air that creates that funnel in the middle, the way water swirling down a drain will create a much smaller funnel. It's the devastatingly strong winds
around the funnel that are the real driving force of the tornado and that do the most damage.
- The effects definitely don't seem the best to me.
They were okay. I didn't have any huge problems with them. My main problem is with the hype. I saw an interview with the producers saying the effects were unlike anything we'd ever seen before and were a quantum leap above the '90 series, but they really aren't that different from the '90 show's effects, just with more animated lightning bolts.
- Is that an allusion to Barry disappearing the Crisis on Infinite Earths?
Barry
died in CoIE, and stayed dead for what by today's comics' standards was an extremely long time. So if it is an allusion, it doesn't seem to be an exact one.
You know, that's one thing the new show missed... Having Barry's clothes fall apart with super speed.
No, that was there. When he ran the 600 miles to Starling City, he had to stop and shed his jacket because it was smoldering.
