The Flash Movie Feels Too Small For Its Source Material

Turns out, the fastest man alive does not get the fastest movie. We are finally about to get the first live-action Flash movie, almost a literal decade after it was originally announced. There were countless changes in directors and screenwriters, with everyone from Phil Lord and Chris Miller, to John Francis Daley, Jonathan Goldstein, and Rick Famuyiwa all set to direct before Andy Muschietti finally landed the gig. All that before you even get to the allegations and arrests of Ezra Miller. Really, not even Barry Allen has as many problems as this movie has had.

In the time since "The Flash" was announced, we have seen two different Batman actors, and three different heads of DC, yet the first footage of the movie is finally here to prove that not only is this movie real; it's finally coming out ... unless we get another "Batgirl".

Even more surprising is that the movie looks kind of great! There are clear comic book vibes, a fantastic "I'm Batman" line delivery, and Michael Keaton looks sharp. The problem is, this looks like a good Batman and Flash movie, but feels rather small when compared to its multiverse-shaking source material.

In the trailer, Barry going back in time results in severe changes to his reality, including there being no metahumans, and somehow Michael Shannon's Zod is back. The only people Flash can call for help are a pair of Batmans, and an imprisoned Supergirl (though we don't yet know if this will be the same Supergirl from "Woman of Tomorrow"), in what looks like the equivalent of Superman's role in the comic.

That comic is "Flashpoint," a game-changing, company-wide crossover event mini-series that mostly existed as a lead-in for The New 52, which reset the status quo of the DC Universe and radically changed every character. 

Being a company-wide crossover event, virtually every major character in the whole DC Universe had a role to play in "Flashpoint," with tons of tie-in titles, in addition to the core miniseries helping paint an expansive picture that truly felt important and apocalyptic. It had serious repercussions for each character, even before you get to the New 52 reset, and there were conflicts that involved dozens if not hundreds of heroes, starting with a world war involving Themiscyra and Atlantis.

By comparison, the trailer for "The Flash" feels like the movie will have about the same scale as the disaster of The CW show of the same name, only with a much bigger budget. The idea of a world without heroes is interesting, but that we are still getting a handful of heroes — only a handful — is a cop-out, like "Captain America: Civil War" barely reaching a dozen characters. In both cases, the reasoning seems to be a desire to focus on the titular character rather than a team-up spectacle, but to have the first Flash movie still be more of a DC-wide event, and then remove a lot of what made it a cool DC-wide event, is a waste.

There is one adaptation that successfully gives us both a character-driven Flash movie and a huge DC-wide event story: the animated movie adaptation "Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox." That movie, which also essentially reset the DC animated movie universe, incorporated a lot of the comic event tie-ins to the main narrative, particularly the Batman one. We do get a lot (and I mean a lot) of cameos from a wide arrange of DC characters, from Etrigan the Demon to Captain Atom.

The film constantly cuts away to other DC characters around the world to show the severity of the changes Barry Allen made to the timeline, while still keeping the point of view of Flash in order to show that the conflict is larger than him, and that he can't be everywhere at once. There are epically bloody fights on both small and grand scales, and all your favorite heroes are slightly altered in interesting ways.

That doesn't take away from Barry's story and the emotional weight of his decision to turn back time. This is a great example of how to adapt superhero comics as faithfully as possible while changing just enough to be better than the source material. This is not only a fantastic Justice League movie, but it is the best Flash movie to date. Let's hope "The Flash" has some tricks up its sleeve" to surprise us.