I'll say up front I was charmed by this film in many ways, once I remembered it was a comic book, its own genre, and if you haven't submerged yourself in that literature, you're right away out of your depth. In my case, I'm not an avid comic or graphic novel reader these days, but I'm a veteran scuba diver into comics to many depths.
I think what we have to remark on is that Parallel (actually, intersecting) Universes are the talk of the town this scifi season. We had the Academy award winning Everything Everywhere All at Once to kick it off, then Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, and now The Flash. All are about a spaghetti monster meta-verse (SMM) wherein many permutations of the current reality get tried -- perhaps some or all are dead ends.
The Flash is true to the comic genre in being geared for teens thinking seriously yet fantastically about their next self, the adult they're "leveraging into" (if that's a way).
I always think of the comic-borne generational teachings (mimetic DNA) as feeling "home grown" but also coming from an adult, a peer human, in touch with her or his inner teen and also a master in some mode of expressiveness (a comic book author, which might be a team).
The opportunity, as always, is to teach some important life lessons, or at least echo the inter-generational thoughts about such philosophical topics as: "what if it were otherwise?". More concretely: "what if I could fix the past?".
The way these movies flicker between realities, and get you thinking in terms of swapping in different actors ...
[ a way Flash knows he's in a different future, is different actors star in the same movies; Michael J. Fox is not Back to the Future guy in this future. Oh no! That's a motif. A kind of Mandela Effect as in this world you're the only guy who remembers "the way it was" unless maybe you came with companions (Dorothy had her Toto at least) ]
... develops a more easy come easy go relationship with reverie literature.
The big budget versions do not necessarily seek to monopolize, only guide and suggest, and no convergence on a single telling is required. Batman is like this in this movie, like that in this other. Indiana Jones keeps shape shifting. Astrologers sometimes have a better grip on this kinds of slidings. Words like "woke" don't begin to capture all the turning wheels. Culture is at least complex, if not complicated.
This film has to shine as a star in the universe in which film explores the same self in the form of two arguing brothers, one the older and more mature, the other the messed up kid, going nowhere. Yet the superpowers must be passed on. "The adult I hope to become versus the train wreck I am now" -- picture the thought balloon, above a teen reading some comic. The recursion motif. Pray to your future self for rescue, might be one version of bootstrapping.
I'm going to admit enjoying some of the action, the high kinetic first person physics type stuff, heavy game engine. Like batman on that motorbike, chasing bad guys in a dense city. Then there's the signature scene of the whole movie, alluded to in the credits, where Flash faces low nutrition limits, one of his vulnerabilities, thinks fast, solves the puzzle. No babies die. A universe we don't have.
Flash's mother was archetypal, and the family matrix well rendered, offsetting the rest of the movie: obvious super-real level fantasy, the stuff of Greek legends. Flash is the comic book Mercury, back to Hermes with winged shoes. We all know that, right?
The movie flirts with gender and ethnicity bias (is one or more of those bad?), all the morphic qualities teens wrestle with and of course not only teens. As a perennial aspect of life, we're confronted with all these pivot points (Dawn liked coming of age stories), it's just that comics have been traditionally pitched to a specific (one could say stereotyped) target demographic.
I'm saying the best way to enjoy The Flash -- and why not if you paid your money -- is to be a teen. Perhaps be yourself specifically, if you're able to connect, or be a generic teen, for at least a couple of hours.
