Where do I fucking start. I guess a good a place as any is the CGI. This is barely a step above the CW TV show, which is insane given that this is supposed to be a blockbuster movie. I know all of the factors here, but this is just embarassing. There’s tons of moments (the initial chase scene with affleck!batman comes to mind) where they CGI’d the actual actors that look just shitty? I don’t know why they decided to do it that way. Also there’s tons of sequences that just feel completely weightless. Re-doing Man of Steel makes this all the more obvious because Zod looks worse than he did. The worst of all has to be the scenes inside the Speed Force time travel bubbles where we see shitty CGI recreations of scenes we just saw.
This movie is also the nadir of mining for nostalgia (so far). Having Keaton come back in his 70s just feels like their scraping the bottom of the barrel. Then we get a whole re-tread of Man of Steel which isn’t exactly anyone’s favorite DC movie. Then we even get Christopher Reeve and Adam West. None of this meaningfully serves the story nor does it do anything but get a cheap dopamine hit. There were a couple moments I did like though. Firstly, the nod to Superman Lives was fun, albeit kinda confusing since it’s nostalgia for an unfinished movie which most people won’t know about. Second, having Clooney show up as a Bruce Wayne at the end was amusing and clever within the context of the movie.
The story itself is a fucking mess too. Doing Flashpoint is fine, but switching from Thomas Wayne being Batman to just Keaton!Batman switches an emotional story beat for nostalgia, cheapening the whole thing. The ultimate resolution with alternate Barry trying and failing to save everyone for eternity smells like a theme but is so abstract and disconnected from real life that I can’t connect with it. I guess you could read it as about grief or something? But then Barry changes the timeline to get his dad to look up at the camera which leads to a different Bruce Wayne again. So as long as your changes don’t arbitrarily change the timeline too much which apparently is unpredictable then it’s fine?
Tonally they were going for this action-comedy vibe. I’ll give them props for going beyond the “quips between action moments” that the MCU slouched into. The first main sequence involves The Flash saving a bunch of babies falling out of a collapsing hospital. Looking past the bad CGI (which is difficult) the sequence is decently good. Another standout scene is where alternate Barry first starts using his powers but freaks out when his clothes catch on fire, leading to him ending up naked in the middle of the street as a truck full of instruments overturns and they all roll out into the street. However, most of the comedy aspects are mediocre to bad. It just doesn’t execute very well.
There’s one aspect I appreciate as well which is that even though it’s based on the DCEU with several characters reprising their roles briefly (Ben Affleck as Batman, Jeremy Irons as Alfred, Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman, and Jason Mamoa as Aquaman) there’s obviously very little “continuity management”. All of the nods to other films are either there to make you recognize stuff (as detailed above) or used to build stakes for this movie. Clooney showing up at the end is honestly refreshing because it’s most like just a one off thing rather than a hook for some future movie.