THE FLASH Ending Explained | Full Movie Breakdown, Cameos, Comic Easter Eggs & Spoiler Review
welcome to the heavy spoilers show I’m your host Paul and I’m very excited to talk about DC’s new movie The Flash throughout this video we’re going to be breaking down what happens in it the comic book influences all those cameos and what the ending means for the future please hit the Thumbs Up Button if you enjoy the video and also don’t forget to subscribe for more breakdowns on the flash throughout the next couple of weeks now the movie itself is Loosely based on the book Flashpoint by Jeff Johns and Andy cubit in order to understand
what was going on in comics at the time we first have to time travel ourselves all the way back to crisis on infinite Earths which was released in 1985. this mega event came at a time when Comics it kinda spiraled out of control and all the multiversal iterations were getting a bit too much to keep one contained continuity thus they had this big crisis event that allowed them to kill off some of the characters celebrate others and also streamline the Canon into one straightforward thing now one of the major events that happened in crisis was
the death of Barry Allen who ran so fast studies seemingly disappeared into nothing Wally West then took over the mantle and he became
and that the world around him was vastly different his wife was with another man he no longer had his powers and both Atlantis and the mascara were at war with one another the Justice League was no more and someone else was in Batman’s caping Cal now in this iteration it turned out that this was actually Thomas Wayne with Bruce being the one that was shot in Crime Alley Martha actually had a mental breakdown because of this and in the flashpoint world she went on to become the joker now things here are slightly altered with Bruce
still being Batman but instead he’s played by none other than Michael Keaton arguably the biggest selling point of the movie I have to admit that when this was announced I got nuts and started a break dance with the devil in the pale Moonlight we’ll talk about it more as we get into the video but in the flashpoint reality the war between Aquaman and Wonder Woman was slowly causing the world to destabilize and thus Barry went to Wayne Manor in order to try and work things out confronted by Thomas he eventually convinced him he was telling
the truth and the Pair worked together to recreate the experiment that gave Barry his powers and when the comics Barry also managed to release the suit from his flash ring but this was revealed to be a yellow one much to the surprise of Barry surmising that the reverse flash was behind this all he believed that Donna changed the timeline to make this world which was descending into chaos now the reverse flash doesn’t appear in the movie but one thing that they mirror is that the group try and track down Superman in the comic cyborg helped
the pair to discover that he didn’t land in Kansas and instead he was taken in by the government and kept underground basked in red sunlight this kept him de-powered but eventually he was free however he ended up flying away leaving the group behind they still soldiered on and the war came to a head with them Stuck in the Middle as the world started to fall apart the reverse flash arrived at Tom Barry which is when he revealed what had really happened though Thorne had been suspected to be behind it all it was revealed that Barry
had changed things by going back in time to stop his mother’s murder outrunning a giant bomb that had been set off in order to end the war Barry raced away from the explosion and back into the past to stop himself from traveling back in time this worked but it ended up creating another soft reboot called The New 52 which kept some elements of the cannon whilst retconning others that’s exactly what seems to be happening with the DCU as well which this movie is now acting as a launch pad for it’s crazy to think that this
was originally supposed to release in 2018 but stuff’s been such a mess that they’ve now ended up having to use it as flashpoint’s original intention which was sort of to restart things anyway the original flashpoint was adapted into an animated movie which someone inspires the beginning section of the film that had a Saturday morning style team up with all the Justice League getting back together for one final showdown though they don’t bring the entire band back together here we do get some big moments with both gal gadon Ben Affleck coming back in the film Aflac
lamented recently that he finally figured out how to play the character and depending on what tone you like with DC I think you’re either gonna agree or disagree with him I’ll give my feelings on this first stack later on but I at least appreciate that they got back a lot of the older casts to open things up Batman dons the blue and gray color scheme for the first time in a film and he also rides on top of a bat bike that looks like it was ripped right out of the pages of White Knight the
Flying Fox appears later on for a split second as well Jeremy Irons is Alfred mans the comms and the lasso of Truth also makes an appearance too now similar to the comics it’s Bruce who barrican fights in the source material had the pair having a heart or heart at the end of the work and in it Barry actually gave Bruce a letter from Thomas in the alternate timeline it’s one of the best innings to a comic book ever I wasn’t crying there was dust in the room and allows Bruce to get some closure on the
death of his dad while there’s also play a big role in the legacy of Barry Allen as his dad was of course wrongly convicted for the death of his mother that’s something that affects his Barry too and when speaking with Bruce they directly reference the character traveling back in time during the events of Zack Snyder’s Justice League Bruce warns him that there could be paradoxes created but he still goes back which takes him right into the speed force this makes him arrive at a sort of speed force Arena which I think is known as quickly
check the note the Chrono Bowl I think I didn’t jot this down when I was watching it but I listened out for it later on and I’m sure they said that Barry here realizes that he can wind things back by the second then we see flashes of his time fighting Henry Cavill in Justice League and also Jai Courtney in Suicide Squad we discovered that in the past Barry’s mother forgot to pick up a tin of tomatoes from the store and that she sent his dad over to one to get some whilst he was gone someone
broke into their home and stabbed dare and Barry’s dad arrived to find her dying in the kitchen the death was pinned on him but recently Bruce has managed to clean up some of the CCTV footage to show his dad was in the store however his cab is covering his head and thus it can’t exonerate him so Barry has to come up with other ways to try and fix the past he goes back in time to the store and drops the tomatoes in her trolley which then means his dad doesn’t have to go out and pick
them up thus the murder never happens and then he sets out to go and return to the present here though as he’s moving back a strange creature pops out and hits him and this is none other than the dark flash now if you’ve ever seen a CW flash season then chances are you you know exactly what the twist is going to be and you can instantly guess this is an alternate Barry Allen it’s something that’s happened throughout the comics with darker versions of Barry often grappling with the character and in the show they played it
up with savitar but here they’ve kind of combined elements of him along with a black flash from the comics now this is revealed later on in the arena and we also get some major cameos from across the DC Universe using archival footage CGI and actors that were brought back to shoot little scenes we get a wealth of people from the past especially when it comes to Superman this includes George Reeves who appears in a black and white World Christopher Reeve back as Superman teddy Sears is Jay Garrick from the CW verse Helen Slater’s Supergirl Adam
West is Batman and lastly Nick wow cage who is playing an alternate version of Superman anyway the Nicholas Cage one’s playing off the fact that he was originally supposed to play the character in The doomed film Superman lives there’s an amazing documentary called The Death of Superman lives which Chronicles all the things that went on with the Tim Burton film and ultimately why it ended up falling apart in the scene he’s fighting a giant spider and in the documentary they kept talking about in The Script how producer John Peters was adamant that they have a
giant spider in the movie this never happened but Peters later went on to make Wild Wild West which yep giant spider at the end now I was a bit surprised that they didn’t include Grant Gustin at all with them weirdly opting for Teddy Sears instead I know Ezra appeared alongside granting crisis but it would have been nice to have at least acknowledged them here Teddy is playing Jay Garrick though like how he did originally in the show however I think John Wesley’s ship would have made more sense if you know how that plays out nikolaj
Costa Waldo who played Jaime Lannister makes an appearance as a guy who who’s about to eat a pizza which flash grabs so you can fill up on some calories he does this later on the movie to a photographer as well and he’s played by none other than director Annie machete a while back it leaked that nikolaj was in the movie and many theories came out that he was actually the reverse flash that’s not the case though which it would have been good but he’s just there to bite down on a pizza before it gets taken
away now Nicholas and machiari actually work together on Mama so I think this Cameo is just him bringing his friends in now the whole thing with Christopher even Helen cider has caused a bit of a kickoff online due to how bad that the two characters look Helen’s okay to me but in the case of Reeve I feel a bit funny with them resurrecting a dead guy to basically use him for Cameo points in the past moments like this in Rogue one and so on have been used at least to have a character whereas he just
pops in and basically just stands about badly to me you have to be Flawless when pulling this off and it looks really bad which massively diminishes its impact and makes it almost psychic parody I am still unsure exactly how I feel about it but my initial gut reaction was that they should have just let the guy rest anyway they’re Cameo so you know it’s not really make a break for the movie and what the film itself is built around is Barry meeting up with his younger self in the year 2013. dark flash hits him as
he’s traveling home and this knocks him to the point in the timeline where Man of Steel was set after giving his powers to the Past Barry he tries to train him and wants to track down the Justice League but they’re not actually formed Tamara Morrison pops up when Barry tries to ring Arthur and his dad answers to reveal that he never met Atlanta Wonder Woman hasn’t emerged yet yet we’re forgetting 1984. cyborg still playing college football but they do know who Batman is and Barry of course knows his secret identity this takes them to Wayne
Manor which is where they’re shocked to find the mansion from the Tim Burton films which in real life’s known as nebworth house lots of cool items here including the Joker’s laughing bag from the 1989 film and they also have the Japanese warrior suit that popped up in that movie movie upon exploring the kitchen which appeared there too Bruce leaps out of a cupboard and shows that he’s still got it even though he’s now living life like Howard Hughes Batman Returns returns and I have to admit I loved seeing him spewing catchphrases even if they were
a bit on the nose now they decide to get nuts and want to head out to get Superman due to zod’s attack on earth now being imminent thinking that he’s in Russia this is where they find Supergirl instead and if you cast your mind back to Man of Steel then there were some Clues towards this you’ll remember early on that clock goes on at the Kryptonian ship and here he finds an open pod which many have linked with her Supergirl in the comics was sent to Earth before Carl in order to protect him however things
didn’t work out quite as planned due to time in space Kalel actually landed before her even though she set off first saving her is where the movie really ramps up in terms of action scenes but like Halal and Flashpoint she doesn’t trust humans she’s been completely drained of everything and crypto get their powers from the Sun so starving them of it causes them to become almost skeletal this is something that we saw when the nuke went off in the Dark Knight Returns comic bark and also during Batman v Superman in a similar scene we discover
that Zod actually intercepted his ship and that he killed the baby Kalel believing that the Codex was inside his blood in this reality though it’s in Super Girls instead which eventually leads to him attempting to invade Earth like how it happened in Man of Steel the group wanted to take the fight to him but Barry needs his powers then this leads to them attempting to try and get them back in one of the movies many back to the future references he’s electrocuted through a similar sort of means to how the kite works and the clock
tower in that film he fails to get his powers though but eventually Supergirl flies him up into a storm which is when he finally manages to regain all his abilities and this takes us to the big scene in the desert against your boy Zod Michael Shannon has been openly talking about the movie and he recently said that he didn’t find his role here all that fulfilling compared to what he did in Man of Steel well kind of wild that he’s doing this before the movie even releases but the man he clearly doesn’t give a either
way though not throwing on the guy but I can see why he was handled the way he was as he’s not really the main antagonist here it’s in fact Barry who is a big fortnite battle plays out with Barry two donning a spray-painted Batman Returns suit and general swanwick getting murdered by Zod kinda telling us out of order as Supergirl leaves them sees Zod killing swanwick and then flies back to help Barry get his powers but this drastically Alters the way that things played out as soups originally went up in the ship now they also
bring in the Batman 89 batwing and eventually this leads to the death of Michael Keaton’s Batman and Sasha Kai’s Supergirl they’re unable to defeat sword which I’ll talk about in just a bit but the deaths actually change a lot of things going forward now for the next part of the video I want to talk what was originally supposed to be the plan here and what they ended up changing it to I have done a full breakdown on the ending scenes if you want to see this more in depth but I thought I’d just cover was
going on at the time with Warner Brothers when the movie was shooting so originally you might remember that Michael Keaton had been announced as taking over the role of Ben Affleck in the DCU he was gonna become a Nick Fury type figure who would act as a mentor to all the heroes and basically be the bridge that brings this all together Keaton also shot scenes with Batgirls and this death was going to be retconned with the original ending now we know this because scenes of it were shot publicly and in it Barry was going to
return back to the present and at this point his dad would be announced as being freed from prison and Mercedes-Benz would then pull up which is when Barry would recognize it as being Bruce Wayne’s and he’d rush over to it which is when Michael Keaton would step out sashikai would then drop down and we’d end with a big WTF moment the pair would then remain in the universe going forward but this has been changed in favor of going with James Gunn’s DCU plants Batman Brave and the bold’s gonna be based on Grant Morrison’s run and
it will feature the father and sonju of Bruce and Damien played by brand new actors now the way the movie ends might make that seem confusing because what we get in appearance by George Clooney Barry arrives and accidentally slightly exposes he’s Batman but luckily no one really hears or pays attention to it now it’s kind of a similar scene to what we were originally gonna get as the Michael Keaton version wouldn’t know who Barry was but having it here also poses far more questions like I said I have done a more in-depth breakdown on this
but yeah a lot of you might be wondering if this means George is going to be the DCU Batman going forward and yeah I I have questioned that myself and this Cameo actually leaked a while back and people instantly hit up gun asking if Clooney was a dcu’s Batman he denied it and said they were going with a new actor and nurse I think that this is probably just gonna be a joke for fans to end the movie on Clooney got a lot of backlash at the time and Hans joking about how bad of a
Batman he was but fans have kind of come around on the cam take and I personally think the movie is hilarious and I know there will be people who think he’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to comics in general but you know just lighten up mate it’s just it’s really stupid and I I enjoy it it’s a guilty pleasure I’ll say that now I know there will be people who think that he’s going to be Bruce going forward as well but I I can’t see myself seeing it even though I could be wrong now
we know that Flash 2 isn’t on the horizon for the upcoming slide and with Annie machietti potentially directing Brave in the Bold it’ll probably be a while now until he gets around to even starting work on his second film for this I imagine they would have to address it in that which it’s gonna be so far in the future uh personally I just think they’ll not address it at all and yeah they will just be left wondering what the hell was that about now I’m guessing that Clooney could also potentially show up in Aquaman 2
or cameo in something down the line and we know that Ben Affleck was cut from the film to keep things streamlined The Flash was originally meant to release after Aquaman 2 but they swapped the order which then kind of forced them to shoot the post credit scene for this film involving Jason that has him stumbling around in the street drunk which is when he lands face first in a puddle whilst Barry explains you’re the Batman so I’ll just a big joke scene again with Arthur demanding more beers and it shows that at least some elements
remain for the DCU going forward however that won’t be Keating a Kaye and their death forces flash to realize that he can’t beat sod and what they can do is keep traveling back in time over and over again to attempt to play the battle out differently and this takes us back to the Chrono Bowl if you cast your mind back to Zacks and that is Justice League then you’ll remember that the heroes originally lost to Steppenwolf but flash traveling back in time helped them to win where things differ though is that zod’s attack is a
fixed point in this timeline and no matter how many times they go back there’s no way to save Supergirl and Batman now thematically this plays into the movie’s true meaning future Barry is willing to accept there’s no solution Razia there isn’t and they want to hold on to the past this could definitely be viewed as a metaphor for the DCU fan base as as people who want to keep the older actors Raz guns now bring in the new ones if you follow the channel for a while then you know I’ve always been fond of Snyder’s
work and I hate the way that some stuff like Henry Cavill being brought back and then dropped was handled by the company so I think this can kind of be seen as a metaphor for that but whether people agree with the new direction or not remains to be seen in the case of the film’s plot Barry 2 constantly goes back to the battle and after being heard over and over and over again by all the Kryptonian weapons this eventually becomes the Black Metallic armor that covers his entire skin the dark flash goes to stab future
Barry but pass Barry jumps in the way and thus him dying wipes out this dark version this clears the way for Barry realize what he has to do when he decides to travel back in time and rearrange things so they play out the same way he removes the tin of tomatoes from his mother’s trolley but he does somewhat say goodbye to her in this Supermarket scene in the car makes Barry traveled home to her directly to tell her the truth Raz here he pretends to be someone else either way a big point that they make
in the comics is that though Barry lost his mother he still got to keep the memories of growing up with her that doesn’t happen in this film but he does say that she’ll be alive out there so Somewhere in Time they just won’t be able to perceive it there are theories that time exists everywhere all at once unless the past present and future are all happening right alongside each other it’s just Humanity’s view of linearity that gives it the order but now due to Barry altering how he perceives things he knows she’s alive at some
point so he says it’s goodbyes but we later learned that he did in fact still shift some things at the store the tomatoes were placed on the top shelf so that when his dad went to get them he looked up and thus the camera was able to capture him due to Bruce cleaning up the footage it can now be entered as new evidence and it exonerates his dad allowing him to go free now as Michael Keaton’s Bruce explains in the film Shifting the past even just a bit can change things from before the original event
was altered using two strands of spaghettis he displays this as the timeline and at the center point where things change the new one skews off so it changes the past and future this is how Eric stolts can be in Back to the Future and originally he filmed scenes for the movie before he was replaced by Michael J a fox so this is why Barry doing the tin thing changes what Bruce looks like in the past and it leaves us as a different one to the Michael Keaton version that ends the movie with Barry’s tooth falling
out and I’ll guess we’ll see what guns plans are going forward now answer my thoughts on the movie I know that there’s obviously a lot of controversy surrounding it due to a number of different issues Not only was the movie in development hell for years and years due to a number of directors getting fired but he then had numerous scripts being made and then alter this stuff with Ezra Miller I’ve read a couple of different reviews where they talked about how you can’t say this is a good film because of what happened with Miller which
I personally think is wrong when you’re reviewing a film I am a Critic so I am just gonna stick to criticizing the movie rather than spending the next 10 minutes talking about something that doesn’t affect the script performances or the plot of this film if you want to hear that then there’s tons of videos out there on the subject but I think if I’m making a video that’s a review of the film then I should just review the film now I did try and keep that out of my mind when watching it and I will
also try to go in with the hype hopefully not affecting how I saw this playing out Judah Miller not being able to market the movie they’ve had to go above and beyond in other ways and they pulled out the likes of Tom Cruise and Stephen King to say that the film’s amazing Gunners said numerous times this is one of the best comic book films ever made and while I think it still has some good moments in it I wouldn’t put it up there as that and that doesn’t mean it’s not serviceable and there’s a lot
here to like whatever you think of Miller the performance here is really well put together and considering that they’re playing two parts it’s an even bigger achievement you will forget that this is someone who’s probably not reacting to anything in the scene with them and that they had to film every scene twice in order to give the two barriers to scene together Ezra kills it with both and it’s an incredible feat to pull this off to the level that they do and they’re also aided by Michael Keaton who it’s as good to see back as
I thought it was gonna be Keaton is one of my favorite actors and there was some time where he kind of went off the radar for a while after playing Batman Sherry did stuff like white noise which I liked but he never really hit the highs that he used to be at until he got the major Revival with Birdman since then he’s done a number of Great Performances with his being the case here too I know a lot of it’s just kind of him saying stuff from the older movies but I think he brings enough
here on top of it to really add to it the opening is incredible as well and all this stuff involving the older cast is absolutely brilliant though Sasha kayes in it for a very small amount compared to what I was expecting she also somewhat steals the scene she’s in and I really hope that they bring her back for the DCU in the future now where my problems lie with the movie comes surprisingly in its First Act I was told that this was a big and bombastic Saturday morning cartoon but I didn’t really Vibe with her
all that much felt very Justice League and the whole baby scene Bruce spouting off about how he should give his money to the poor and Barry admitting he’s a virgin I was a bit like hmm I know it’s lasso of Truth stuff but just the tone of it you know I wasn’t expecting that this would be a celebration of Snyder’s work which obviously has a much darker tone and they kind of lean more into the camp sort of town that Joss Whedon went with when it comes to DC I must admit I prefer the dark
attack on stuff and that’s not just because I’m a snyderbot but also with stuff like the Batman Dark Knight trilogy Joker you know that that’s more what I tend to lean towards I think it just feels a bit off when it comes to my personal tastes but yeah like I said I know people enjoyed it so if you’re fine with it then it’s not gonna ruin the movie for you now one thing that I also found in that opening was that Barry was annoying as hell and I thought that when the second one got introduced
that it just went to a ridiculous level I was sitting there thinking no way can he be like this the whole movie and to be fair they didn’t do that and they actually used it really well in the end and you can actually see how the characters change and mature over the film which actually makes those more annoying scenes work a lot better although I didn’t really gel with that first act at all I think by the time they get to Michael Keaton that everything just falls into place and it starts to really come together
however where all these scenes are let down is by the often times of abysmal CGI that riddles the entire film there’s a lot of CGI characters in this that look fake as hell and the effects stop this movie from being as good as it could be it’s weird that Zack Snyder’s Justice League had half the time and budget that this movie did for effects and that came out looking way better when this is intended for a theatrical release I watched Avatar 2 last week and that’s kind of set the bar now for me as to
where I think CGI should be at for 2023. I think a lot of this looks really bad and I kind of wish they’d taken out some of the money from the marketing budget in order to pay for the effects to be polished they’ve done crazy over the top marketing for it including program drum flights at betray the film’s logos and they’ve had to do this because they can’t really use their star to push it the budget for the film’s rumored to be around the 300 million Mark and for it to look like this it is
pretty wild it was also supposed to release in July 2022 originally but it was delayed a number of times due to the switch-ups at Warner Brothers so to have it completed almost a year ago and I know they’ve done reshoots but to have it breaking much all done a year ago and still look this bad at points is unexcusable to me No One’s Gonna remember the marketing plan with those flying drones in five years time but the poor CGI is going to be something that lasts forever so I think they should have put more into
it now another issue that the film has is that it’s releasing two weeks after Spider-Man across the spider verse there’s actually a lot of similarities with that that I think are gonna make people put the two up against one another I am going to spoil some of the elements from that movie so if you haven’t seen it then skip ahead 30 seconds because I’ll just be talking about how things are the same okay go go right yeah that’s enough time so if you’re watching this bit then you’ve seen that movie and in both films we
have a hero who travels across the Multiverse a parent’s life or death controlling the fate of the entire universe and an alternate version of them that ends up appearing there’s a lot beyond that but yeah one film is about trying to do anything to change the Canon Razia there is about accepting it now in my opinion across the spider verse does this stuff better so the flash rightly or wrongly gets a bit of a negative gleam to it due to coming out so close to it flash also suffers from the fact that we’ve had so
many Multiverse movies already which I’ve sort of used the same sort of trops weirdly this was put into production before all the ones that have come out before it but it’s now releasing after meaning that they have had time to go and steal its Thunder you’ve had so many movies now that have brought back old actors dealt with the Multiverse and even Award winners like everything everywhere all at once that unfortunately has taken away from what I think would have been a groundbreaking movie had it been drawn before all those of the films however I
still think this is a great movie and it’s helped by brilliant performances some hilarious jokes and a lot of moments that celebrate the history of DC I think this is a really good film and definitely worth checking out if you’re watching this review without going to see I don’t know why it would but thanks for sticking with me now with all that being said this is the best DC movie since the Dark Knight I know I say that about every DC movie but this is a DC movie that dark tonight The Dark Knight best movie
Dark Knight there’s three Dark Knights in this movie making it the most Dark Night so you don’t know what happened there but yeah but that’s a joke it was a crap joke to be fair but I think in the end that this movie deserves to be seen it’s not one of the best comic book movies ever made but it’s a good time and that’s why I’m giving it an 8 out of 10. and that’s kind of my right out of the theater reaction and I’m sort of hovering between a seven and an A but for
how I feel at the moment I think it would round up to an eight instead of going down chill I guess yeah still a shell but my issues with that First Act I think our soul does the movie goes on but my score May drop down once I’ve had a couple of chances to watch it now I think that this film is gonna be absolutely torn apart on Twitter but overall it’s a good Flash Film and a good adaptation of Flashpoint I know though that deep down the DC fan base is gonna go to war
over this film for the next couple of years and people are about to end friendships over what happens in this film gonna be non-stop endless arguments a never-ending War so hug your family tonight brother because tomorrow we fight and obviously I’d love to hear you your thoughts on it what do you think is going to happen in the future are you going to be fighting a civil war all day tomorrow on Twitter make sure you comment below and let me know you want to support the channel for as little as 99 cents a month then
please click the join button below and as a thank you you’ll get early access to videos every week we also have a merch store over at xeroedition.com which sells lots of nerdy inspired t-shirts hats and more we just launched a secret Invasion slash Pulp Fiction inspired t-shirt so if you want to head over there and help us out then the links in the description if you want something else to watch we’ve got a big breakdown of the post credit scene along with that George Clooney reveal so definitely head over there right after this there’s still
so much to talk about I will be covering the flash more and more and huge thank you for sticking with me until the end I’ve been Paul you’ve been the best and I’ll see you next time and you take as off and enjoy your weekend peace foreign
