The Flash's First Big Action Scene Is The Ultimate (And Hilarious) Superhero Moment
The following article contains spoilers for "The Flash."
In "The Flash," Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) is a complicated guy. He's a member of the Justice League, but unlike most of his counterparts, he's still just a kid. The gang doesn't really call him in for jobs unless everyone else is otherwise occupied. As Barry himself puts it, he mostly works as the Justice League's janitor, often cleaning up "Bat-messes." However, early in "The Flash," Barry gets a chance to prove himself in the most hilarious way. Though it may be a little discordant with the rest of the film's tone, it's impossible to deny the charm of this sequence. The slow-motion work puts the "X-Men" films' Quicksilver scenes to shame, and it's chock full of ridiculousness and goofy moments, all the while keeping the stakes pretty much as high as they can go.
I'm talking, of course, about the scene at Gotham General where Barry has his big Flash power showcase as he saves the most innocent members of Batman's hometown.
Never perform with babies and puppies, unless you're The Flash
Alfred (Jeremy Irons) calls Barry to get his help because everyone else is busy. Batman (Ben Affleck, in this scene) is chasing down some bandits who stole a dangerous virus, but the battle causes the parking garage in front of Gotham General to collapse — there's major structural damage. As the front of the building begins to sheer off, a nurse in a neonatal unit screams as she tries to save a bunch of babies in their plastic cribs as they crash through a window out into the air, several floors above ground.
I'll admit my initial reaction when I saw the first screening was horror. I mean, Andy Muschietti did direct both "It" movies, and the DC Universe has been getting darker over the years. Still, once I realized that the babies were all smiling, I knew this was going to be a comic scene. There are continual reminders of that as Muschietti throws progressively more innocents out of the building in slow motion. Babies drift by, and then a therapy dog. A little stuffed duck toy gets ripped apart while glass shards and a bottle of acid, for goodness sake, fly toward babies' faces.
It's chaos, but that isn't even what makes it the funniest scene in the film.
You can't skip breakfast
The best part of this entire sequence is that it all revolves around the fact that Barry hasn't had breakfast, and his metabolism is so fast that it's making it hard to do anything. That means that, while saving these babies, the nurse, and the therapy dog, he must raid a vending machine and warm up a burrito in a falling microwave.
Of course that's silly, but in a way, this entire bit of "Looney Tunes"-style disarray demonstrates who Barry is. He's confident in his powers now; he calmly obtains a snack, and then moves on to saving the little ones. We get that he'll do whatever he needs to if it means he can save someone, even going so far as to catch one baby in the microwave. We even understand he cares what happens to the people he saves after he saves them. He mentions getting therapy to the nurse who he rescues since she's still screaming after he delivers the babies and dog safe and sound. No one else in the Justice League ever seems to do that. When this thoughtful version of Barry later meets alternate-universe Barry, the contrast between their attitudes and approaches is sharper than ever.
Power has rules
Your first thought might be that Barry should have sped up and gathered each baby, individually zipping them back to the ground. However, as we learn in this scene, people who don't have his powers can't travel like that. (Alt Barry tries it with Original Barry when the latter loses his powers, making him barf a lot.)
In April, I attended a screening followed by a Q&A with director Andy Muschietti in which he spoke about The Flash's powers specifically in that scene. He explained that "[Flash] cannot move human beings at high speed because he would disintegrate them." He said:
"So that's why at the beginning — it's not explained until later when [the Barrys and Bruce Wayne are] in the kitchen and he says, for instance, you can move a microwave, but you cannot move a baby. So that's why he's so delicate with the babies and he just nudges them and pulls them. And when he finally lands ... every one of the babies [is on] the stretcher and the statue is falling and he is about to destroy the bridge and all of the babies are going to die, he goes out of hyper-speed, of super-speed, and he has to run like a normal human being."
It sounds like this moment may have been a vestige of filmmaker duo Phil Lord and Chris Miller's early take on the material years before this film actually got made, which Lord described as being "about how much food [the Flash] had to consume."
Again, this scene is a little outside of the rest of the film's tone, but it's so well done and so funny that it's easy to forgive.
"The Flash" is currently in theaters.