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This is the animated adaptation of the last DC Comics story before they rebooted to the New 52 -- and since it's an alternate timeline story, it should be right up my alley.
But good lord are some the character designs ugly. And the story is beyond violent -- seriously, Netflix says this is PG-13, and it's entirely for the death and destruction.
On the other hand, it's a pretty good Barry Allen story, with a good bit of character growth and lots of inventive use of his power.
The voice cast is uniformly good, and it was fun to hear some of the actors from the DC Animated Universe back -- Dana Delany as Lois Lane was a wonderful treat, for one.
My main reaction is that this story is absolutely not for small children, and maybe not for anyone up to and including 40-year old adults. It is that violent, and there are that many on-screen or just off-screen deaths -- many committed by characters who are usually heroes. Seriously, Wonder Woman kills two people just off-screen, one of whom is her often-love interest in the comics, and the other of whom is a child (and we see her drop the dead body)! It's a really disturbing story, and not in the way that I usually enjoy.
That said, the opening scene with young Barry and his mother when she teaches him the Serenity Prayer made me raise my eyebrows, especially since she explains that her own mother taught it to her when she was a little girl. Given that the Serenity Prayer is associated with AA, I wondered what was up there.
The first scene with Batman after Barry wakes up and realizes everything has changed tells you just how dark this alternate timeline is. Batman uses guns. And when Cyborg shows up and tries to sell this Batman on his team, the team line-up is kind of disturbingly obscure -- Enchantress, Citizen Cold, Pied Piper, Shade the Changing Man, Sandman, and the Shazam Kids. If these are the heroes that exist because everyone in the Justice League either doesn't exist, is actually causing the Amazon-Atlantean War, or never got their powers in the first place... well, things don't look good.
Since this is an adaptation of a multi-issue miniseries, I think it suffers for cutting out all of the side stories but trying to have allusion to them -- we don't get more than a glimpse of the Batman-Joker situation and no resolution there, and the way the Amazon-Atlantean War starts off in the animation substitutes marital infidelity and gross stupidty (I don't care if your husband the king cheated on you at a peace treaty signing, if it was with the Queen of another country, you don't attack her -- especially not when she's sharpening her sword!) for the more complicated plotting and political manipulations that were in the book. The streamlining could have eliminated some of the minor and cameo characters in order to make the central story more coherent.
Also, at the epilogue, Barry Allen's Flash costume has changed -- instead of the plain red uniform, he is wearing one that has yellow 'racing stripes', for lack of a better term. I think that's supposed to be the New 52 costume, but the unexplained change makes me wonder if Barry is in a third timeline and just didn't notice.
But good lord are some the character designs ugly. And the story is beyond violent -- seriously, Netflix says this is PG-13, and it's entirely for the death and destruction.
On the other hand, it's a pretty good Barry Allen story, with a good bit of character growth and lots of inventive use of his power.
The voice cast is uniformly good, and it was fun to hear some of the actors from the DC Animated Universe back -- Dana Delany as Lois Lane was a wonderful treat, for one.
My main reaction is that this story is absolutely not for small children, and maybe not for anyone up to and including 40-year old adults. It is that violent, and there are that many on-screen or just off-screen deaths -- many committed by characters who are usually heroes. Seriously, Wonder Woman kills two people just off-screen, one of whom is her often-love interest in the comics, and the other of whom is a child (and we see her drop the dead body)! It's a really disturbing story, and not in the way that I usually enjoy.
That said, the opening scene with young Barry and his mother when she teaches him the Serenity Prayer made me raise my eyebrows, especially since she explains that her own mother taught it to her when she was a little girl. Given that the Serenity Prayer is associated with AA, I wondered what was up there.
The first scene with Batman after Barry wakes up and realizes everything has changed tells you just how dark this alternate timeline is. Batman uses guns. And when Cyborg shows up and tries to sell this Batman on his team, the team line-up is kind of disturbingly obscure -- Enchantress, Citizen Cold, Pied Piper, Shade the Changing Man, Sandman, and the Shazam Kids. If these are the heroes that exist because everyone in the Justice League either doesn't exist, is actually causing the Amazon-Atlantean War, or never got their powers in the first place... well, things don't look good.
Since this is an adaptation of a multi-issue miniseries, I think it suffers for cutting out all of the side stories but trying to have allusion to them -- we don't get more than a glimpse of the Batman-Joker situation and no resolution there, and the way the Amazon-Atlantean War starts off in the animation substitutes marital infidelity and gross stupidty (I don't care if your husband the king cheated on you at a peace treaty signing, if it was with the Queen of another country, you don't attack her -- especially not when she's sharpening her sword!) for the more complicated plotting and political manipulations that were in the book. The streamlining could have eliminated some of the minor and cameo characters in order to make the central story more coherent.
Also, at the epilogue, Barry Allen's Flash costume has changed -- instead of the plain red uniform, he is wearing one that has yellow 'racing stripes', for lack of a better term. I think that's supposed to be the New 52 costume, but the unexplained change makes me wonder if Barry is in a third timeline and just didn't notice.
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That doesn't even make sense for Flash!