Respond to these rapid questions in our The Flash quiz and we will tell you which The Flash character you are. Play it now.

“The Flash” is one of the most amazing and infuriating mixed bags of the superhero movie age; it is at once cerebral and dumb, challenging and cavalier. It contains both the best and worst digital effects work I’ve ever seen. It consistently exceeds any expectations we may have for its competence just to immediately face-plant into the closest wall, much like its genuine but frequently helpless hero. When it comes to time, parallel universes, and the question of whether “canonical” events in a person’s life or an entire dimension can be altered, “The Flash” keeps repeating its narrative action by pressing the reset button and starting anew. It arrives on screens immediately after “Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse,” a high watermark for both superhero movies and major studio animated features that explores many of the same themes, and suffers the double misfortune of being its own worst enemy from beginning to end, despite genuine thoughtfulness and an intriguingly unstable cocktail of genres (slapstick comedy, family drama, heavy metal action flick, philosophically driven science fiction adventure). Barry Allen, a twenty-something forensic scientist and secret superhero who feels like the “janitor” of the Justice League and is still dealing with the effects of his mother’s murder and his father’s unjustly imprisoned for the crime, is portrayed by Ezra Miller, whose off-screen run-ins with the law make some of the movie’s raunchier comedy land poorly. It’s bad form to discuss the movie’s more interesting parts because doing so would require going into great detail about the plot, but at the same time, a lot of it has already been “spoiled,” not just on social media and online forums but also in the movie’s own trailers and marketing materials (Warner Bros. provided the image at the top of this review) and on Wikipedia. This is another instance of “The Flash’s” double-bind. After reading that, you can decide whether to continue reading or to stop for now. Those who continue to read: Remember the scene from the 1978 version of “Superman: The Movie,” where Christopher Reeve’s Superman had to decide between preventing a nuclear missile from reaching Miss Tesmacher’s state and saving his beloved Lois Lane from being killed in an earthquake, tried to do both, lost Lois, then went back in time to resurrect her? Barry’s choice to attempt time travel and alter one detail on the day his family was killed led to the expansion of that scene into a full movie and its fusion with the “Back to the Future” series. Dad (Ron Livingston) was dispatched by Mom (Maribel Verd) to the neighborhood grocery store to pick up a can of tomatoes that she required for a recipe. When little Barry hears a disturbance and rushes downstairs, he discovers his mother lying on the kitchen floor, a knife slashed through her bloodied chest, and his father sobbing over her body while holding the knife’s hilt. Barry thinks he can use his Flash abilities to go back in time to that terrible day, put a can of tomatoes in Mom’s shopping basket, and save both of his parents. Anyone who has watched a time travel movie or read The Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury is aware that it is not that easy.

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The “The Flash” film, which was directed by Andy Muschietti (“Mama,” “both” “It” movies), and was written by renowned genre screenwriter Christina Hodson (“Birds of Prey,” “Bumblebee”), deserves praise for treating its themes and the suffering of its characters seriously without succumbing to gloomy, lifeless machismo. Miller meets a different version of himself with an intact, happy family when he enters what he thinks is “the past” (it’s actually an alternate timeline), and he befriends and mentors the other Barry while learning along the way how unpleasant he can be to others. But you shouldn’t waste any more time and start this The Flash quiz. Barry’s anxiousness, awkwardness, and facial tics are overemphasized by Muschietti in the pre-time-travel version of the character, making him seem like one of those schlemiels that Jerry Lewis used to play. However, once the first Barry joins forces with the second Barry, Miller maintains a high level of schlemiel energy for the second Barry while lowering it for the first Barry. This allows the original Barry to develop gradually, following the typical path of a youthful hero. These mirror-image duets are where the movie’s best effects are on display. The outcome is the most compelling case of a starring man playing opposite himself since Michael Fassbender in “Alien: Covenant.” Even in the photos of both Barrys, there is a certain amount of handheld shakiness, which is a visual signifier of “authenticity.” You’ll probably forget that one actor is portraying the same role after a few scenes and instead pay attention to what Miller does with both versions of the character. Every interconnected feature film in the DCEU series is defined by Superman’s city-leveling battle with General Zod in “Man of Steel” as a character- and team-defining canonical event. More than one movie, most notably “Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice,” included references to that competition’s aftermath in their stories and dialogue. When it’s brought up once more in the early part of the movie, you know Barry and Barry will run into it once more in a different realm. Zod appears as expected, accompanied by his evil companions, scarab starships, armored shock troops, and terraforming World Engine. The difficulty is that there is just one superhero—the Caped Crusader—and no Justice League to oppose him. Not the aged, Frank Miller-like Batman portrayed by Ben Affleck, but the Batman portrayed by Michael Keaton in the Tim Burton movies of the 1980s. He is only older, more sallow, and further removed from the civilization he is watching. Keaton offers the movie’s most understated performance as the aged Batman, who is simply Bruce Wayne combined with Howard Hughes’ long-haired recluse persona. He underplays and responds in a way that breathes new life into a tale that is arguably too reliant on familiar scenarios and makes Miller’s jittery, abrasive traits more tolerable. He smooths the ride without slowing it down, acting as the equivalent of a shock absorber.

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Barry, Barry, and Bruce are persuaded that the Superman from this version is imprisoned in a Siberian facility managed by Russian mercenaries and go there to save him. Kara Zor-El, Kal-El’s cousin and Supergirl (Sasha Calle, sporting a modified pixie cut and a menacing gaze), turns out to be a she. According to reports, Superman may still be present somewhere, but Zod can be defeated by his cousin, who was dispatched to look out for him. The movie demonstrates that its obsessional referencing of the “Back to the Future” films was not merely a running gag when the modified four-person Justice League substitute faces Zod’s invasion force. Also, you will find out which character are you in this The Flash quiz. The end of the second “BTTF” film, where time-traveling teen Marty McFly (played in Barry’s universe by Eric Stoltz, who took over for Michael J. Fox in our world! ), was forced to attend the same prom that marked the end of the first “BTTF,” is represented by the reimagining of Zod’s attack in this film. (This film’s choices regarding what to keep and what to erase from historical records are bizarre; I’d love to hear the reasoning behind erasing many of the DCEU superheroes from the second Barry’s universe while deciding that “Back to the Future,” “Footloose,” and “Top Gun,” as well as the first Chicago album, were immutable occurrences.) The big battle in the movie is the least convincing scene because some of it resembles a video game cutscene from the early aughts. The two Barrys differ on whether traveling back and forth through dimensional paths will solve issues or create new ones, which is unfortunate because it is the scene that provokes the most contemplation. Batman, the Flashes, and Supergirl confront Zod. “The Flash” refers to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus, the source of all science fiction with even the barest pretense of seriousness. Shelley forewarned readers that employing science to emulate God or defy nature had negative repercussions, and that the Prometheus character in the narrative would be better off giving up his illusions than continuing down a destructive road. Is this the kind of movie that will pay attention to Shelley’s warning or disregard it in favor of giving the hero what he wants and the audience the wish-fulfillment dreams that it seeks and that superhero movies almost always endorse? Even the first two Christopher Reeve Superman movies erred on the side of viewer wish fulfillment; in the first, he has the ability to turn back time, and in the second, he uses a super-kiss to have Lois forget that she knows who he really is. It is commendable that “The Flash” managed to thread the needle by offering viewers a reasonably upbeat conclusion without minimizing the philosophical and scientific challenges it addresses elsewhere. Unfortunately, “The Flash” also exhibits a negative trait that detracts from its best qualities. It serves up fan-wanking callback after fan-wanking callback to other versions of heroes and villains from film and TV, seemingly with no other purpose than to burnish Warner Bros’ properties and make the audience point to the screen and whisper the names of actors, characters, films, TV shows, and comic books that they recognize. This happens even as it deftly translates Shelley’s concerns into modern comic book terms. The “Chrono-Bowl,” a cosmic switching station with a design that alludes to clockwork gears, the concentric rings of chopped-down trees, theater-in-the-round, and a tribunal, keeps popping up in scenes starring Batman, Batman, Batman, Batman, Superman, Superman, Superman, Flash, Flash, and so forth.

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The actors who originally played them, many of whom passed away long ago, have been scanned (or rebuilt) as vaguely three-dimensional but uncanny grotesques, like Madame Tussaud’s wax figures placed over audio-animatronic puppets, rather than finding an artistic, modest way to reuse library footage from earlier adaptations of DC comics—as, for example, “In the Line of Fire” did with footage of a younger Clint Eastwood from “Dirty Harry.” Remember the technique that “reanimated” Peter Cushing in “Star Wars: Rogue One,” then served up an even more unsettling “young Carrie Fisher” in the film’s climax, paved the way for a nearly expressionless “young Mark Hamill” in “The Mandalorian,” and de-aged ’70s movie stars for a variety of legacy sequels? Even if technology hasn’t advanced much, it keeps being repeated and churned out. Also, you must try to play this The Flash quiz. To depict alternative universes, the Chrono-Bowl gives the main cast of the movie the zombie CGI treatment as well. Some of the SAG-carded, frequently updated IMDb pages of these real, active performers have a somewhat demonic appearance. The hands and torsos are not anatomically accurate. One resembles a gecko with eyes that face opposite ways. Is the technology simply not there yet, or were the deadlines hurried and the digital effects artists abused to the point where quality control vanished—a problem throughout the entertainment industry? And even if it does “get there,” will it ever stop appearing to be only one (digital) step away from enveloping a mannequin in dead flesh? Such worries are irrelevant when doing this sort of thing in an entirely animated fashion. Everything in an animated comic book adaptation is a drawing that was inspired by another drawing, so it is a representation of something that is not intended to appear “real.” Not the case in live-action. “Hey, that’s Actor X!” gives way to “He looks kinda creepy and unreal,” and the enchantment is broken. What a disaster. What a shame, considering “The Flash” has a lot of excellent qualities. The film gives much more care to what it wants to express than to how it tells it. It fervently forbids doing something while simultaneously engaging in a variation of that same behavior. Barry, who is driven by a desire to bring the dead back to life, questions the morality and viability of many actions that the movie frequently takes, both in tiny and significant ways, without breaking a sweat. opens on June 16th, a Friday.

For more personality quizzes check this: What Is Your Fatal Flaw Quiz.

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