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The following contains spoilers for The Flash, in theaters now.
Superheroes have always embraced a creed of "go big or go home," with epic storylines and larger-than-life conflicts. Modern effects and A-list budgets have made it the default setting for most comic book movie adaptations, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe has demonstrated the potential of multi-movie arcs and ongoing plot threads. Bigger is often better in superhero stories, and while the good ones never lose sight of the characters at their heart, it's easy to forgive them if the bombast thunders a little heavier than most movies.
So it comes as something of a surprise that the time-travel paradox at the heart of The Flash draws inspiration from a far quieter source. The film is loosely based on the Flashpoint comic book event, in which Barry Allen travels back in time to save his mother and creates a much darker reality as a result. The moment screams for some kind of Herculean clash, complete with a built-in nemesis in Reverse-Flash to give it some power. Instead, Barry's cataclysmic interference in the timeline arrives with the tiniest shift in details that mirrors a classic Ray Bradbury story.
A Sci-Fi Classic Provides the Template for The Flash's Paradox
The idea began with Ray Bradbury's classic short story "A Sound of Thunder," which depicts a time travel service in the future that lets hunters travel back to the Cretaceous period and hunt a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Disaster occurs when one hunter inadvertently steps off the prescribed path, resulting in widespread changes when he returns to the future. It's credited with originating the term "the butterfly effect," in which seemingly small actions can have huge consequences. The story was adapted into a disastrous 2005 movie: released with partially finished effects after funding ran out.
Subsequent science fiction movies have made copious use of the concept, most notably the Back to the Future movies which The Flash repeatedly cites in-world. Like "A Sound of Thunder," those movies hinge on tiny changes, such as Marty McFly pushing his father George out of the car accident that led him to meet Lorraine. The Terminator movies hinge on similar minutiae, such as a seemingly unexceptional LA waitress holding the key to humanity's survival. The Marvel Cinematic Universe very tellingly went in a different direction with the Time Heist in Avengers: Endgame, resulting in inadvertent paradoxes that led to the creation of the MCU's Multiverse.
The Flash Focuses on Little Details Instead of Big Ones
The Flash needn't go to the extremes of Endgame just to punctuate its paradox with some big-league mayhem. In fact, it just has to stick to Flashpoint, in which The Flash prevents Reverse-Flash from killing his mother Nora. That holds plenty of potential for a showstopping fight scene, but while the new film toys with the idea of villainous variants, it ultimately uses them in a very different way.
Instead, it sticks with the "Sound of Thunder" formula, in which Barry Allen makes the smallest possible change to achieve what he wants. His mother is killed when his father goes out for a can of tomatoes she forgot at the store. He simply places the can in her cart at the store earlier, keeping dad home on that fateful day and preventing the tragedy. The same principle gives him a silver lining later when -- unable to prevent his mother's death -- he surreptitiously adds evidence that ultimately exonerates his father after being found guilty of murdering Nora.
The cheat undoes a good deal of the impact, letting Barry have his cake and eat it too. But its focus on the little details instead of the bigger ones demonstrates an unusual devotion to the concept. There's plenty of action in The Flash, and it invests a lot of energy into making its effects sequences work. But its more important details are the smallest ones, a trick it adroitly borrows from Bradbury's classic.
The Flash is now playing in theaters.