I've been blowing through the DC Universe movies on Netflix recently (JL: Doom, All Star Superman, Superman/Shazam, a few others) and I figured I might as well carry on and pick up Flashpoint Paradox, based on the mini-series which I love/hate in various degrees. Love it because of the brilliant 100 Bullets version of Batman that Azzarello & Rizzo came up with and the Kubert artwork in general, hate it because of Geoff Johns' fanwanking of Flash into THE GREATEST HERO THE UNIVERSE EVER KNEW. Plus they totally didn't stick the landing, as we kind of discussed two years ago when the New 52 launched. So I'm happy to say that the movie version is kind of friggin' awesome, taking all the good points and junking most of the bad. They even came up with an ending that makes way more sense than whatever bullshit nonsense with Pandora and the Wildstorm universe that the original series put out there. As with the comic, the movie mainly makes me want to see a whole movie about Thomas Wayne: Asskicking Batman and that whole backstory. As with the comic, it still bugs that someone as versed in Barry Allen's history as Johns is would just suddenly decide that Nora Allen, who was very much alive in 1986 when we last saw Barry in continuity, was now dead years before Barry even became the Flash. But at least given that she's dead, Barry's motivations kinda sorta make sense here. That being said, this is a VIOLENT movie, with the writers exacting wholesale slaughter that wasn't even done to this degree in the original books, which themselves were pretty violent for the sake of. I will say, unless you're a big DC geek, you're gonna be sitting there glassy-eyed wondering what the fuck is going on for a lot of it, because big chunks of it rely on knowing that someone in the Flashpoint Earth was someone else in the "real" Earth, and if you don't know who that person is then it's pretty meaningless to you. Like really, does anyone give a fuck about Grifter? His New 52 book only ran like 8 issues!
Anyway, it's very faithful to the original source (the electric chair scene is almost beat-for-beat from the book), and that's both good and bad, because there's a lot about the original I wish they would have changed. But I liked it a lot and it's worth the $12 or so for the DVD. Plus then you won't have to go back and read the original series.