Zack Snyders Justice League featured one of the fastest versions of FLash on screen. Despite being inexperienced with the DCEU’s Speed Force, this version of Barry Allen may as well put the other flash’s to shame. In this version of the Flash, he only has the knowledge behind his powers, not the experience. For instance, he is well aware that he taps into the Speed Force to get his super speed. Despite being oblivious to the potential this ability holds, Barry Allen is already able to break the sound barrier and make small jumps back in time.
Snyder’s version of the Flash:
This version of Flash has already proven strong enough to take down villains like the Parademons and Captain Boomerang. However, this is just the tip of the Flash’s true powers. In the comics and the CW version, Barry Allen can use his speed to acquire secondary abilities like creating wind vortexes, phasing through solid matter, and most famously, traveling through time. His speed is such a strength in battles that when it comes to fighting major villains such as Darkseid and Gorilla Grodd, it’s all about strategy as he still beats them when it comes to speed.
The flash has always been in the situation of either creating a new timeline or fix the current one. As such, to even remotely perform the task, he has to run as fast as he possibly can to break the Time Barrier. In the DCEU, Barry Allen only demonstrates a fraction of this power, but he’s still quite fast by speedster standards. Let us explain just how fast Snyder’s flash really is.
How his powers work in the DCEU:
Even though DCEU has not given the flash enough screentime for us to fully grasp his powers, the existence of the DCEU’s Multiverse suggests that he got them the same way as all the other multiversal versions of himself. This is through a bolt of lightning that struck him and linked him to the Speed Force. With the Speed Force in his arsenal, Barry can do so much than just run super fast. For instance, he can partially control the lightning bolts that emit out of him when he taps into the force. Not only that, he can even create vortexes, stop tsunamis and even come on time for work(which he still cannot manage).
Although it seems that Barry has not gained the ability to control the Speed Force just yet. As we can see in the movie, he rips apart the shoes he wore for his interview at the pet shop. This means that he still cannot fully control his powers. As in the comics, the Speed Force would protect anything that Barry touches even if he travels at super speeds.
However, it seems as if Barry is starting to get a hold of it as we see him save Iris West in the middle of a high-speed car crash. Barry Allen must move her very carefully to avoid harming her with friction or inertia. It is also notable that in this version of the Flash, his physical performance while running doesn’t seem to affect how fast he can run. Instead, it seems as if his speed is totally dictated by how much he uses the Speed Force.
The potential of the Flash:
While the DCEU hasn’t shown the Flash’s top speed, it has revealed that he can travel back in time using the Speed Force. In real life, time really does appear to behave differently at the speed of light, which moves at approximately 300,000 kilometers per second (186,000 miles per second), but there’s no real evidence that light can actually travel back in time. Hence, The Flash’s superhuman time travel ability may be a different power altogether rather than sheer speed.
Even if time travel does not seem a result of super speed for now. It certainly does help in the fight against Darkseid in the Snyder cut. As the world is getting torn apart, Barry runs faster than we have ever seen him go as he reverses time with the help of the Speed Force. Barry can also use the Cosmic Treadmill, which lets him travel from the not-so-distant future of the Knightmare scenario back to the events of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, where he warns Bruce Wayne that “Lois is the Key” to keep Superman from succumbing to Darkseid’s Anti-Life Equation.
As we see in the film, the Speed Force is directly linked to the speed, time, and space that Barry can run through. The connection allows Barry to literally open doors to multiple realities and introduce the Multiverse to the DCEU. The comics and the Arrowverse have found various ways to explain the Speed Force realistically. Now that Zack Snyder’s Justice League has set the basis, it’s the turn of Andy Muschietti’s The Flash to delve into the intricacies of the Flash’s powers in the DCEU.
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