James Mangold isn’t worried about the rise of digitally de-aged movie stars. And he doesn’t think you should be either.

“I don't think it's the future of movies,” the director tells Inverse, “but I think it's another tool at our disposal.”

Digital de-aging has been applied heavily in recent years in everything from the Marvel Cinematic Universe (Captain Marvel featured a de-aged Samuel L. Jackson in a starring role) to Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman and its youthful Robert De Niro. Even Mark Hamill got the de-aging treatment so Luke Skywalker could show up in The Mandalorian and provide some guidance for Baby Yoda. And now, in Mangold’s upcoming Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Harrison Ford appears as a younger version of himself for the film’s first 25 minutes, which take place on a Nazi loot train during the final days of World War II.

There’s a scene in The Flash where a character is resurrected over and over, each return a little more hollow than the last. It’s a lost cause. Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) knows it. The audience knows it. And yet, this shambling corpse that wears the face of a character we once loved continues to live despite the pain of knowing we can never go back to how it was.

That’s the gist of Andy Muschietti’s The Flash, a jumbled culmination of Hollywood’s obsession with IP and nostalgia masquerading as an earnest time-skipping adventure. There’s a good movie buried somewhere in there, and maybe if The Flash wasn’t propped up as a multiverse-spanning crossover event, that movie could’ve shined through. Instead, it limps over the finish line, a splashy but inconsequential end to Zack Snyder’s DC Extended Universe (barring the upcoming Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom).