I believe it was in the early ’70s when DC Comics, mainly under writer Denny O’Neil, decided to make a clean break from the four-color, Adam West-style Batman to something closer to the character’s 1930’s vigilante roots. One step in this was to have Dick Grayson graduate high school and go to college so Batman would be operating alone again. But another quiet step was that they started calling him “The Batman” again.
And yet other media still presented Batman as a standard superhero until the Tim Burton Batman movie, way back in 1989. I had problems with the movie, but at the time I thought they were at least trying to present the character realistically, for instance by giving him armor. But the Batman movies since that one have been getting steadily more grim and dark, especially with the Zack Snyder movies that took their cues from Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns.
My sister wanted to go see the new Robert Pattinson Batman movie (directed by Matt Reeves) and we went to see it last Wednesday, and I think she was a lot more impressed by it than I was. I think it IS very good, but at the end of the day The Batman is just another movie about a heavy-breathing, obsessed vigilante in a leather mask.
No, not The Batman, The Riddler.
Some general impressions:
I don’t like how most of these movies since Michael Keaton have basically made Batman a bulletproof tank who gets into fights with gunfire and survives mainly because he is a bulletproof tank. Because given the other similarities between the characters, going too far in that direction makes Batman basically Goth Iron Man.
But given that this Batman does have military-grade armor and uses contact lenses with digital feeds to record events around him, you’d think that they’d make him more like the comic character and have the eyes be white slits in a helmet, which you could also explain as nightvision lenses. I mention this because the movies insist on making the actor’s eyes visible and having the masked vigilante wearing black eye makeup around the eye holes of the black mask, so when Pattinson takes it off, he looks that much more emo than he usually does. Although this is probably the only modern Batman movie I’ve seen that acknowledges that he is wearing makeup.
On the other hand, I did like how this is one Batman movie where Batman avoids guns and killing. It is also a movie that actually focuses on Batman as a detective, having to follow The Riddler’s clues and piece together the big picture, although at least one person pointed out that it’s Selina Kyle (Zoe Kravitz) who actually grabs the crucial suspect while trying to get revenge for her slain roommate.
Paul Dano, exerting some serious “Voted Most Likely To Shoot Up The High School” energy as The Riddler, allows himself to be captured fairly late in the movie, and it seems like the whole thing is over, but The Batman realizes that there’s at least one more step in his scheme, and it’s especially disturbing given how it uses “stochastic terrorism” to organize people over social media to commit mass violence against a city. In the process of that discovery, Batman learns that fear and vengeance are not enough. This is part of why the movie is almost three hours (and 20 minutes of that is end credits), but it’s that final act that distinguishes this movie from something where Batman just uses the Batmobile machine guns to blast bunches of criminals.
Robert Pattinson is actually very good as Bruce Wayne and credible as The Batman, and I don’t know why that would surprise anybody given that Pattinson made his reputation playing a grim, brooding obsessive who stays out of the sunlight. But then both he and Kristen Stewart have gotten a bad rap for being the popular stars of the teen-fantasy romance of the Twilight Saga, which I didn’t love as much as its fanbase seems to but did not hate nearly as much as some people seem to.
The Batman is a very well-done movie, but it is too long, too dark (in both the literal and figurative senses) and doesn’t really give us anything new or beyond what came before. The Riddler, as perverse and insane as he is, is not more insane than Heath Ledger’s Joker. Pattinson, good as he is, doesn’t have the total Batman package of Christian Bale, much less the edge of Keaton, the suaveness of Val Kilmer, or the metal nipples of George Clooney.
But as I keep saying, not like it matters. Superheroes are literally corporate property, as in, not only can DC (no longer calling itself a comics company) do whatever it wants with these characters, all that aggregate product means that any given character is the product of more than one creator. Batman isn’t just the Bob Kane-Bill Finger character, and hasn’t been for decades. DC has actually been running multiple media versions of its characters concurrently (as with Grant Gussin and Ezra Miller both being The Flash), and in that regard, this movie is just Matt Reeves’ interpretation of Batman, no more or less official than the Ben Affleck one, although given the success of this movie it’s probably going to be the setting they’re going to run with.
Overall, I thought that The Batman wasn’t as good as I was hoping, but a damn sight better than some haters want people to believe.