The Doctor’s Diagnosis: B-
The Batman isn’t necessarily the Batman that I want or the Batman that I think we need right now, but I can’t deny that it has merit. I recently heard an interesting comment on one of my favorite podcasts (Best Movies Never Made, I listen to it on Stitcher) that basically said that Batman stories are, more so than any other comic book stories, tantamount to creative Rorschach tests for their creators because of the inherent versatility of the character. Superman wouldn’t make sense in a gritty crime story, The Punisher wouldn’t make sense in a science fiction story, etc. Batman, on the other hand, has run that gamut in the history of different takes on the character. Sometimes he’s a killer, sometimes he has sworn not to kill. He’s fought serial killers and he’s fought aliens. He can be anything that you want him to be, he can (and has been) reflective of any mood in society. In that sense, The Batman is a fitting version of the character for 2022, but the film, despite being spectacular on many technical levels, is just too sad and realistic for me to have any fun with it.
Set during Batman’s second year patrolling the streets of Gotham, the film follows the young vigilante hunting a serial killer known as The Riddler who has been killing members of Gotham’s social elite and leaving riddles behind for Batman to figure out the motives for his killing spree. Working with Lieutenant (not yet Commissioner) Gordon, Batman goes deep into Gotham’s underworld to figure out the Riddler’s plot, having his first encounters with The Penguin, Catwoman and crime boss Carmine Falcone along the way.
I won’t go into plot details any further except to say that the mystery begins much more strongly than it ends. For about the first hour, I was loving The Batman. The small-scale mystery and requisite detective work reminded me of my favorite Batman comics and cartoons. The scale and logic of the film’s early stages starts going off the rails around the halfway mark, though, as the Riddler’s plan becomes increasingly unfocused and begins to steer into generic supervillain territory. Early clues ultimately lead to very little and the mystery ultimately serves as little more than a preamble for generic destruction.
Much has been made about The Batman returning the character to his roots in a noir detective story (his flagship title is called Detective Comics, after all) and the film does largely achieve this. The grandiosity of recent comic book movies is mostly absent here, especially in the superior early stages of the film’s epic three-hour running time. More of a police procedural than a Marvel-style orgy of CGI characters shooting lasers at each other, The Batman is an extremely grounded take on the character that spends a lot of time with Batman investigating crime scenes, talking to the police and searching the seediest parts of town for clues. Although it isn’t always original (there are several scenes lifted straight out of The Dark Knight), this is the most realistic portrayal of what it would be like if a deranged billionaire decided to dress as a bat and chase criminals.
While I can appreciate the artistic choice and achievement of such a realistic, grounded take on the character, there is a basic problem with that approach: reality fucking sucks. If you don’t believe me, turn on the news for five seconds. Fucking awful, right? That’s why I don’t understand the need to inject more and more realism into these movies and I would prefer that things be more stylized and fun. To be clear, when I say “stylized and fun,” I’m speaking more in the sense of the Tim Burton films than the godawful Joel Shumacher films. The Batman goes so far into the dark and gritty that many of the characters aren’t recognizable as their comic book counterparts.
That march toward realism at the expense of fun is most apparent with the villains and this is where the film starts falling apart for me. Riddler and Penguin aren’t really Riddler and Penguin. Riddler is a serial killer modeled on the Zodiac and, while the character is creepy despite an increasingly uninteresting plan, he has little in common with the Riddler as I know him and Paul Dano plays him as more of a raving lunatic than the cold, calculating menace that he is in every other iteration that I’ve seen. It isn’t that the character is too dark, as this isn’t even the darkest version of the character that I’ve seen (check out the comic book story Dark Knight, Dark City from 1990; that nightmare fuel has stuck with me since I read it when I was six). It is rather that everything fun and quirky about the character has been removed. Similarly, Colin Farrell is playing The Penguin as a straight-up Italian mobster without any traits of the comic book character (although I do appreciate the movie’s use of the Iceberg Lounge, which is the Penguin’s night club in the comics). I thought that Zoe Kravitz was great as Catwoman, except for the fact that she was playing Catwoman. The character bears little resemblance to the source material and her minimal costume furthers the film’s mission to eliminate the elements that make these characters fun. Christopher Nolan’s films also took huge liberties with the characters, but they still felt far more representative of the original characters than the villains do here. For much of the film, especially when the villains (and Catwoman) are on screen, it just didn’t feel like Batman to me.
There are positives in this regard, though. I did like Robert Pattinson’s Batman (which is something I didn’t think that I would ever say in my life), as he projects the brooding, intimidating physicality of the character perhaps better than any other version. Batman is a horror villain for criminals in this movie, as he hides in shadows before finally emerging and beating the ever-loving shit out of people. There is an early montage sequence that is lifted straight from The Dark Knight, but is more effective here as the Bat Signal lights up the sky and we see criminals around the city staring into the shadows of back alleys, hoping that the signal didn’t summon Batman to them. Unfortunately, Pattinson’s Bruce Wayne isn’t nearly as effective, as he plays him as a sad, whiny bitch rather than create the playboy façade that is more typical of the character. Once could argue that this is a more realistic portrayal of what this psycho would be like, sure, but I don’t want a Bruce Wayne that acts like he’s hitting up Hot Topic on his way to a My Chemical Romance show. Jeffrey Wright is also great as Gordon, even though he has many scenes that would make a lot more sense with Robin instead of Gordon.
The production design and musical score are also worth noting as positives. While I prefer the gothic grandeur of the Burton films, this Gotham is perhaps the most representative of the comics. Gotham here is a claustrophobic, seedy nightmare that feels like New York in a 1970s movie (or like the Joker movie, which was going for a similar vibe). The musical score is also epic and effectively plays up the terror of the Batman character in the eyes of the criminals. When that music builds up, one expects a demon to be crawling out of the darkness and, to the criminals, that’s exactly what happens. I did immediately subtract a third of a grade for the repeated use of Nirvana, though. I fucking hate Nirvana.
The Batman is a good movie, but I’m not sure if it’s a good Batman movie. I do give Warner Bros. credit for doing different things with the DC movies, as opposed to Disney basically making the same movie over and over again with the Marvel characters. But the overall tone and bleakness of this, despite being an interesting artistic choice, didn’t work for me overall. I have read interviews with the cast implying that these are early versions of the characters and they will evolve into versions more consistent with the comics in future films and I hope that’s true because there is potential here. I just wish things could be fun again.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Batman_(film)#/media/File:The_Batman_(film)_poster.jpg
