A buncha quick The Batman thoughts
Call this one a mini-newsletter; this isn't even an essay, I'll just bullet-point some thoughts on the topic of the day here. Spoilers below, but the short version: about halfway through the big car chase (which fortunately meant it was too loud for anyone to hear and be bothered) I said outloud "I fuckin' love Batman".
I don't think I can productively compare this to The Dark Knight since that was such an impossible to replicate Watchmen-esque quantum leap in the popular consciousness of what these can be, putting everything after trying anything remotely similar in its shadow. Striking that from the record though, this is definitely my favorite live-action Batman movie and conceivably my favorite live-action superhero movie period. It is however just as much of a lightning rod of topicality, in that the inciting incident here is an 8channer forming a parasocial relationship with a celebrity.
The Batman is a perfect adaptation in that it understands the franchise is about a bunch of high-strung weirdoes, and the (only relatively) normal people who exhaustedly have to put up with their schticks. You easily believe that even if he wasn't dressed as Batman, everyone would still react to Bruce as a complete freak.
Pattinson's definitive: a brilliant, laughable, terrifying sharpened knife of a man who looks so pathetically washed-out and naked whenever he has to take the suit off, and who can only pull himself out of his solipsistic depressive spiral once his heart is violently cracked back open. Kravitz is so sublimely ripped from the pages she's almost an anomaly among all these oddball left-of-center takes, Wright is the platonic ideal of straight man, Farrell is so goddamn delightful beyond even my outsized hopes I might be more excited for his HBO Max show than the proper sequel, Serkis is every bit as good as you expect, Turturro was a sleazy pleasure (two Batman movies with great Falcones! If every you expected a part to get phoned in), and Dano I warmed up to as it became clearer what it was doing with him.
Lord this movie is so ugly-pretty and sounds so brutal-pretty.
The matter-of-factness to the whole thing, the willingness to simultaneously take Batman at face value and take the piss out on him while still viewing him as something remarkable, is an approach that could only really happen from a director who's clearly an honest-to-god fanboy in the way Reeves is (while thankfully still having the necessary perspective to not fall into the pits that could come with that).
I was pretty sure we had a winner by the time of Ava Maria playing over the logo, I knew we did when the forensics guy awkwardly asked Batman to move, and it just kept rolling. Possibly the funniest Batman movie?
The beginning being a big riff on Dark Knight's "you have a better chance of winning the power ball than running into him!" scene paired with the most lurid Frank Miller monologue imaginable, and ending with a monologue of Pattinson going "wow, I sure was full of shit at the beginning of the movie huh" is a hell of a statement of intent.
Best Gotham bar none. Closely related note: this is a ridiculous cartoon universe and though I have no need to see folks with superpowers in this setting, Reeves is talking out his ass when he says that wouldn't fit.
Also best cape.
Right up until the theatre I wasn't sure how much I really believed this was gonna be a detective movie no matter how many times everybody said it. They did it though! It ruled!
Selina unrolling her toolkit gave me very satisfying Toy Story 2 vibes.
Almost shocking they went with the contact lenses and didn't use it to do the white bat-eyes, but that would have robbed us of Pattinson's work there so just as well.
I chose to read the glass maze for the rats as a reference to the end of the original Riddler comic, a childhood favorite of mine. Speaking of comics references, this sure was a ton of Batman stories I'm ambivalent to or outright dislike - Long Halloween, Hush, Earth One - remolded into something brilliant, particularly the Thomas Wayne stuff.
Selina progressively going further and further 'I guess cat stuff is my thing now' is a hoot.
"GHHAAAA, C'MAAAAAHNNNNN, DON'T SHOW ME DAT" "NO HABLA ESPAÑOL?????"
Pattinson doing 'Batman switches to Bruce's voice during a phone call', thumbs up.
If I have one real criticism, it's the script and scene-to-scene editing isn't as tight as it could be - it really stands out having two back-to-back 'the possible truth of the Wayne murders' moments, and Riddler himself vanishes for awhile.
I love that this is a movie that...expects you to read into things? No one needs to say that Thomas's good intentions spiraling into something horrible or Riddler trying to process the chaos of the world by turning everything into gimmicks and clues parallel Batman, it assumes everyone's a grown-up here and can read between the lines. And Falcone's death being framed like the Wayne murders to represent the death of Bruce's chances at ever getting closure? That's CINEMA baby.
Batman's pleading line to Selina - something to the effect of "He's taken enough from you. Don't give him this too." - is a really damn good and concise take on the no-kill psychology in a story that isn't especially about that, especially when I worried they'd keep it at the 'ol groaner "You'll be just like him!"
WB can have a little bit of copaganda, as a treat.
Riddler as basically mass-shooter works shockingly well for me. Still a guy who wants to be seen and to show how much better he is than everyone else, and this bypasses the frequent 'are you just making the bad guy do a few extra murders that can't be justified to make sure we can't root for him' thing by making him one more dude responding to some kind of kernel of societal malaise by making it all about his own bullshit taking it out indiscriminately on everyone around him. I briefly wondered if the logline of this movie as being the origin of the rouges gallery meant his subscribers would turn out to include some proto-villains, though I was more than satisfied with what it went with instead.
The punch I expect will stick with me is that Batman is so integrated and downplayed as part of the world that when he steps up and saves the day at the end before the eyes of the entire city it feels absolutely astonishing even though this is a Batman movie and he's Batman. He's just some weirdo local curiosity who probably ironically trended on Twitter a couple times and then he acrobatically dispatched a dozen gunmen with thousands of people watching before inspiring a people out of the literal darkness, it's as mind-boggling as if the guy who punched Richard Spencer went on to foil a terrorist plot on live TV. Immediately up there for me with Superman catching Lois in '78 and "Three cheers for Captain America!" as 'wow, holy shit, they're showing us the moment Superheroes as an idea are born.' I understand plenty of folks didn't like the third act and I'm sort of baffled, it's such an organic conclusion in the guy being confronted with every last one of his failings and deciding to evolve rather than die, as a crimefighter and a man.
I didn't choke up at him and the kid YOU choked up at him and the kid
I saw someone refer to Batman clasping the woman's hand as their new favorite moment in superhero movies, and I don't know that I'm there but that's very fair. Certainly the big (Scott) Sndyer-esque speech about Gotham resonated with me at the end in a way even the actual equivalents from that run didn't, cutting straight to the heart of what I love about the character. In a way in spite of being a simple marketing gimmick the title of the movie is appropriate, because it's essentially the tale of the change from 'The Bat-Man', weird figure of the dark, to 'Batman', the guy by our side in the night.
The Joker bit is basically fine. He was gonna happen and I'm sure Keoghan will do well in the future in whatever capacity he's utilized, Reeves' reason for including him was a good one and I'm looking forward to the release of his scene with Pattinson to get a better sense of him, I'd probably be psyched if we hadn't just had two bad movie Jokers in a row plopped between this and Ledger to bring down the mood. The background Reeves hinted at sounds pretty dumb, not gonna lie, but I would have thought the same of the Riddler take in here and he sold me on that so I'll withhold judgement for now.
The final scene is a character arc unto itself as the tale of Bruce Wayne's journey from volcel to incel to accepting he only has room for one woman in his life: Lady Justice.
No Man's Land next, huh? Wild, but also sensible in that while this was Batman versus a monstrous system (which I imagine puts the Court of Owls and Black Glove off the table for future installments after all), that has him dealing with a total absence. I can see Mr. Freeze fitting in here the way Reeves has in mind, and I'm delighted to hear he seems to be giving real consideration to Robin if not outright teasing that as his intention. I hope that Arkham show becomes a dumping ground for all the villain ideas he has that don't fit in his trilogy, and my personal hope for the cold open of 2 is to get Batman wrecking Black Mask as a regular criminal going "So we all do this now? I guess?"
Maybe the first movie since I was a teenager I know I want to watch again sometime. Just a really, really good noir about God's Lonely Man realizing that actually everyone else is sad and fucked up too in their own ways and he needs to be part of the solution instead of the problem, where also Batman kicks a bunch of dudes and solves some riddles.
Possibly this did not end up as mini as I had intended.
-- David Mann, 3/9/2022