This is what artistic freedom gets you : the first film where Batman is probably a virgin .
When you put out a legacy blockbuster film that’s been rebooted and consumed by the cultural at large, you either dive into expectations or subvert them. It’s impossible to ignore an 80 year history, and not to have a reflective response to the character. You can do that by updating it to reflect the modern day ( the Nolan Trilogy is about a post 9/11 war), so it was curious of why THE BATMAN seems to have come out of the 1980’s. So it makes sense that the thing that connects to the two is Vengeance and the problems that come from it.
The first 30 minutes of BATMAN BEGINS is about how Vengeance can never be Justice. Because Vengeance is for short term personal emotional catharsis and Justice is for structural reason. The only time somebody could think the two could be the same would be if they themselves are the system, or in a Biblical sense , GOD. This kind of delusion can come to be in many ways, from extreme ego and narcissism , to cutting yourself off so much from society that you become the entire world based on refusing to see or hear the outside world. Who is seen? Who gets to decide what is hidden? There is a gadget in the movie that are contact lenses that are high definition video recorders. While gadgetry is a crucial part of every Batman movie, this camera is doubly effective because it ties directly into The Batman’s most important theme: The question of who is seen and who goes unseen in a society, and how problems that are willfully ignored — if not intentionally buried — can metastasize from the shadows. To ignore these problems, and not deal with them, is the same act of selfishness that allows one to put personal vengeance over structural justice. In the same way that focusing only on what criminals do and how they see you, you are warped at how everyday folk interact with the system you put on the city.
Ultimately THE BATMAN is about a vigilante who goes from coming out of the shadows and commit reckless violence as a way to cope with the trauma the paralyzes his human psyche, to a hero who was baptized in the flood of a terrorist as the literal shinning light in the darkness where he once dwelled to lead the people of Gotham to safety . His biggest victory does not come through violence, excellent car handling, or detective work , but from a commitment to making his city a better place, not just a safer one. Background HISTORY: THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, probably the most famous batman story, created by Frank Miller, when he was repeatedly mugged in NYC in the 70’s/80’s and nothing was done about it. A profoundly facisist but moral force that cuts through liberals Hoopla about rehabilitation and compassion, and the empowered conservative majority of the time with due-process and apathetic view of what was happening. “Now, presenting a vigilante as such a powerful, positive force is bound to draw some flak,” he said, “but it’s the force I’m concerned with, more as a symbol of the reaction that I hope is waiting in us, the will to overcome our moral impotence and fight, if only in our own emotions, the moral deterioration of our society. Not just some guy who puts on a cape and fights crime … I think Clint Eastwood is more in touch with what we should do with superheroes than virtually anybody in comics. Dirty Harry is clearly larger than life; his behavior would certainly land him in jail. But that’s irrelevant, what is relevant is that, through all his hostility, and despite his dirty language, Harry is a profoundly, consistently moral force, administering the ‘Wrath of God’ on murderers who society treats as victims … plainly bigger and greater than normal men, and perfectly willing to pass judgment and administer punishment and make things right It was after this and Watchmen that Allan Moore and Frank Miller basically thought the superhero genre was played out , a funeral for a bunch of children characters that would become fascist if taken seriously. Kind of like how Clifford the big red dog would be killed due to his danger to society if taken seriously. When BATMAN has his opening monologue and says “I AM THE SHADOWS” and. “I AM VENGEANCE” while pounding the face of a random thug dozens of times, I was worried that the movie didn’t actually understand what it was saying. I got really worried when he let the man who was assaulted just lie on the ground after he hit all those thugs. Thankfully, the rest of the movie proved to me that Reeves had an understanding of Noir beyond “BLACK AND WHITE DETECTIVE WITH SEEDY ELEMENTS”. Guilmero Del Toro has a quote about Noir: Noir isn’t about Venetian blinds and a husky voice-over and dimly lit street. It’s not about a dame smoking under a spinning fan. Those are the clichés. Those are the Coca-Cola commercials of noir. What I understand to be noir is the real grittiness that comes out of American realism — those films that channel the same spirit as George Bellows or Edward Hopper or Thomas Hart Benton. It’s the poetry of disillusion or existentialism. The tragedy that emerges between the haves and the have-nots. And the have-nots are trying to breach their ambition through violence and, ultimately, worshipping a hollow god, which is money. So therefore it’s literally an exploration of the flip side of the American Dream. The shadows of THE BATMAN , like the shadows of a noir film is to intentionally hide things, from the viewer , from the protagonist, from the world. This really goes beyond “Rich bad, Poor good”, and it is the strongest part of the movie , because in many ways THE BATMAN is afraid to blaze it’s own trail. At its most exhausting, it restages moments from the Nolan trilogy: A mobster tells Bruce Wayne the truth about how the world works, Batman fights his way through a nightclub in a fury or through a hallway illuminated only by gunfire, footage of the film’s villain terrorizing their next victim is broadcast over the evening news. We’ve gone from 9/11 dark to NYC crime wave dark. Almost all of the characters, apart from the Riddler, are recognizable from previous Batman movies . This is sad because the movie feels alive with possibility of reinvention at many times. And they created great images that could help sell it. In that, they even questioned so much about the structures that held this character in place… and they just fumbled contextualizing the answer. And, like the character himself, they left us by falling back on the status quo (THE JOKER). Only in the way that the Riddler becomes an indictment on Batmans own way of life does the movie breathe new life. It makes Batman the most interesting person in his own movie for the first time ever. Because the new question it asks is: “What if the only thing scarier was gaining enemies by being a creature of the night, is what if you gained people who would think you a friend?”
WEAKEST PART OF THE MOVIE
STORY STRUCTURE IN BLOCKBUSTERS AND DETECTIVE STORIES
I think the weakest part of this movie is the structure and it weakens both the detective and blockbuster parts of the movie. My guess is due to the fact that they didn’t cut enough broad pieces of the story while writing the movie , so small bits that would go a long way to improvement ended up on the chopping room floor.
Writing a detective story is hard, you need to walk the tight rope of keeping the momentum of the investigation by the investigator , and feeling like the audience/reader is truly figuring it out (make them feel smart) — and yet, then we need times where the killer throws a haymaker at the audience with a twist (make them feel genuine surprise) that doesn’t feel out of left field (avoid making them feel like the author is cheating).It’s hard to see Batman in this movie ,in this respect , as nothing more than a glorified crossword puzzle affiencdo, in this respect.Batman is like constantly thrown haymakers by the Riddler , and all the progress he makes either turns out to be a red herring (Penguin) or useless by the time he figures it out/purposefully given to him by the Riddler.
This plays a lot into how Batman is bad at his job, which makes sense because if Batman had thought for two seconds he probably could’ve realized that all the photos released of the Riddlers Victims are from the exact same angle , which ends up being the location where he shots Falcone!
On a meta level, the twists they do give are typically not super exciting: Rat with wings? That could be the Penguin! But what if the twist was … it’s another mobster who works with the Penguin that the audience doesn’t have pre-conception of beyond gangster, and we don’t have an HBO Max in development for? So it’s gonna be less exciting for general audience when do the reveal? Sign me up!
I think the main issue is that the first part of the movie is there is at least three instances of reveal to the audience of : “ YOU THINK THIS GOTHAM ELITE IS A GOOD GUY? WRONG THIS PERSON YOU’VE MET TWO SECONDS AGO IS ACTUALLY CORRUPT” . Which stops being a surprise and more of an assumption because of this … Until they bring up Thomas Wayne but then don’t use that effectively . I’ll get into this later.
The payoff of the identity of the Rat turns out to be Falcone, the lamest possible outcome. If I asked you as soon as his character was introduced
Me:“Hey do you think the guy who gained the most money, power, and influence from Sal Maroni getting taken down had a role to play in that very event?”
You: “ Yeah that would make sense.”
Me: “ What if I told you he was 100% behind it and did it unilaterally “
You : “ That would seem really boring, predictable ?”
Me: “What if I gave you no indications that he’d have any reason not to ?”
You don’t need a twist ending , but you do need to give the audience reasons to ‘rewrite’ the story that they know in their heads as they go along. They need to think, ‘Hey piece of evidence x makes me think outcome y is more likely now, and also opens possibility of outcome z’. That’s never really done here.
The biggest sin in the structure ,though is having that excellent jail interrogation scene with the Riddler, ending on this, and then having Batman go back to investigate nothing specific. This makes it feel like the movie should’ve ended already, because there’s not a real narrative ,character, emotional reason for Batman to go back.
This really falls apart when it turns out the final part of the Riddlers Plan about blowing up the dam and then shooting citizens in the arena by his Twitch fans. For two reasons
This isn’t signaled to the audience at all , which makes me think that theres some scenes cut out given the Riddlers very religious background of tone ( could do something with Noah and the flooding of the earth), and the Gotham Renewal fund ( money used to build half hearted infrastructure that’s embezzled by the elite )
We are told this via exposition in a twitch stream.
There’s nothing for the audience to be like “Oh yeah that ties back to this at the start!”. If there was something along the way planted in the story , you could have the Riddler say something during the interrogation scene at the end , that triggers Batmans deduction skills to lead him to the Arena right after dramatic high . That would be great blockbuster structure.
The hard part about writing Blockbusters is that there’s an unwritten rule that you need ‘set pieces’ that are often thought of before the story is written (‘we are gonna have a Transformers fight in Chicago , make it work’). You can write a really solid story, but you need to fit those set pieces in somehow. In movies like THE DARK KNIGHT, things like Truck Chase work because it ramps up in the middle of a story moment with stakes (Harvey Dent going to jail). THE DARK KNIGHT runs at 100 mph , even when the action slows down there’s still strong emotions to keep the audience intensely focused (Batman interrogates joker -> Race to save Rachel ->Joker Escapes ->mourning of Rachel->Reveal of Two Face). Even when things aren’t blowing up the audience doesn’t get catharsis to allow them to release their intensity or emotion until the very end when Two Face Dies.
RANDOM ROGUE ONE ASIDE
There’s really well choreographed set pieces and scenes that I hate because they don’t make sense in the movie ( Cassian and Jyn , the two characters we’ve followed for the whole movie, hug and die completing their mission-> Darth Vader, a character we’ve seen in one scene making a pun, goes crazy violent killing background characters). I think it’s good to ask when writing is ‘how do I want to audience to think and feel at the end of this scene?’, if you’ve written a good enough movie where the audience feels sad/cathartic that you’re main characters have died , how will they react to this 50 seconds later? How will they feel leaving the theater?
END ASIDE
THE BATMAN the set pieces intergrations are a mixed bag , from organically coming from the heartbeat of the story (Batman escapes the police precedent after being knocked out), pretty but weird(Batman chases Penguin in the bat-mobile, Greig Fraser’s the cinematography use of soft focus to highlight the detective observations and also the blurriness of moral ambiguity used here makes it incompressible sometimes), to nicely shot but weird ( Why is Bruce Wayne cutting the lights in the Iceberg Lounge if he really needs to prevent a murder). The quality of a blockbuster structure comes down to how organically can you integrate these set pieces into the actual story.
But even if I think the Detective and Blockbuster part of the movies don’t stand as strong as they could, what makes THE BATMAN soar is the Characters specifically Riddler and Batman.
STRONGEST PARTS OF THE MOVIE
THE RIDDLER
“I’ve been invisible my entire life, but I won’t be now”
“All it takes is fear and a little focused violence, you inspired me”
Edward N. should be a symbol of societal success, to go from Orphan to Forsenic Accountant. He remembered though that Thomas Wayne gave him brief visibility, but once he died, society didn’t care about him or any orphans anymore. Bruce Wayne in his mansion towering above the city safe from the dangers he can’t see, Edward wanted to recreate that with the flood as he and Batman watched on top of Arkham, the ones who have the true power.
His last plan is called A REAL CHANGE, he understands that structural power, even removing those structures, make a real difference as opposed to killing one or two people here or there.
Marvel movies love to have a foil (at least in the origin movie) as a villain ( Captain America : Red Skull, Antman : Yellow Jacket, Hulk :Abomination). The issue usually in execution is that when similarities between the hero and antagonist are drawn, the action that the hero usually takes is ‘continue to do the same thing’.
The only two POV shots (beyond the contact lenses , which in a way still Batmans POV) we get in this movie are from the Batman and the Riddler, it’s not a coincidence that the opening title (THE BATMAN) follows the riddlers POV shot.
I kind of hate it when theres a scene in a movie where its basically just subtext for ‘HEY I’M THE VILLAN MAYBE WE AREN’T SO DIFFERENT AFTER ALL HERO #EYESEMOJI’ when it was clearly shoehorned in. I think it works very well here because when that scene comes, The Riddler comes from a sincere and authentic place, as opposed to mocking. This doesn’t feel like vague allusion and is instead 100% solidified by the story that has just been told.
When he says “SEE YOU IN HELL” , it’s a call to comradey to do what is needed to be to be done in his weird biblical roots , not a mock. So often do the villains in these stories rise to fight the meteoritic rise of the hero, in this one he rises to “aid” the hero.
Oddly, enough one of the few villains that fail because they overestimate the protagonist, so much so that the only way the final disaster is averted is that the Riddler thought that Batman was his partner by the fact he executed his schemes so perfectly. This is one of the few recent movies where I feel the scene where they show how the villain is a foil to the protagonist didn’t feel outplace or shoed-in in a rewrite because it seems “smart”.
A villain that wouldn’t exist without Batman
BATMAN:
Batman fails the entire movie , and by extension this is the first batman movie where BATMAN is the most interesting part of the story. Which is weird because the portrayal seems to have followed the generic rubric of the 21st century . Humorless and brooding, he speaks as little as possible, moves with a fearsome sense of purpose, and regularly bristles with a muted paranoia of the world around him.
Batman fails the same way his Father failed to help the city, failed to make a real change. His violent quest is both as useful and quietly destructive and corrosive as his fathers Gotham Renewal program.
I feel like the Nolan Wayne and the Reeves Wayne are on a continuum of either you’re a human being being batman and aren’t incredibly violent, or you’re a introverted freak who says “I am vengeance” and you really have no personal life beyond that, basically everything Patterson does comes from a place where he is very hidden , even from himself. . The Synder Wayne has this weird in between where he kills people yet is a fully functional human being.
The Riddler floods the city like god and sets up for it to be rained sulfur upon like Sodom, I feel the religious aspect could’ve been pushed a bit more , in the same way that Batman thinks he’s bringing justice to a city but doing something much darker, The Riddler feels he’s doing Gods work but is just deranged. This also matches how in a way Batman is baptized at the end of the movie and emerges as a beacon of light.
I think a nice parallel is when the movie open Batman enters from the shadows in his first scene in the movie , to when at the end he is carrying the torch to be a guide for the people in the light. This is an actual character transformation/development where he realizes he can’t be just some emo punk, he needs to actually inspire hope and help the community ( a similar track to the Nolan Batman). I’m skeptical that it will stick fo the sequel but I think that’s why this movie worked pretty well.
BRUCE WAYNE:
The Bruce Wayne in this movie is very much inside himself, both psychologically and physically. Bruce looks sallow and frail; even in private, the man is prone to hunching over in self-consciously wounded repose. The gulf between the man and his alter-ego is so vast in Reeves’s film that it’s hard to imagine how the skittish Bruce can be the same man who can incapacitate mob heavies with a single blow and command everyone’s attention upon entering a room. Bruce is broken by the same trauma that powers Batman, to equally toxic impacts.
In many iterations, since the Waynes are old money, Bruce Wayne is Gotham and Gotham is Bruce Wayne, the foundation is the same. The movie would be boring if it was just “corruption in city hall!” so bringing the personal life of Bruce Wayne into the story to make it personal is necessary. They did that to barely aggressively fine requirement.
The story suffers from the lack of Bruce Wayne, and would’ve benefited from like 5 more minutes of like a Bruce Wayne origin story. When he is at the funeral, and he sees the father(who would later become a Riddler)who lost his son to drugs, it shows his inability to act his consequences.By not caring about the “Bruce Wayne” part of his life, he let down the other part of the system that is critical to his complete function and social contract
The growth of Batman going ham on that thugs face, shows us how bad that actually is at the end of the movie. The thing that would’ve driven it home is something I really hate for most movies but would’ve been thematically chefs kiss * here …
The reporter who died was (or should’ve been ) the Riddlers Father.
The Riddler and Batman have a similar relationship to Thomas Wayne and Falcone. That way both of the Waynes actions of breaking the system created and empowered these monsters, both of because of what they did in the shadows. They hate to admit it , and they are fundamentally different from their foils, but they really choose to ignore/hide their ties as opposed to understanding it.
My hope is that this series is about how Bruce Wayne becomes a person.But the hope of THE BATMAN is that one day he will make his city a better one, not just a safer one.
Notes That Don’t Really Fit Anywhere.
THINGS THAT BARLEY MATTER:
Catwoman ( They really couldn’t give her a character arc to choose to not shot her father! I understand this is kind of a NOIR trope of femme fatale but still! Good acting but was dead from the script)
Catwoman parentage ( I understand this is comic accurate but it doesn’t seem to add anything in the service of character, drama, or plot. The meta (branding) reason may be that they really want to hammer home she isn’t a villain because she’s stealing from her father????? He’s already a crook drug dealer, she can take that money!!! She’s not owed an inheritance!!!)
Alfred (Three Scenes! All to set up a mediocre Pattison Monologue!)
The throw away diagram that Bruce Wayne carves in house (looks good but is never revisted but done anything).
Penguin ( Really added nothing to the story, but kudos for having him in the rain a lot but not giving him an umbrella.)
That car chase ( Don’t like having camera angles just from the vehicles, couldn’t understand what was going on , because I didn’t know where everything was relative to everything else. I get that the entire movie is trying to get a claustrophobic feel, but never clicked with me.)
JOKER: wut
WHAT I LIKE BUT WON’T TALK ABOUT A LOT:
Peter Sarsgaard as Gil Colson (Playing the corrupt DA as a pathetic vermin as opposed to just a creep, when Catwoman turns him down , he doesn’t go like “BTCH” , he just gets sad and goes to his car)
^Related, once the DA dies they aren’t like “Just got a call from HARVEY DENT (HINT FOR THE NEXT MOVIE), the DA is dead!”
Falcone ( John Turturro, plays it like he’s in a Woody Allen movie, I was expecting everything he said was to be riffed on by another character but never does!)
Flying Squirrel Suit: out of left field and was a big hoot! The fact that the Riddler wasn’t obsessed with proving he’s smarter than Batman.