From beginning
to nth
Again, The Batman
By The Nth Review
In video gaming, there’s a warm excitement that emerges with each new generation of consoles. The Microsofts, Sonys, and Nintendos of the world (now) spend billions of dollars to throw the most effective and efficient hardware into the world and watch game makers produce new gaming experiences that weren't possible before. Kids of the 70s, 80s and 90s watched as crude 2D graphics became slightly less crude 2D graphics until gaming machines became powerful enough to render 3D polygons. These became slightly less crude 3D graphics until we were shifting around realistic-looking people in service of destroying enemies or harvesting gems. We went from buying games in cheap plastic cartridges to downloading them via wireless radio waves straight from a farm of computers thousands of miles away. But with each new generation, we’re encountering a problem of diminishing returns where better hardware is no longer producing demonstrably better results, especially without high-end TVs. Princess Peach is still getting kidnapped by Bowser and it’s still up to Mario to save the day, but the result is getting less shinier with each new version.
Alongside the diminishing returns on graphics, we’re also encountering the entrapment of The Monoculture. Corporate consolidation and the instantaneous nature of pop culture memography ensures that nothing popular can ever disappear and nostalgia can no longer ferment. Complaining about sequels and reboots and adaptations is missing the point: fewer ideas are coming in and no ideas are leaving.
The Batman opens simply with a massive title card and some dark and dirty mood setting, introducing our titular hero as an abstract force who enters the scene slowly and loudly, with the rhythmic thud of his heavy goth-band boots. He doesn’t emerge from the shadows, Robert Pattinson’s Batman explains, he is the shadows. Director Matt Reeves does his best to carve out a new look and feel for his film with a Bruce Wayne who consistently looks like he just got out of bed for this. While the film is three hours long, it wasn’t the length that ever bothered me, it was the ever-increasing pings of deja vu.
Batman, like Star Wars, or even Mario at this point, is woven into the fabric of American culture. It’s not merely a matter of if you’ll be exposed to these mythologies, but when and how, and each new generation produces even more content to complicate how that introduction happens. Do you start with a 2D Mario side-scroller or a 3D open-worlder? Do you enter Star Wars with the original trilogy or play them chronologically? Of course, Batman, Star Wars and Mario are not ever going away, even as their temporary handlers flub the occasional entry. They ruined Spider-Man and Star Trek at various points in the past couple decades and they’re still being brought back to the frontlines over and over, ammunition in a never-ending content war.
I admit I hadn’t been paying much attention to The Batman’s development except for the hiccups in production when COVID bested their best intentions and shut it down. Warner Bros and DC have spent the past decade desperately trying to mimic the success of their rival’s cinematic universe, but they can’t seem to find the talent or the plan to best Marvel’s money machine, much less build or maintain their own. I have stayed far away from Zach Snyder’s dour previous entries in the Batman series.
As an Elder Millennial, my introduction to Batman came, of course, with the campy Adam West series of the 60s, but the weight of the character and his world didn’t sink in until Paul Dini and Bruce Timm’s animated series. Those cartoons were very respectful of their young target audience, not even featuring a title card in its intro to tell you what the show was. The Burton/Schumacher films of the 90s that ran alongside it were… fine, but it didn’t seem like a creator took Batman as seriously as Dini and Timm did until Nolan brought us his Dark Knight trilogy.
2008’s The Dark Knight isn’t just among the best Batman films ever made (it’s no Mask of the Phantasm, after all), but one of the best movies ever produced. When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences snubbed it for a Best Picture nomination, the pop culture roared. The following year, the Academy Awards featured a double-sized slate of entries to ensure that popular films wouldn’t easily miss the window again. Watching The Batman, you can feel that film’s fingerprints all over and through it.
The Dark Knight is the middle chapter of Nolan’s Batman trilogy and it is large and intense, the kind of stressful that shows like Breaking Bad would later trade in. Its score by Hans Zimmer introduced me to shepard tones, shrilly sounds that seem to escalate into infinity without end, heightening the on-screen thrills. Gotham City winds up becoming the movie’s protagonist as Batman and his most intimate antagonist, the Joker, play the metropolis as a massive beach ball. The Joker keeps setting up more and more devious traps and situations and Batman races to keep the city from collapsing onto itself. It is a film that keeps you wondering how much more things can fall apart, banking on a more contemporary and realistic setting than its fantastical predecessor or its bloated sequel.
The Batman avoids daylight however possible with each frame appearing to be colored sketchings on black paper. The visual palette is compressed and grim and this world feels even more tuned into the realism of our world than Nolan did with his films. You won’t joke about USB thumb drives after this film. Each hit Batman takes makes you rub your abdomen in reaction. A wingsuit jump that doesn’t go quite right made me physically cringe. The film knows how to throw punches and make them hurt. It has a glorious visual vernacular with persistent rains blurring lights when the camera isn’t intentionally racked out of focus. A fistfight is lit entirely by the muzzle flashes of automatic weaponry. Batman’s rocket-powered muscle car leaps over a burning wall of overturned semis. Batman being shot at on a massive arena display causes panels to flicker out, tile by tile. I remember thinking it was a shame that so many of the movie’s visually inventive scenes were spoiled by the trailer.
Here, Pattinson is 80% Batman, 20% Bruce Wayne, but 100% detective. It wouldn’t be difficult to imagine a CSI: Gotham that watched this film and ran with it. While the various Batman films have all had their procedural bits where Batman examines clues and comes to conclusions that reveal the next stage of some greater mystery, The Batman builds entirely on it. The film’s naturalistic look and feel makes all of its individual actions feel less cartoon-ish than even the Nolan films. There is no bank vault here or secret fantasy factory to churn out Batman's unique tools on-demand. Here, the caped crusader may as well be running around the film’s various crime scenes with a notepad jotting down clues. The trail that leads Batman to Paul Dano’s Riddler, the antagonist behind a series of serial murders, comprises the bulk of the film, tying together the film’s conspiracy of villains. You can even see the threads out to the inevitable sequels, of course you can, but I would love to see more of Colin Farrell’s Penguin chewing scenery, too.
But as the story progresses, I felt like Nolan’s Dark Knight was somehow being projected over this film. Zoë Kravitz’s Catwoman gets more Pfeiffer-esque respect than Hathaway got from Nolan in 2012. Watching Bruce Wayne entering the mobster Falcone’s den felt far too familiar after Bale did it for Nolan in 2005. Watching Batman cross one of Chicago’s unique drawbridges evoked Nolan’s action scenes from 2008. The film only visually spares us the death of Bruce Wayne’s parents by some random, mob-affiliated loner in a dark alley because it spends a ton of its run-time mentioning it in every other way.
There was some point, maybe a third of the way into this film, where I kept my eyes out for when the Reeves’ aesthetic seemed to wane and I was watching a Nolan film on new, shinier gaming hardware that sent my saves to the cloud automatically. It’s not just that it’s hard to pull off the dark gothic aesthetic for a full 3-hour film, it’s that both Reeves and Nolan decided that the urban world of this very contemporary moment is where Batman should exist, rather than the heightened surreality of Burton and Schumacher’s films. The only problem is that Nolan got to make his Batman films first.
The Riddler is a villain for our times as well. Avoiding spoilers as much as possible, the film banks on contemporary themes of classist inequality to establish an antagonist that becomes more and more relatable as the film marches on. And yet the film isn’t very interested in resolving the issues that created The Riddler, something Catwoman keeps nipping Batman about. “We’re fixing a symptom,” the film preaches, “we’re good.”
And that’s not to say I disliked The Batman. It was an enjoyable romp with plenty of understated humor. I’m familiar with, but haven’t seen any of director/co-writer Matt Reeves’ previous work (Cloverfield, those dark, James Franco-less Planet of the Apes films). I enjoyed Robert Pattinson in Cosmopolis and half of the Twilight films I’ve seen. Zoë Kravitz is incredible. Andy Serkis is a great Alfred. I wish Jeffrey Wright as Jim Gordon wasn’t asking Batman for answers immediately after a clue is given. The grisly detective work here is thoroughly engaging, as are Paul Dano’s erratic live streams that mimic the Joker’s snuff footage from The Dark Knight.
And still, I kept wondering how much better The Second Batman will be now that they’ve, yet again, established the series’ landmarks. This film grows as large as Nolan’s biggest film and yet it still feels like it’s set dressing and world-building for some elaborate super-sequel against a familiar villain. Would it ever be possible to put a new Batman on the silver screen without the fate of the entire Gotham City hanging in the balance like it does here… again? What is a new Batman movie with a smaller budget that puts things in a more intimate focus?
But why ask questions we don’t want the answers to? In The Monoculture of now, Batman is forever saving the world from familiar villains with graphics that look 50% better than last time. He will periodically get another charismatic actor to portray him and another visionary director to guide him. He will get a new Batmobile, that will not be called a Batmobile, to zoom him around. Alfred will be there, and so will Jim Gordon and some of those gangsters and probably the Joker. This is his cinematic fate and he can never escape it.
But maybe that’s not the worst way to go.
