THE BATMAN is Not the Greatest Comic Book Movie of All Time, But It Is Still Very Good
Equal parts dully derivative, yet also emphatically exceptional, Matt Reeves’s ultra-noirish take on the Caped Crusader is a mixed bag, but ultimately a worthwhile and captivating experience.
“They think I’m hiding in the shadows. But I am the shadows.”
Rorschach’s Journal: March 29th, 2022.
This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face. The streets are extended gutters, and the gutters are full of blood, and oh, I almost forgot to mention: Bruce Wayne in The Batman totally stole my schtick!
Observe! An opening hardboiled voiceover narration of a journal entry riddled with misanthropy and nihilism, written and told in a gravelly moody voice, by a violent vigilante stalking the streets of a corrupted, crime-ridden city?
That’s my thing!
(And maybe also Travis Bickle’s thing, but still…!)
***
Okay, but for real. Now that the Rorschach bit is done, what do I (as in me, as in Jack, the author) actually think about Matt Reeves’s The Batman?
To be honest, I have somewhat more mixed feelings about it than I expected to. It’s maybe the kind of stuff that a second viewing would smooth out, knowing ahead of time where everything’s leading, and what the movie’s going for.
Visually, it’s outstanding, with Greig Fraser’s incredible cinematography putting to shame the likes of many other comic book movies of the past decade, be they Marvel movies (including, but not limited to, the recent CGI-overdriven Black Widow and Shang-Chi), or even certain other DC films (the predominant example being Joss Whedon’s grossly bastardised theatrical version of Zack Snyder’s Justice League).
This isn’t just because of Fraser and Reeves’s usage of highly stylised contrasty darkness in the lighting, nor the expressionistic toying with spatial depth of the image, the bokeh blur in the depth of field, and the colour scheme primarily beholden to moody shades of red and black, which not only harkens back to their work on the underrated Let Me In, but is also quite befitting the visualisation of the psychological state of this new darkest of Dark Knights.
No, it’s because rather than everything we see being a constant barrage of blatantly obvious green-screen scenes, where actors are unconvincingly composited atop fake CGI backgrounds with mismatched lighting between the two elements, all of which are cobbled together by overworked, underpaid, non-unionised VFX artists being exploited and ground through the gears of the uncaring capitalist machine of the corporate studio overlords…
…instead, so much of Fraser’s work here looks, feels, and mostly is grittily tactile and real. Yet crucially, whenever anything may very well have not been real, his and Reeves’s usage of The Volume — the real-time animated background technology Fraser developed for The Mandalorian, and also used on Denis Villeneuve’s Dune — makes the actors and the backgrounds look seamlessly of a part within the atmosphere of the scene, as opposed to the aforementioned annoying recurring trend of many blockbusters nowadays over-relying on blue- and green-screens so much, that perilously little of what we see looks or feels totally photorealistic, let alone authentic.
Meanwhile, Michael Giacchino’s monumental score is of course GOD TIER, though I’d expect nothing less from him. Utilising an ensemble of sparse electronic flourishes, solo harps, piano, tolling bells, thunderous drums, metallic percussion (sounding as though they were perhaps made with the airplane parts he used as instruments in his scores for Lost?), rousing strings, booming brass, and even a small touch of a Morricone-esque electric guitar twang to occasionally give this Batman a bit of a Man With No Name/avenging cowboy mystique — (which is bolstered by the film’s sound design repeatedly giving Batman’s boots almost the sound of spurs spinning with every colossal, rain-soaked step he takes) — Giacchino’s score is appropriately brooding, nocturnal, methodical, melancholy, terrifying, and pitch perfect.
Also of note:
Having seen that Giacchino deliberately interpolated ‘Ave Maria’ into his theme for Paul Dano’s Riddler (as it’s a song significant to his character) by transposing the melody from its original uplifting major key, to a new unsettling minor key, I am now of the belief that his theme for Bruce/Batman similarly interpolates a song significant to Bruce’s character, which is Nirvana’s ‘Something In The Way’. It appears twice in the film, both diegetically and non-diegetically, and before that it was famously used in the first trailer that was released back in 2020, where Nirvana’s song, and Giacchino’s Batman theme, were seamlessly intertwined with one another. Back then, I thought it was just a clever music remix idea on the trailer company’s part; now I wonder if the two songs meshed so well together because Giacchino’s Batman theme was always inextricably sourced from the very fabric of ‘Something In The Way’s composition, just as ‘Ave Maria’ was so integral to The Riddler’s theme.
But I digress.
Robert Pattinson brings an energy to Bruce Wayne and Batman that I’ve not seen before with the character. There’s a duality to him that goes deeper than just the obvious Bruce Wayne/Batman dichotomy inherent to his persona.
One side of him is an intensely grungy emo-haired sad boy, whose smudged black eye makeup — which he dons whenever he puts on his cowl — makes him look like The Crow.
But another side, that Pattinson imbues his Bruce with, is the energy of an emotionally stunted, deeply broken man, who at his most fearful, when you look into his eyes, you can see the frightened child who witnessed the murder of his parents, and is terrified of ever losing anyone like that ever again.
His is a Batman in his infancy, and that wiry, naive youthfulness justifies the overall existence of this umpteenth version of the world’s greatest detective, adding something rather unusual, and moving, to the character’s dynamic that hasn’t been seen a million times on screen before.
Additionally, thanks to the presence of Zoë Kravitz’s Selina Kyle/Catwoman acting as that character’s typically alluring self towards Batman, the film even dedicates some time to colour in this reclusive, non-playboy-alter-ego-sporting version of Bruce Wayne with shades of mildly pervy voyeurism, deeply repressed desire, and a smidge of kinky obsession. It’s all within the bounds of its PG-13 rating, so it’s not as if it can go, like, full Brian De Palma or Paul Verhoeven with it, but even so… well, I don’t know about you, but it’s been a hot minute since I can recall seeing a major tentpole blockbuster comic book movie lavish so much attention on long leather thigh-high kinky boots (no, not the film, nor the musical) as a recurring piece of costumery that reflects a main character’s infatuation with their love interest.
On the flipside, we then have our major antagonist of the plot, who comes in the petrifying form of Paul Dano’s Riddler. His take on the character is an ingenious spin on his comic counterpart’s penchant for puzzles, puns, and pop quizzes, turning those traits into their logical darkest endpoint of being the calling card of an elaborate, baroque, police-taunting, galaxy-brained serial killer, of the sort that’s populated every form of dark crime thriller for the past several decades.
As you’d expect from an actor as consistently brilliant as Paul Dano, his Riddler is often legitimately scary. From the very first startling shot that introduces him in true chilling horror movie fashion, he is monumentally unnerving. As a mouth-breathing maniac in a mask, he evokes Michael Myers, and as a brutally violent, faceless killer whose eyes behind the mask are over-widened by madness, he evokes The Phantom from The Town That Dreaded Sundown. In his mannerisms, his voice, his motives, his execution of his grand scheme, and in how much horrible empathetic understanding you come to have for why he does what he does, Dano’s Riddler is unforgettable, and electrifying to watch.
And that’s even in spite of his various video messages being majorly derivative of Heath Ledger’s Joker’s much more genuinely disturbing videos in The Dark Knight, the similarities of which I found kind of distracting. I mean… grainy handheld videos held up close to the villain’s face, as he holds someone captive in an anonymous room, alternating between talking in creepy sing-song-y tones, and growly guttural shouting, before threatening the city of Gotham with further killings if he doesn’t get what he wants, which everyone in the city sees because he sent these videos to the news? Sounds a little too familiar, no?
And ay, there’s the rub!
Because there is just so much in the plot of The Batman that I’ve seen before, with the only new thing being the Batman re-skin overlaid atop the tropes it’s trading in.
If Joker was basically The King of Comedy garbed in DC Comics mythos, then The Batman is every serial killer horror, psychological crime thriller, and high-concept police procedural you’ve ever seen, with only the addition of DC Comics characters and lore to differentiate it.
David Fincher practically ought to have a co-director credit with Reeves, seeing as The Batman’s atmosphere, style, tone, story, and multiple entire scenes, are virtually identical to numerous films in Fincher’s filmography, namely — as has been noted in a million and one other reviews — the likes of Se7en, Zodiac, and maybe even also The Game, considering The Riddler’s presence herein.
(e.g. That one scene in Se7en, when Morgan Freeman is gravely reading aloud from the disturbed rants and ramblings within one of the killer’s innumerable notebooks, feels almost copied whole-cloth by a scene with Jeffrey Wright’s not-yet-Commissioner James Gordon.)
Plus, there are the parts that feel completely cribbed from the likes of Chinatown, the Saw movies, Zack Snyder’s Watchmen, and any number of film noirs, mob films, and crime sagas in existence.
(If they had kept in that 5 minute deleted scene Warner Brothers released online, featuring the quote-unquote “Unseen Arkham Inmate,” then you could easily also add Manhunter/Red Dragon/Silence of the Lambs to the list.)
I also initially found The Batman’s tone to be overly somber, humourless, and moribund. Kind of insisting itself of its own importance. Like, the way that the Riddler always communicates in wordplay and puns through his murderous tableaus? It’s patently, objectively absurd, but the film treats it with such a deadly weight and gravitas, that the absurdity can’t quite meet it halfway. It never once winks to the audience about it, or has the characters lampshade its ridiculousness, which makes it all come across like… god, I dread to even compare it to this, but… like an SNL skit of itself, where the po-faced self-seriousness is part of the joke. Or like taking the script for the 1960's-era Adam West Batman: The Movie, keeping all of the Riddler’s riddles and puns the same, but slapping a moody horror movie filter on the image, and putting some spooky horror movie music underneath it to try and change the tone, only The Batman does this non-satirically.
For days and days, I struggled to put my finger on what this reminded me of.
Is it like Riverdale turning a fun teen comedy comic strip into a dark and moody murder mystery? Not really, because Riverdale is still aggressively camp, and knowingly preposterous, but also inconsistent with its own in-universe rules (because last I heard, some of the ensemble protagonists have superpowers now?!), and nobody writing for it seems to care about it being good or not, whereas a lot of love and care clearly went into The Batman’s conception and execution.
Is it like that episode of Community, where the attacks of the Ass Crack Bandit are treated like a serial killer spree in a gritty, desaturated NBC crime drama? Sort of, but also not exactly, because Community did that for comedic purposes intentionally.
Is it like the Black Mirror episode Hated in the Nation, which took a very silly premise — (i.e. swarms of killer robot bees get controlled by unwitting swarms of social media hate campaigns targeting people to cancel and kill) — and stretched it out into a dour, feature-length mystery drama that aimed for feeling like some epic Greek tragedy, but was just too ludicrous for anyone to take it seriously? It’s not too far off, though I do think The Batman is a lot more successful, and enjoyable, than Hated in the Nation.
Or is it (god help me) like that film The Snowman (2017), where the serial killer uses snowmen as his calling card, and it’s so absurd it’s hilarious, but the film treats it as if it’s the most grimly horrifying thing the characters and the audience have ever seen, which makes everything feel sillier than the film intended?
That comparison feels the closest to hitting the nail on the head, I think. But don’t get me wrong, The Batman is still an infinitely better movie than that dumpster fire.
(Funnily enough, it only occurred to me several days after coming to that conclusion that there’s an irony to my comparison between The Batman and The Snowman, what with the latter being directed by Tomas Alfredson, who most famously directed Let The Right One In, which Reeves then later remade into Let Me In. Talk about full circle!)
A BIG COROLLARY TO ALL THIS CRITICISM:
On the day I saw the film, I may have been in an off mood, because I had both gone to a job interview earlier in the day, and been quickly rejected within 5 hours of the interview, and this was the second time in two days in a row that this had happened with two different jobs. Soooooo… I might have been in a somewhat saltier state of mind than usual. You might even say I was saltier than the Dead Sea. And thus, that latent cynicism may have negatively impacted my view of the film. Which is another reason why I need to see it again to fully determine my feelings about it, because I suspect they’d perhaps be more positive the second time round.
Plus, the ideological underpinnings that coalesce by the end of the film hilariously confuse and anger that prattling political pipsqueak Ben Shapiro to a hysterical degree not seen since he infamously went off on one about ‘WAP’ (a.k.a. “Wet Ass P-word”), so any film that makes him lose his mind, and unmask his fundamentally close-minded idiocy like that, has got to be more good than bad.
And though it’s nearly 3 hours long, the runtime of The Batman feels like it just flies by. It may take its time with its pacing, but it never feels like it’s dragging its heels unnecessarily. There’s nothing that feels like you could cut it out, and not miss it. It’s a sprawling pulpy crime epic, with the onus placed on detective work, hunting for clues, putting pieces of a fragmented puzzle together, and doing it all at just the right speed for the solutions to feel earned.
Even better are its thematic overtones of interrogating what the existence of Batman means for Gotham City, what the character represents as a symbol to others, and what Bruce’s avenging alter ego means to himself. It’s the kind of film that I think would piss off the same people who hated The Last Jedi for deconstructing and recontextualising the Jedi order, the human fallibility of Luke Skywalker, the entire infrastructure of the Star Wars universe, the ideas of who can and can’t be a hero, and examining the various moral complexities and ambiguities that often went unaddressed in the franchise before that point.
All in all, I like more about The Batman than I don’t, and that’s more than good enough for me.
Originally published on Letterboxd.com.
