![]() While Reeves’s style and color palette are different from Nolan’s, he’s equally interested in the Miller-derived idea of the city as psychic protagonist, with lots of earnest monologuing about whether such a corroded urban landscape is worth saving, or if a self-styled crime fighter is just wasting his time. Miller’s vision of a Gotham City buckling under Reagan-era anxieties-nuclear proliferation, inner-city crime, encroaching spiritual malaise-remains deeply influential, even after Tim Burton’s gothic, expressionist Gotham. “Two years of nights,” he grumbles in voice-over sounding (purposefully) like Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle or the Rorschach of Alan Moore’s 1986 graphic novel Watchmen. ![]() In this version, Batman is less authentically world-weary than prematurely burned out-a nice Gen Z spin on the archetype. Miller’s 1987 DC comics arc Batman: Year One is an obvious inspiration for Reeves and Peter Craig’s screenplay, which makes it clear that Pattinson’s incarnation is still just experimenting with his nocturnal alter ego. And when Batman emerges from the shadows to pummel some face-painted gangbangers, the bleak imagery evokes vintage Frank Miller. When Robert Pattinson’s Batman stalks through the bloody crime scene at the mayor’s apartment, staring down the cops lining his path, the effect is pure pulp friction-a kind of vivid, scummy immediacy. We’ve seen it all before, but not usually with such a patient, arresting sense of confidence. There’s a crime-riddled Gotham crisscrossed by low-level mobsters the title character smacking down street-level hoods during his nightly rounds and a police force resentful of the vigilante in their midst. The tension, then, is between a filmmaker who specializes in disequilibrium tackling material that’s almost ritualistically familiar.įor the first 45 minutes, The Batman does a beautiful job of giving us the beats that we expect, tricked up just enough to seem fresh. Reeves isn’t above show-offy camerawork, but it’s less to impart his own sense of control than to keep the audience off balance. Or the terrifying car-crash scene in his remake of Let Me In, which unfolds with the camera as a hapless backseat passenger, looking on unblinkingly as the world turns upside down. Think of the excellent first half of Cloverfield, with its anxious first-person perspective on an impending apocalypse. Paranoia is in Reeves’s wheelhouse at his best, he’s a fluid, moody virtuoso. ![]() ‘The Batman’ Exit Survey The Five Biggest Takeaways From ‘The Batman’ ‘The Batman’ Is Unlike Any Superhero Movie Before It When the owner of the original POV shot suddenly materializes in the shadows behind the mayor and dispatches him with a blunt instrument to the head, the effect is genuinely unsettling. Reeves, though, uses the visual vocabulary of a slasher movie for all it’s worth. The actors were having too much fun, and the over-cranked psychological intensity was subordinate to spectacle. Nolan’s Dark Knight movies were grim and melodramatic and full of brutal, sadistic acts of violence, but they were never scary. As the sequence goes on, stitching us in complicity into an act of surveillance and then cutting stealthily into the home of Gotham’s embattled mayor (Rupert Penry-Jones), there’s a sense of dread that feels new and strangely alien compared to other iterations of the franchise. Shades, definitely, of Dirty Harry and its all-seeing sociopathic sniper, or maybe The Silence of the Lambs’ Buffalo Bill. It’s just good enough to wish it were better-a lavish piece of intellectual property that ultimately prices itself out of providing cheap thrills.ĭirected by Matt Reeves, The Batman begins like an exploitation movie, with a voyeuristic, quasi-Hitchcockian point-of-view shot seen through high-powered telescopic goggles-heavy breathing on the soundtrack and a family in the crosshairs. The Batman is the Batman movie we deserve, though: overwrought and overlong, but also carefully crafted and exhilarating. Maybe if Christian Bale’s climactic self-sacrifice at the end of The Dark Knight Rises had hit a little bit harder, without the winking, now-you-see-him-now-you-don’t resurrection engineered by Christopher Nolan (still prestige-ing after all these years) maybe if we hadn’t had Ben Affleck glowering through various Snyder cuts like the human embodiment of a contractual obligation. That’s because we didn’t need another Batman movie. ![]() The Batman is not the Batman movie we need.
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