This is a relentlessly grim movie, all darkness and despair cinematographer Greig Fraser also shot Dune and Rogue One and Zero Dark Thirty, and the vibe, metaphorically and visually, is similar here. Of course he’s the Riddler, but I don’t think that name is mentioned even once.) Batman is a boogeyman, too, a specter haunting the lowlife villains of the city, the bat signal in the sky above the city a threat… and now that those murders are revealing the duplicity and dirty dealings of Gotham’s powerful and influential, it may be that he is beginning to haunt them, too. (Paul Dano plays the killer, though we don’t see his face until close to the end of the film.
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Reeves has dialed the awfulness of Gotham way the hell up, the city a cesspit of crime and corruption, and Bruce Wayne is a detective (as he is in some comic-book interpretations), attempting to solve a series of murders of prominent Gotham citizens by a killer who livestreams his crimes from behind a disturbing mask and leaves cryptic puzzles behind with the bodies he gruesomely destroys. (Zoë Kravitz’s excellent Selina Kyle is, like, not CATWOMAN, just a stealthy burglar who “has a thing for strays,” some of which are of the feline variety.) The cat and the bat… Nobody in The Batman knows they’re in a Batman movie, which is extremely refreshing. There’s no snark, no winking self-awareness, and - even given that there’s a guy running around in a caped bat suit - no sense of the spandex pantomime spectacle to which we’ve become accustomed. In fact, apart from a spectacular car-chase scene that makes you feel like you’ve never seen a car chase onscreen before, there’s little in the way of the usual blockbuster junk. We don’t get, thank goodness, one of those interminable 40-minute-long superhero battle sequences. The tweaks here? Director Matt Reeves ( War for the Planet of the Apes, Let Me In) - cowriting with Peter Craig ( 12 Strong, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2) - has dialed the comic-book action stuff way the hell down, certainly as compared to the genre onscreen in recent years. You can retell his story with tweaks here and there, and it can be a good retelling, but it can still leave you wondering why. But if Bruce Wayne/Batman is - and I don’t think this is too much of a stretch - our modern Hamlet, there’s only so much give in this cultural avatar and his milieu before he ceases to be him.
This is not to say that this isn’t a pretty good film, as craft and narrative go, or that the always intriguing Robert Pattinson ( Tenet, The Lost City of Z) doesn’t bring a fresh and even provocative take on the character. The Batman has a somewhat contentious relationship with the GCPD. So I mean: Does Batman have anything to say to us - as a culture - now that hasn’t already been said in recent years?Īnd The Batman’s answer is mostly no. I care about stories, and what the stories we tell say about us (while also acknowledging that what is popular also says something about us). Yes, I know Hollywood will do almost anything if it thinks it’ll make a buck, or a billion. I’m not asking this in the framework of the “Hollywood is a business!” shit that the fanboys love to remind me of when what makes money happens to coincide with what they idolize, or *ahem* how the entertainment-industrial complex has weaponized fandom as a function of late-stage-capitalism as we all grasp desperately for something to believe in while the world collapses around us. (We can count five actors and many more movies if we go back to Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman.) Did we need another? In just the past decade, two different actors have portrayed billionaire Bruce Wayne and his vigilante alter ego Batman in central roles on the big screen, in more than two films.