Film Review: The Batman
Matt Reeves’ The Batman is an invigorating balm for superhero fatigue
Within the glut of modern superhero fiction on the big screen, Matt Reeves’ The Batman is a stylish, revitalizing tonic. A coming-of-age story grafted onto a pitch-black noir, the film plants the seeds for The World’s Greatest Detective and strikes at the beating hearts of Batman, the Waynes, and Gotham City. Under a slowly unspooling mystery and a bevy of comic book influences, Reeves launches the Caped Crusader back into the limelight of his own franchise, delivering a new, definitive Batman mythos. Robert Pattinson and Zoë Kravitz shine. Minor spoilers ahead…
Over the last 30-plus years, Batman has been a stalwart constant of pop, comic book cinema. With Tim Burton’s gothic crusader, Joel Schumacher’s camp protector, Christopher Nolan’s grounded vigilante, and Zack Snyder’s vicious brawler, new big screen iterations of the Dark Knight have never been absent from the zeitgeist for too long. But with those flips of the page also comes a peculiar phenomenon that - out of the countless superheroes that have been adapted to film - seemingly only affects Batman: He is a hero that has increasingly become a passenger within his own franchise. Whether it’s sharing the room with the Justice League or being upstaged by a Heath Ledger performance for the ages, Batman movies are rarely about Batman anymore. Who can blame them? It’s no secret that Batman’s colorful rogues gallery has much more allure than Martha Wayne’s pearls spilling - yet again - onto the pavement. After all, it’s the role of The Joker that nabbed two Academy Awards almost within a decade of each other.
Enter Matt Reeves’ The Batman, a sprawling re-centering of the Dark Knight mythos within the framework of a conspiracy noir. Examining a greener vigilante fighting for the soul of his city, The Batman dives deep into the Caped Crusader’s psyche, the Wayne legacy, and the muck of Gotham City. Taking place in the second year of Bruce Wayne’s (Robert Pattinson) nighttime operations, the film pits Batman against The Riddler (Paul Dano), a brutally clever serial killer targeting the city’s corrupt elite and teasing out a massive coverup that reaches down to the very foundations of Gotham. It’s the perfect backdrop for a revitalized Batman-centric narrative, digging right into the character’s core in a way that hasn’t been seen since 1993’s masterful Mask of the Phantasm. The Batman finds its hero grappling with his thirst for vengeance and his seemingly ineffectual fists, coming to terms with that fact that the problems of Gotham City can’t possibly solved with beatdowns alone.
“It’s the perfect backdrop for a revitalized hero-centric narrative, digging right into Bruce Wayne’s core in a way that hasn’t been seen since 1993’s masterful Mask of the Phantasm.”
Occupying a middle space between Nolan’s grounded realism and Snyder’s bombastic arena of gods, The Batman draws inspiration from a deep library of comics. With a palette consisting of - but not limited to - Year Two, Broken City, The Long Halloween, and Dark Victory, Reeves paints a grotesquely alluring portrait of Gotham City, a grimy hellscape perpetually on the cusp of dawn. It might be trifling to call a city a character of its own, but not since Burton’s Batman and Batman Returns has Gotham felt so alive. In production designer James Chinlund’s hands, Reeves’ Gotham City rises above its Liverpool and London stand-ins, pulsating with its own gothic architecture and hopeless rhythms amidst The Riddler’s chaos.
With the villain’s sanguine tableaus and confounding ciphers, many will aptly compare The Batman to David Fincher’s dark, serial killer oeuvre of Seven and Zodiac, but the film is thematically closer to Roman Polanski’s Chinatown or Alan J. Pakula’s Klute: a grim treatise on corruption and the intractability of crime. At its center? The Wayne family. Reeves - along with screenwriter Peter Craig (The Town, Bad Boys for Life) - wisely excises the ubiquitous Thomas and Martha murders, but centers their legacy as a point of pathos for Pattinson’s soulfully brooding Bruce Wayne. The Batman aims to deconstruct the saintly image of Bruce’s parents through the tendrils of Gotham’s corruption, pulling a comics-faithful wrinkle that has since become Batman canon: Not even the city’s best can escape its crooked seduction and its criminal temptation.
“The Batman is a grand mosaic of interlocking pieces that fit together as a refreshing antidote to superhero fatigue.”
At times lumbering with its unwieldy three-hour runtime, The Batman runs on its engine of characters that all ignite around Pattinson’s Batman. Effortlessly switching from terrifying, to naive, to introspective, Pattinson shares easy chemistry with a who’s who of Batman lore, whether its Jim Gordon (Jeffrey Wright), Carmine Falcone (John Turturro), or Oswald Cobblepot (Colin Farrell, having the time of his life). Paul Dano’s The Riddler isn’t the propulsive dynamite that was Heath Ledger’s Joker - a tall order and an unfair comparison to the best the Batman franchise has to offer - but he’s formidable in his own right. A sympathetic, cerebral bogeyman whose fiendish and sadistic murders are contrasted with a righteous crusade against the corrupt, The Riddler and his increasingly unhinged presence act as a fitting centerpiece for a story about The World’s Greatest Detective. In the end, however, its Zoë Kravitz’s Selina Kyle who steals the show: The Batman simply crackles when Kyle’s morally ambiguous cat burglar saunters onto the screen, counterbalancing an ominous mood with a fleet, dangerous charisma.
The Batman is also - excuse the hyperbole - hands-down the best-looking Batman movie. Corking out another visual feast after last year’s Dune, director of photography Greig Fraser once again demonstrates his mastery of light and dark, motion and stillness: The Batman is a film bathed in the shadows, but it’s never muddy or incomprehensible, and it stands head and shoulders above your standard superhero fare. Gone are the drab colors and weightless CGI; The Batman lives and breathes with its meticulous compositions and breathtaking kineticism. Every frame is a painting. And reverberating beneath it all? Michael Giacchino’s incredible score. Many will be humming The Batman’s simple, rhythmic main theme, but dig beneath the surface and you’ll find Giacchino’s gorgeous handling of variations and throughlines. From The Riddler’s haunting “Ave Maria” leitmotif to Catwoman’s slinky, noir-inspired suite, the sounds of The Batman are instantly iconic.
The Batman is a grand mosaic of interlocking pieces that fit together as a refreshing antidote to superhero fatigue. It’s a noir epic that immediately jolts free from its other caped contemporaries, featuring dazzling and stylish set pieces that aren’t the main attraction, but a product of its dark, arresting drama. Slipping the coils of what came before into the detective story from the comics we’ve been waiting to see, The Batman feels paradoxically new and old, energizing and vintage, and like something superhero filmmaking hasn’t been in a long time: a full-on cinematic meal.
