I'm the goddamn Batman
There's no argument I can imagine that director Matt Reeves's The Batman, the first in what's undoubtedly meant to be a new ongoing series built around DC Comics' second-most iconic superhero, is "the best" Batman film to date. But I think no argument is necessary that it is "the most" Batman film, and I'm including here the ludicrous carnival bombast of both the three-hour version of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and the four-hour version of Justice League. At two hours and fifty-five minutes, The Batman isn't as long as either of those, though it is plenty fucking long, but that is not what I mean by "the most": I mean how extremely unrelenting the film is, spending all of that running time (or that running time minus the end credits scroll, close enough) at 100%, pounding away as the most over-the-top celebration of everything grim and moody and nocturnal and vicious about the version of the character popularised in the gloomy 1986 comic miniseries The Dark Knight Returns and all the subsequent works that have followed its lead.
I will confess immediately that I think The Batman would benefit from perhaps being a bit... less. The running time is an extreme problem for the film, which lets its twisty but not exactly "complicated" story develop at a slow crawl and adds an absolutely deadening finale of 30 minutes or more that picks up after the film has started buttoning up almost every one of its plotlines. So it is obliged to start a new one, and it's hacky, hokey comic book nonsense that might have been perfect in a much more playful film than this one. But a grandiose, indulgent running time isn't even the fatal problem here, necessarily, so much as how little variation the film has across that running time. This is monotonous, in the most denotative, objective, nonjudgmental way the word "monotonous" can be used: it has one tone. Ever since Christopher Nolan first plugged the character into a sober urban crime drama, Batman movies have been the most somber, unsmiling A-list comic book adaptations out there, but even so, this is a uniquely single-minded, mirthless experience. When The Dark Knight came out in 2008, it represented a new bar for how punishingly bleak a major audience-pleasing popcorn movie, but even that still has modulation: there's some sparkling dark humor (the pencil joke!) to go in with all the po-faced musing about the philosophy of vigilante crimefighting. The Batman is one thing, and it is that that thing hard for three hours.
This is, to be clear, different from saying that it's an unpleasant slog. One of the benefits of being so damn long and having so much muchness within it, The Batman can't help but hit some of the time. Even much of the time; even most of the time, arguably. Reeves has very clear designs on what he wants to do with this most well-worn of supeheroes, and I am pleased to find that, despite what the marketing folks at Warner Bros. have been trying to make it look like, that doesn't include just making a long-delayed fourth Nolan movie. Speaking strictly in terms of the narrative, Reeves & co-writer Peter Craig have very pointedly made this much more of a detective thriller than a superhero action movie; for the first time in his big-screen career (unless you want to count the 1993 animated feature Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, and honestly, I think it's fair if you do), Batman is actually obliged to investigate a mystery that doesn't immediately - doesn't ever - boil down to "here is the colorful psychopath who must be punched this time".
Specifically, Batman (Robert Pattinson), in his second year of crimefighting, is called in by Lt. Jim Gordon (Jeffrey Wright) to help with the ugly murder of Gotham City's mayor, perpetrated in a crime scene staged as a obvious and not-terribly-challenging puzzle. And the killer has even left a letter addressed "To the Batman", making it even clearer that he views this as a game to play with the caped crusader, far more than just a killing spree. And a spree it is, as this figure - who refers to himself, in one of the several crude videos he leaves behind, as "The Riddler" (Paul Dano) - starts killing his way through several of Gotham's city fathers. As Batman digs into this, he quickly realises that it's all related to the city's plague of police and governmental corruption, and somewhat less quickly realises that it's connected to the city's reigning mobster, Carmine Falcone (John Turturro), and realises last of all that the Riddler had a very different endgame in mind than just exposing some ne'er-do-wells in high places.
That's a bit of a cursory summary, but I don't know that The Batman needs much more than that; it's honestly a pretty straightforward tale, and for all the emphasis on Batman as a detective and not a warrior, most of the "investigation" consists of him solving an uncomplicated riddle and from that being given a new chunk of exposition from one of, like, a dozen different characters who already know the whole story before the film begins. But the story qua the story isn't really what The Batman is interested in. It's more about the plunge into a whirlpool of depravity and corruption that shakes the hero's conviction that there's any actual good to be done in the world. Basically, it's Se7en with superhero imagery, and that's certainly not the worst idea for what do with a comic book adaptation, though it's not an idea calculated to do a whole lot for me, personally.
The imagery, anyway, now that's what the film is interested in. Reeves is making a mood piece here, a neo-noir in which the ugliness of the story is mostly there to reinforce the deep shadows and dead urban spaces that are the real stars of the show. Even for Batman, this is a dark film: almost the first thing the hero says is "I am the shadows", and cinematographer Greig Fraser took that as a mission statement to fill the movie with inky silhouettes against washed-out skies that are invariably graded toward browns and bronzes, and huge swathes of underexposed murk. It's obvious, but the movie is never afraid of obviousness: it's going for a thick, pulp-fiction nihilism that is meant to be immediately graspable in the big, dramatic visual language of a comic book. And for the most part, it gets there: again, I don't know if it would have hurt the film to try some other visual strategies, or alternately, to try this one for about 70 fewer minutes. But on a frame-by-frame basis, The Batman looks unmistakably cool, even if those frames aren't all necessarily working together as cleanly as they might.
Somewhat less successfully, Fraser also tries out a very aggressive motif of shallow focus, and more specifically of rack focus from one shallow plane to another. Sometimes, this is very straightforward, directing our attention to specific objects. Much more frequently, it's not serving any apparent function at all, though I freely admit that's probably on me more than it's on the movie. I appreciate, very much, a modern studio tentpole - in the aesthetically dessicated superhero genre, no less! - that's doing something extravagant and weird with its visual style. But I'd have maybe liked it more if I knew what the hell Fraser and Reeves were up to.
Because, outside of that strange visual idiosyncrasy, The Batman is a powerfully focused movie. It's doing just about the only thing a filmmaker can still do with Batman at this point (save for take a big step back to Silver Age camp or Golden Age earnestness, and I would greatly welcome either of those approaches), which is to break apart what "Batman" means as a symbol within his world, and as a dominant pop culture figure in ours. The film has made two central choices, both of which it clearly marks out in dialogue: it sets this early in Batman's crime-fighting career, and it largely abandons the idea of Bruce Wayne as screen presence. Indeed, one could easily suggest that "Batman remembers that he needs to keep being Bruce Wayne or lose his soul altogether" is the main character arc of The Batman. But setting this in Year Two of Batman's career is probably the more productive choice, since what it allows Reeves and his action unit to do is to stage some very weird, off-book action setpieces. As long as Batman has fought on the big screen - scratch that, as long as Batman has fought on the big screen, and not in the paunchy middle-aged body of Adam West - his fight sequences have mostly demonstrated a level of brute force efficiency, sometimes mixed with the fluid deadliness of martial arts training. Here, he's actually a bit of a clumsy wreck much of the time, not flowing through the darkness as clodhopping through it like a tank in impenetrably thick and perhaps inflexible armor. He stumbles and falls, he thwacks into goons rather than neatly punching them. It leads to what are almost certainly the most interesting and fresh fight scenes in the history of Batman cinema - and not till now did it ever really strike me that these aren't particularly good action movies, mostly, notwithstanding the big car chase in The Dark Knight. Because The Batman actually is a good action movie, even a very good one: there are several very fine action setpieces and two actively great ones - an apocalyptic car chase, and a disorienting fistfight in a hallway light only by muzzle flashes.
Anyways, outside of the action, this is all a very glum, heavy look into how morbidly depressing it is to be the Batman. Some of it works extremely well, some of it frankly sucks a little bit, but all of it is bent around that thing. And I would hate to shortchange the parts that work well, such as the extraordinary Michael Giacchino score, an immediate contender for the best thing he's composed outside of his work with Pixar. It's certainly uncharacteristic, oriented around a devastatingly fatalistic four-note pattern - calling it a "motif" is almost too generous, it's barely even a melody - that plods along with extraordinary weight and scale (one of its first appearances is on chimes tuned low, echoing like the bell of a gloomy cathedral; it's not a trick Giacchino returns to, but it makes quite an impression). Everything about The Batman is heavy and much of it is downright airless, but the music gives it all of the imposing symphonic grandeur and drama that it needs to have the poppy energy of a comic book.
It's the foremost strength of a movie that honestly has very few identifiable "flaws"; it's more that at a certain point, it's hard not to feel ground into submission by just how ponderously self-aware the film is about the unsmiling grandiosity of the material. There are a lot of strengths, but they tend to repeat themselves and thereby lose some of their charm. In the case of the acting, we get a hell of a lot of people who are well-cast and doing very committed work that feels trapped by the thinness of every single character in the script: I am very excited to see more of Pattinson's Batman or Zoë Kravitz's Selina "Catwoman" Kyle, but what they did here is pretty drab and straightforward. The one exception is Colin Farrell's latex-clad Penguin, easily the film's brightest shining source of light; he's not afraid to go big and garish, trotting out a frankly alarming "Eyetalien-American Gangstuh" accent that somehow doesn't play as comic or even incongruous, and provides a beady-eyed, bellowing menace that is the closest this comes to feeling like a Batman comic.
But anyway, to tie together all of this sprawl (but it is such a sprawl of a movie, I apologise for nothing): the strengths are real, and they're very impressive. But the sheer volume of the film makes even the strengths feel like they're struggling to breathe in a thick fog. I appreciate that Reeves and company are trying to do something new with Batman, even if they're using some awfully familiar elements; I appreciate that nothing whatsoever about this film feels safe or market-tested, except that it clearly wants an R-rating and had to be good and earn a PG-13. But I would be lying to you if I said that I found the film as a whole all that watchable.
I will confess immediately that I think The Batman would benefit from perhaps being a bit... less. The running time is an extreme problem for the film, which lets its twisty but not exactly "complicated" story develop at a slow crawl and adds an absolutely deadening finale of 30 minutes or more that picks up after the film has started buttoning up almost every one of its plotlines. So it is obliged to start a new one, and it's hacky, hokey comic book nonsense that might have been perfect in a much more playful film than this one. But a grandiose, indulgent running time isn't even the fatal problem here, necessarily, so much as how little variation the film has across that running time. This is monotonous, in the most denotative, objective, nonjudgmental way the word "monotonous" can be used: it has one tone. Ever since Christopher Nolan first plugged the character into a sober urban crime drama, Batman movies have been the most somber, unsmiling A-list comic book adaptations out there, but even so, this is a uniquely single-minded, mirthless experience. When The Dark Knight came out in 2008, it represented a new bar for how punishingly bleak a major audience-pleasing popcorn movie, but even that still has modulation: there's some sparkling dark humor (the pencil joke!) to go in with all the po-faced musing about the philosophy of vigilante crimefighting. The Batman is one thing, and it is that that thing hard for three hours.
This is, to be clear, different from saying that it's an unpleasant slog. One of the benefits of being so damn long and having so much muchness within it, The Batman can't help but hit some of the time. Even much of the time; even most of the time, arguably. Reeves has very clear designs on what he wants to do with this most well-worn of supeheroes, and I am pleased to find that, despite what the marketing folks at Warner Bros. have been trying to make it look like, that doesn't include just making a long-delayed fourth Nolan movie. Speaking strictly in terms of the narrative, Reeves & co-writer Peter Craig have very pointedly made this much more of a detective thriller than a superhero action movie; for the first time in his big-screen career (unless you want to count the 1993 animated feature Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, and honestly, I think it's fair if you do), Batman is actually obliged to investigate a mystery that doesn't immediately - doesn't ever - boil down to "here is the colorful psychopath who must be punched this time".
Specifically, Batman (Robert Pattinson), in his second year of crimefighting, is called in by Lt. Jim Gordon (Jeffrey Wright) to help with the ugly murder of Gotham City's mayor, perpetrated in a crime scene staged as a obvious and not-terribly-challenging puzzle. And the killer has even left a letter addressed "To the Batman", making it even clearer that he views this as a game to play with the caped crusader, far more than just a killing spree. And a spree it is, as this figure - who refers to himself, in one of the several crude videos he leaves behind, as "The Riddler" (Paul Dano) - starts killing his way through several of Gotham's city fathers. As Batman digs into this, he quickly realises that it's all related to the city's plague of police and governmental corruption, and somewhat less quickly realises that it's connected to the city's reigning mobster, Carmine Falcone (John Turturro), and realises last of all that the Riddler had a very different endgame in mind than just exposing some ne'er-do-wells in high places.
That's a bit of a cursory summary, but I don't know that The Batman needs much more than that; it's honestly a pretty straightforward tale, and for all the emphasis on Batman as a detective and not a warrior, most of the "investigation" consists of him solving an uncomplicated riddle and from that being given a new chunk of exposition from one of, like, a dozen different characters who already know the whole story before the film begins. But the story qua the story isn't really what The Batman is interested in. It's more about the plunge into a whirlpool of depravity and corruption that shakes the hero's conviction that there's any actual good to be done in the world. Basically, it's Se7en with superhero imagery, and that's certainly not the worst idea for what do with a comic book adaptation, though it's not an idea calculated to do a whole lot for me, personally.
The imagery, anyway, now that's what the film is interested in. Reeves is making a mood piece here, a neo-noir in which the ugliness of the story is mostly there to reinforce the deep shadows and dead urban spaces that are the real stars of the show. Even for Batman, this is a dark film: almost the first thing the hero says is "I am the shadows", and cinematographer Greig Fraser took that as a mission statement to fill the movie with inky silhouettes against washed-out skies that are invariably graded toward browns and bronzes, and huge swathes of underexposed murk. It's obvious, but the movie is never afraid of obviousness: it's going for a thick, pulp-fiction nihilism that is meant to be immediately graspable in the big, dramatic visual language of a comic book. And for the most part, it gets there: again, I don't know if it would have hurt the film to try some other visual strategies, or alternately, to try this one for about 70 fewer minutes. But on a frame-by-frame basis, The Batman looks unmistakably cool, even if those frames aren't all necessarily working together as cleanly as they might.
Somewhat less successfully, Fraser also tries out a very aggressive motif of shallow focus, and more specifically of rack focus from one shallow plane to another. Sometimes, this is very straightforward, directing our attention to specific objects. Much more frequently, it's not serving any apparent function at all, though I freely admit that's probably on me more than it's on the movie. I appreciate, very much, a modern studio tentpole - in the aesthetically dessicated superhero genre, no less! - that's doing something extravagant and weird with its visual style. But I'd have maybe liked it more if I knew what the hell Fraser and Reeves were up to.
Because, outside of that strange visual idiosyncrasy, The Batman is a powerfully focused movie. It's doing just about the only thing a filmmaker can still do with Batman at this point (save for take a big step back to Silver Age camp or Golden Age earnestness, and I would greatly welcome either of those approaches), which is to break apart what "Batman" means as a symbol within his world, and as a dominant pop culture figure in ours. The film has made two central choices, both of which it clearly marks out in dialogue: it sets this early in Batman's crime-fighting career, and it largely abandons the idea of Bruce Wayne as screen presence. Indeed, one could easily suggest that "Batman remembers that he needs to keep being Bruce Wayne or lose his soul altogether" is the main character arc of The Batman. But setting this in Year Two of Batman's career is probably the more productive choice, since what it allows Reeves and his action unit to do is to stage some very weird, off-book action setpieces. As long as Batman has fought on the big screen - scratch that, as long as Batman has fought on the big screen, and not in the paunchy middle-aged body of Adam West - his fight sequences have mostly demonstrated a level of brute force efficiency, sometimes mixed with the fluid deadliness of martial arts training. Here, he's actually a bit of a clumsy wreck much of the time, not flowing through the darkness as clodhopping through it like a tank in impenetrably thick and perhaps inflexible armor. He stumbles and falls, he thwacks into goons rather than neatly punching them. It leads to what are almost certainly the most interesting and fresh fight scenes in the history of Batman cinema - and not till now did it ever really strike me that these aren't particularly good action movies, mostly, notwithstanding the big car chase in The Dark Knight. Because The Batman actually is a good action movie, even a very good one: there are several very fine action setpieces and two actively great ones - an apocalyptic car chase, and a disorienting fistfight in a hallway light only by muzzle flashes.
Anyways, outside of the action, this is all a very glum, heavy look into how morbidly depressing it is to be the Batman. Some of it works extremely well, some of it frankly sucks a little bit, but all of it is bent around that thing. And I would hate to shortchange the parts that work well, such as the extraordinary Michael Giacchino score, an immediate contender for the best thing he's composed outside of his work with Pixar. It's certainly uncharacteristic, oriented around a devastatingly fatalistic four-note pattern - calling it a "motif" is almost too generous, it's barely even a melody - that plods along with extraordinary weight and scale (one of its first appearances is on chimes tuned low, echoing like the bell of a gloomy cathedral; it's not a trick Giacchino returns to, but it makes quite an impression). Everything about The Batman is heavy and much of it is downright airless, but the music gives it all of the imposing symphonic grandeur and drama that it needs to have the poppy energy of a comic book.
It's the foremost strength of a movie that honestly has very few identifiable "flaws"; it's more that at a certain point, it's hard not to feel ground into submission by just how ponderously self-aware the film is about the unsmiling grandiosity of the material. There are a lot of strengths, but they tend to repeat themselves and thereby lose some of their charm. In the case of the acting, we get a hell of a lot of people who are well-cast and doing very committed work that feels trapped by the thinness of every single character in the script: I am very excited to see more of Pattinson's Batman or Zoë Kravitz's Selina "Catwoman" Kyle, but what they did here is pretty drab and straightforward. The one exception is Colin Farrell's latex-clad Penguin, easily the film's brightest shining source of light; he's not afraid to go big and garish, trotting out a frankly alarming "Eyetalien-American Gangstuh" accent that somehow doesn't play as comic or even incongruous, and provides a beady-eyed, bellowing menace that is the closest this comes to feeling like a Batman comic.
But anyway, to tie together all of this sprawl (but it is such a sprawl of a movie, I apologise for nothing): the strengths are real, and they're very impressive. But the sheer volume of the film makes even the strengths feel like they're struggling to breathe in a thick fog. I appreciate that Reeves and company are trying to do something new with Batman, even if they're using some awfully familiar elements; I appreciate that nothing whatsoever about this film feels safe or market-tested, except that it clearly wants an R-rating and had to be good and earn a PG-13. But I would be lying to you if I said that I found the film as a whole all that watchable.
