Moving Pictures: The Batman Review
By Mo Burford
Matt Reeve’s The Batman is, depending on how you count it, something like the 10th appearance of the dark knight on film. Entertaining and occasionally electric, it builds on the foundation of its predecessors while changing enough to stand out in a crowded pantheon.
The Movie is currently playing at Columbia Cinema in The Dalles.
This incarnation has all the dirt and grime and pain modern audiences might look for, but little of the pleasure, little of the exquisite joy of following the caped crusader’s quest for vengeance, justice and even normality. And while I have complained to friends of the gratingly high levels of campy quipping and arch acting in Batman and Robin, this time around I missed some of the playfulness that Batman movies have historically had in them. When you completely remove that element, you are left with something that feels, at worst, unpleasantly self-serious.
The Batman brings us back to Gotham—albeit a more squalid, rainy and corrupt version—where Batman (Robert Pattinson) is only in his second year as the caped crusader and finds himself squaring off against The Riddler (Paul Dano), The Penguin (Colin Farrell) and Carmine Falcone (John Turturro), with the aid of Jim Gordon (Jeffrey Wright), Catwoman (Zoë Kravitz) and his trusty butler Alfred (Andy Serkis).
In contrast to what may be lacking in tone, the film is confidently shot and well constructed, employing fun and flashy cinematography (courtesy of Grieg Fraser) which, at its best, leaves you holding your breath. And the action is some of the best and most practical looking I’ve seen in recent memory, both visceral and heart-pounding. The score, by Michael Giacchino, nicely accentuates the dread underlying much of the film.
While the cast is stacked with heavy hitters giving fine performances, it felt a little crowded, making it difficult for any performance, including Pattinson as Batman, to shine. Despite The Batman’s nearly three-hour runtime, the characters felt slightly underdeveloped, while their relationships to each other felt woefully neglected. I certainly don’t need to be told one more time Batman’s origin story, and I applaud the movie for recognizing that. I do, however, need to see the characters interacting on an emotional level. It was difficult to parse what Pattinson’s take on this Batman was besides melancholy.
The film is, however, extremely stylish. Matt Reeves—most notably of the Planet of the Apes reboot trilogy—presented a Batman film that felt for the most part practical and kinetic—a departure from the CGI-dominated Marvel films and other big DC franchises. The fights weren’t merely a series of fast cuts around punches. Instead, they were presented in wide shots that let the action play out while showing off the choreography. The movie also included certain hallmarks of the Batman universe that are always fun to see: the Batmobile is very cool; the Batsuit is very cool; the tech is very cool. Gotham is artfully rainy and grimy, while its interiors, when not industrial, are often gothic and intricately designed—differentiating this film from the art-deco style of Burton and the brutalist architecture of Nolan.
I’ve seen lots of critics touting The Batman as “noir” or “neo-noir” and, while the movie has some stunning uses of lighting, I struggled to categorize it as such. To be blunt, The Batman has no mystery in it—not the impenetrable mystery of something like The Big Sleep, nor the twisty red herrings of The Maltese Falcon—because the characters are constantly explaining to each other exactly what is happening in long sequences of exposition every few scenes.
This means I, as a viewer, never felt a single second of not knowing. That feeling of mystery can be one of the great joys of cinema! I view this as one of the film’s larger flaws—and a flaw of most major superhero/franchise filmmaking: the constant use of exposition in dialogue to explain to the viewer exactly what is happening at all times, rather than showing us and trusting our ability to follow along.
The film does, however, indulge in noir’s pessimism, with its view that all systems and most folks are, at their core, rotten. This can be used to great effect in noir, but in the context of a three-hour Batman movie, it felt a bit deflating.
But I have hopes for the inevitable sequel. This movie felt a lot like the first book in a series: laying the groundwork, building out the world, introducing the key players; it also suffered some of the bloat and drag that sometimes comes with that work. My hope is that the next installment in the series will really find its legs and utilize the world it's already created to more satisfying and fun ends — not unlike what Reeves did moving from Dawn of the Planet of the Apes to Rise of the Planet of the Apes.
It’s hard, if not impossible, not to compare Batman movies. My friends and I seem to be able to endlessly parse and compare the films. And so it feels worth it to put my cards on the table as a reviewer. For me, there is no better Batman movie than Christoper Nolan’s The Dark Knight. But to be perfectly honest —a nd true to my childhood self — I also really love Tim Burton’s Batman Returns. It’s so weird! (Also, The Lego Batman Movie is way better than it has any business being.) Where will The Batman stack up when I talk to my friends? I think it’s too early to say, but my guess is somewhere in the middle, never reaching the heights of the best but nowhere near the worst.
Ultimately, I couldn’t shake the feeling that we’d seen all this before again and again, while the parts we hadn’t seen were so dour that it was hard to get excited about them. Batman is prickly and dour, Catwoman is prickly and dour, Alfred is prickly and dour, The Penguin was prickly and dour and The Riddler was an internet troll/domestic terrorist. And while at first, I was glad not to have Arnold Schwarzenegger as Mr. Freeze skating by quipping, “Ice to meet you,” by the end, honestly, I wouldn’t have minded.
All that being said, I had a good time. And really, any day you get to watch a Batman movie is a pretty good day.
★ ★ ★ 1/2
(Three and a half stars out of five)
The Batman is now showing at Columbia Cinema in The Dalles, Hood River Cinema, and the Skylight Theatre.
Questions, comments, movie suggestions? Email Mo at movingpicturesccc@gmail.com
For more reviews and to see his up-to-date movie log, follow Mo at Letterboxd
