They think I’m hiding in the shadows. But I am the shadows.
I’ve been saying it for years: the problem with the Snyderverse is not that it’s dark. It was an easy narrative, especially given how the Marvel Cinematic Universe films are, superficially at least, brighter and lighter, both in tone and in color, jokier and sometimes downright silly. So, Snyder comes in with his ponderous take and it seems like, okay, the MCU movies are good and they’re fun and these are bad and they’re also really dark, so I guess they’re bad because they’re dark. But that’s never been it. It's been the self-seriousness, pompousness and, well, look, just bad writing. I feel like we’ve finally got the proof on that now that The Batman has arrived and it is, I would say, the darkest Batman movie yet, both tonally and visually. The palette is . . . inky. The tone is . . . kind of psychological horror meets serial-killer thriller. Michael Giacchino’s score is thunderous, repetitive and menacing. And yet it’s easily the best Batman film since The Dark Knight, a movie that’s almost fifteen years old now. It’s really the only Batman film, in my opinion, that I think is worthy of going up on the shelf next to The Dark Knight. It would be hard to say which is better, honestly, at least as far as I’m concerned.
Director Matt Reeves is a guy I like a lot. He’s good at turning genre pictures into movies that are more artful than they might be and at subverting things in a way that doesn’t feel as jarring as subversion often feels. I’m a big fan of his Planet of the Apes movies, particularly War for the Planet of the Apes, which seemed to tease the most epic film of the trilogy and then delivered a muted, stark movie that wasn’t really a war movie at all. This movie isn’t quite as subversive; it’s called The Batman and it’s about The Batman. I think this really has to be the least screen time Bruce Wayne has ever gotten in a Batman movie and even when Robert Pattinson’s Bruce Wayne is out of the cowl, he’s not putting on the usual front. He’s, you know, obviously still the tormented Batman. It’s a different take on Bruce, but I like it. Anyway, back to Reeves, he crafts a film that’s just crawling with atmosphere; his Gotham City is surely the best version we’ve ever seen on film, a beautiful neo-noir hellscape of corruption and darkness. Since I didn’t quite close the loop above, I’ll just do it here; Giacchino’s oppressive score is a big part of the movie’s brooding and threatening atmosphere. I think it’s one of his best scores, actually.
Look, I’m probably not saying anything new here, but, yes, I love the more detective oriented take on Batman. I love the relationship with Jim Gordon, an absolutely fantastic Jeffrey Wright. Turning the Riddler into a Zodiac style serial-killer is pretty inspired, honestly. As a fan of deep-cut villains (in more ways than one), I’ve always wanted a straight-up serial killer Batman movie with Victor Zsasz, but the more I thought about the Zodiac, the more I realized that the Riddler really works in that context. Zoe Kravitz is excellent as a bitter, angry Selina Kyle; down to both the writing and the performance, she is far and away my favorite incarnation of Catwoman. The film even manages to make the sexual tension between Batman and Catwoman work; it was kind of refreshing that Christopher Nolan kept the relationship totally platonic, until, you know, the last four minutes of the movie, because I think that relationship can be kind of cheesy and on the nose if you play it too straight. But this script and these performances nail it and Pattinson & Kravitz have actual sexuality here in a way that most comic book movie characters don’t. Paul Dano is very good as the Riddler as well. It’s, okay, it’s a broad performance. But so was Heath Ledger’s in The Dark Knight; I’m not saying Dano is on that level here, because he just isn’t, but he’s appropriately creepy and unsettling. Of the rest of the star-studded supporting cast, I think the one who deserves special mention is John Turturro as a weary, avuncular Carimine Falcone. It would be really easy for someone like Turturro to just come into a movie like this and just kind of coast and give us a standard gangster performance, but he doesn’t do that. He does something a lot more interesting, finding a quietness in Falcone that is a little tired and a little sad. But the classy veneer and even the actual human emotions Falcone demonstrates are still hiding real danger, the potential for real violence. The fact that there may be real affection for some people and real regret over bad things he’s done doesn’t mean that the way he deploys those things are any less manipulative. It’s a complex take on the character and I really responded to it.
The Batman is a movie with a few things on its mind. In many ways, it’s a movie about being an orphan and, while it’s hardly revolutionary for a movie about Batman to engage with those ideas, this film expands the theme out from Bruce Wayne himself to make us painfully aware of the orphanhood of both Selina Kyle and The Riddler. It’s also worth mentioning that the film opens with the murder of a father and the film is saying something, I think, in terms of the ways Bruce Wayne and the Riddler contextualize something as simple as another child losing a parent. Anyway, as I finish up here, does the movie have problems? I mean, I suppose. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that not everything is up to the absolutely perfect standards of the movie at its best. But I don’t know that those are problems. End of the day, it’s absolutely the Batman movie I’ve been waiting for ever since The Dark Knight; in some ways, it’s the Batman movie I wanted even before The Dark Knight in that it gets some things more right than The Dark Knight does. Like I say, my favorite of the two is probably going to shift based on which one of the two I’ve watched the most recently and I’m fine with that. All I really have to say at the moment is that The Batman is a masterpiece. 4 stars.
tl;dr – finally, a Batman movie worthy of standing next to The Dark Knight; atmospheric, scary, thrilling, a dark film noir detective story with great performances all around. 4 stars.