The Batman (2022)

I'm a 6 at best. It's so damn tired, that whole Batman thing has been used too many times to have any novelty. It's "solid", in terms of acting and production and FX, but just how many times can this genre possibly be worth doing again. And again. And again.

The movie is more than good, but I don't get any vibe that it's a Batman movie. Just some ordinary good thriller movie.

Yeah. I couldn't quite put my finger on it but this is pretty accurate. In attempting to edge away from so many previous incarnations (and really, who can blame him for at least wanting to?) Reeves might have lost sight of the core construct. It's a delicate balancing act but like I said before, kudoes to him for trying.

Edge away?. Isn’t Batman supposed to be a detective of sorts?.

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I didn’t like this all that much to be honest.

I’m gonna see it again obviously, because it wouldn’t be the first time my thoughts of a popular movie was lower and then raised on a rewatch…

Yeah, I'm not arguing that point. It's just the way the franchise has played out. I remember watching the old TV show with Adam West and that one had Bruce Wayne down in his bat-lab with his bubbling beakers and whatnot trying to solve the bad guy du jour's nefarious scheme. Keaton sort of continued it. But then Schumacher went full on whatever the **** that was. Then Nolan introduced some realism.

But as far as nuts and bolts detective work there hadn't been anything like the comic's iteration. Maybe the animated series but that was about it.

Right now I'm waffling on it. I'll watch it again and probably end up liking it more.

Or full on hating it.

This was more like an episode of Law & Order than anything resembling the previous entries in the franchise. That might sound like a put down but it's not meant as one.

Yeah, I wasn't a huge fan of the movie but I did think it was arguably the best portrayal of the way I think of Batman after reading a few hundred Batman comics since the 1970s.

It’s hard to ask this without sounding condescending, but have you read any of the famous runs of the Batman comics? Stuff by Miller, Loeb, Brubaker or Snyder (Scott not Zack)?

Spoilers ahead



Managed to get this in over the past two nights. The chance of me watching an entire 3 hour film straight through right now is pretty much nil, so I will take a two-sitting viewing as the small victory it is!

There is much to like about this film. For those of us that enjoy the crime-solving detective aspect of the character, this film ventures about as far into that territory as possible without abdicating its superhero foundations. When considering the entirety of Batman's rogues gallery, The Riddler is probably the best fit for a story of this nature, and the filmmakers exercise this to its full extent for much of the run time.

Really, for the first half of the film, The Batman plays more like a police procedural that just happens to have some weirdo in a bat suit hanging around. This oddity aside, this is easily the stronger half of the film. It's focused, tightly directed, and features plenty of sleuthing, all couched in stylized, gritty Mise en Scene. The director clearly had a vision when he set out to make this film, and for the most part, it delivers in spades. If the director had maintained this clarity of vision, shortened his film by 45 minutes, and trimmed out some of the problems introduced in the second half, this would easily have been ne of the best, if not maybe the best Batman film to date.

Alas, it was not to be.

The choice to introduce an additional antagonist alongside The Riddler stuff made a certain amount of sense only when considering the half-baked political messaging that gets introduced at the mid-point. It just wasn't handled very well. More so, by attaching yet another on-again-off-again antagonist in The Penguin, the story unravels, becoming convoluted as the director throws too many balls in the air, which eventually all come tumbling down around him. The choice to develop a side narrative about Catwoman and Falcone, instead of spending time fleshing out The Riddler, was a critical error. It bogged the film down, hamstrung the pacing, and lost much of the momentum that had been building in the first half. Much of this was in service to political commentary that was destined to fail from the outset.

Batman movies are inherently hyper-real, and the more the proceedings are pushed into realism, the more realistic light that is shown upon the main character, the less entertaining he, and in turn the film, becomes. When you strip all the superhero fantasy stuff away, you are left with an emotionally damaged fetishist with questionable motives and even more questionable methods. While interesting to think about, there is a tipping point at which all the fun falls away, and the character is just a bummer, and even a bit creepy and off-putting. Perhaps this enhances the character for some, but for myself, at least lately, this is not the case. There is such a thing as being too post-modern, and perhaps we crossed that line with Batman a few films back. At this point, I think a deconstruction of Batman only exposes the absudity of both superheroes and Batman himself.

Look, either Batman and the Wayne family are bad people, or we are here for the punching and gadgets - trying to do both doesn't really work. This is frustrating, because the film does so much right when it stays in the lines that make Batman work. Even when it colors outside the lines, it doesn't understand the picture it is trying to create. A film with such measured attention to detail during its first half is just plain off the rails when it randomly tacks on an attempted shooting of a politician by a suddenly-supposed-to-be-relevant group of chat room gun nuts. Bullets bounce of Batman earlier in the film, then all of a sudden he gets shot and falls off a scaffolding, just so Catwoman can save him. Thomas Wayne is a terrible person because he is rich, then he isn't, because apparently his idea was good until he died and then evil men corrupted his work.

I have seen accusations of this being a woke Batman film, but, aside from one or two obvious and annoying lines about "white privilege," I don't think a film about Batman can really be woke, so I disagree. If anything, it's a film that cuts clean, sculpted lines for half its runtime, only to become obscured by rickety political scaffolding that is erected during the later acts. Does it destroy the work? I don't think so. But the enjoyment I felt during the first half of the film was certainly diminished quite a bit, at least for this viewer.

The performances are fine, for the most part, and I enjoyed Pattinson's Batman, but maybe his Bruce Wayne not quite as much. Still good, though. I think he is a fine actor.

Final rating for The Batman:

Too long, and becomes convoluted in the second half. Excellent cinematography, procedural/detective stuff, and some good performances. Kick-ass Batmobile!

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The 1776 of the myth of the virtuous Wayne's is upended by the 1619 of the original Wayne having a reporter killed (by intention or by accident) and the institutional sin of the "Renewal" fund sustaining systemic corruption.
Bruce Wayne now has the psychology of one who is attempting to wash away his white guilt and class guilt by terrorizing poor people at night. But how is what Thomas Wayne did Bruce's fault? The simple answer is "Original Sin."
Even being a traumatized orphan wasn't good enough to wash out the sin, because someone else had it worse.
The Riddler had it worse, so Bruce must pay for his unearned privilege (it is unclear how anyone deserves anything on a simple deterministic account, but whatever).

Batman is now Bruce Wayne's apology for the existence of Bruce Wayne. He's not "vengeance." He's "reparation."

careful there, blurring the lines of motive between the writer and that of the psychopathic character using his personal twisted world views to justify his terrorism. "Even being a traumatized orphan wasn't good enough..." to the Riddler "...to wash out the sin..."

Also:


feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

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"My Dionne Warwick understanding of your dream indicates that you are ambivalent on how you want life to eventually screw you." - Joel

"Ever try to forcibly pin down a house cat? It's not easy." - Captain Steel

"I just can't get pass sticking a finger up a dog's butt." - John Dumbear

The film reveals that Thomas did indeed turn to Falcone to intimidate a reporter to stop reporting true facts.
Alfred does soften the blow later by arguing that in a moment of weakness Thomas attempted to protect his wife by scaring a reporter to keep her name out of his mouth. And it appears that Thomas attempted to redeem his error by telling Falcone he was going public after the reporter died.

However, Thomas Wayne would have had to have been a child to expect that Falcone might not maim or kill to get Wayne's point across to the reporter. That death is still on him. Frankly, threatening to burn down a gangster after he did you a favor (by doing gangster stuff that you couldn't muster the will or strength to do yourself) is a high point of hypocrisy. He might as well have cut his own throat. His emotional overreaction got the reporter killed and then his overreaction to the reporter getting killed got him and his wife killed. So, Thomas has done dirt, and at best was a hypocritical idiot.

Also, certain blows made by side-characters still land. As Selina notes, Bruce is rich and white and privileged. As Riddler arguers, he had it much better as a billionaire orphan than any orphan did under the non-functioning and corrupt renewal program. The city is as it is because of Batman's father's sins (Alfred mitigates but does not erase the sin with his clarification) and we are told that the sins of the father attach to the son.

Bruce is now complicated. He can't be SO dark gray that we think of him as the villain (e.g., Thomas Wayne was a human trafficker and Bruce covering it up or something), but the film refuses to present him and his family and his privilege as unequivocally "good." In this film, Batman has something to answer for. He is trying to right the wrongs of his family's past. And this is all very much "present year."

Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."

Bruce Wayne is a rich, white, male, cis, privileged person trying to thread the needle. He is owning his imperfection, but they haven't made him so bad that he is now the baddie. I think that is a few years off yet.

The frustrating aspect of this is not that we are not focused on the real problem - a rich guy spending his fortune to dangle poor people off of roofs to get information, breaking the bones of street criminals, engaging in extra-judical actions (above the law). In short, what is troubling about Batman is that he is a fascist, NOT that his parents weren't perfect.

This point reinforces my contention that the film, for all its trying, isn't really woke, because it can't be. It's more of a half-assed attempt at making a point that Alan Moore already made, decades ago, and in a much more succinct and elegant way. Which brings me back around to that being the main drain on the fun and entertainment value of this film. it is fairly successful at being a piece of gritty post-modernist art, but frankly, I am sick to death of that shit, and not just because I disagree with it politically. It's fine to deconstruct fictional heroes as fascists, but it has never been much fun. Not that a this stuff has a duty to be fun, but a man can only take so much before he moves on to lighter fare...

Yeah, one senses that so many people never really got what it was that Moore was saying in Watchmen.

Wow....I think it's too easy to go down the road to greatly overthinking Batman. If you go back to the source, old comix, the guy is just a masked vigilante without superhero powers who does jobs that the cops don't want to do, against bad guys who dodge or outgun the cops. He's a rich guy who can fund himself. Nothing about it says PC, Woke or any of the other forms of moral cover that we might give to a vigilante.

Especially in the US, where vigilantes are as much the Klan or lynch mobs as they are Batman, any reasonable society looks down on people exacting personal "justice" (AKA, revenge). It's way too easy to get bogged down in revisionist versions of this guy. I'd just leave him as he was back in the comics, rather than piling decades of causes, political shifts and revisionism onto what is just a comic character.

There was an NPR interview a few weeks back that got into the skull-faced gang and the significance of the initiate who only had half a skull image on his face and how the filmmakers would hope that audiences would notice these subtle cultural details. If we were to discuss this, would it be "overthinking"?

Yep. It's 3 hours of entertainment, a story line concocted by corporate script writers, meant to sell tickets, digital streams and toys to kids. At some point it becomes like discussing the soil conservation measures used in cotton fields in Gone With the Wind.

Where are all these poor people? We checking W-2’s? Wasn’t the Penguin driving a Maserati?

criminal ≠ poor

That is also explored in the movie you’re discussing.