The Batman (2022)

I always had a movie idea for a street level superhero like Batman to break with the formula. Because every movie seems to build to a huge existential threat on a massive scale by a villain (or villains) that the hero must stop.

So instead, I always thought that more of a "day-in-the-life-of" movie could turn away from the formula that we've all come to expect. Maybe for Batman, just solving a simple kidnapping story = no supervillain gassing the populace, no remote-controlled penguins or early ice age that's going to kill thousands, no poisoned water supply, no hidden bomb that's going to take out half the city, - just a simple crime story of kicking bad guys' butts to maybe just save one person?

James Gunn's Super (2010)?
It's been a while, but recall thinking it had some issues but mostly enjoyed it. But I think it sounds like what you're describing - admittedly as a dark comedy.

For reasons I won't go into other than, "earlier posts", I'll also mention there's a documentary from 2011, called The Interrupters, which I only know of by reputation, but not having seen it.

Yeah, Michelle was fairly over-the-top at times in Batman Returns, like the scene where she's growling "I am Catwoman" to the woman in the alley, but I would respond that she was just matching the tone of the film around her (which I found to be at least slightly better balanced than The Batman), and she still did an amazing job with her performance, regardless of how "exaggerated" her acting may have been sometimes. Besides, it's not as though she didn't have a more relatable, down-to-earth side in that movie, like the scene where she comes home, weary from a long day of work, talks to her cat about pathetic she is, and gets nagged at by her mother:



Compare that to Zoe's version of the character, who had less emotional range, and was just so serious and grim all the time (just like the movie around her), and I know which Catwoman I like better.Yeah, but so what? I mean, this is something I've always disliked about discussing Superhero movies online; I see all this criticism aimed at the movies for the changes they made from the comics just because they're changes, without much explanation as to why those changes were actually bad. Like, it's not automatically a bad thing that Batman '89 made

There's no so what?, Stu.
I like Pfeiffer's Catwoman. A lot. It's a lot of fun.
I mean, I think we're all accepting that Burton took the central character and some things from the comics history and kinda made his Burton-thing out of it. And it's very lovable.

One of the best comic book retcons (IMO) was when they revamped Batman's origin so that he didn't know who killed his parents.

They deleted Joe Chill from the equation (and the alteration wasn't some big insult to the origin story since Chill himself wasn't added by name to the Batman mythos until almost a decade after Batman's origin had been told).

This change added to Bruce's motivation & obsession: every mugger or villain he fought might be his parents' killer and every criminal came to represent their killer because he had no closure to their murders.

I like the idea, but not as any sort of rational impulse. His parents were killed twenty to thirty years ago, so no one under the age of 40 is a likely target. He might have better luck in the suburbs or a nursing home. As an emotional impulse, however, it makes sense. He doesn't know who did it, so he has a generalized transference of rage against street criminals. He doesn't do it because he really thinks he will catch the guy, but because he wishes each one of them was.

Then I'm happy to hear that, since it seemed like you might have been agreeing that her Catwoman supposedly not being like the comics was a negative thing (though I still wouldn't be so sure about that point, based off of this). However, even if her Catwoman really wasn't like the one in the comics, my point still stands; it's not automatically a bad thing for movies to change something from the comics just because they're changes, especially when comics change their depictions of characters from previous versions constantly anyway. They're adaptations, not straight-up translations, and they shouldn't be judged like they are.

And that's not to say that no changes from comic to film have ever been bad; there have been plenty of those over the years, like the way that Batman Forever had or the way Man Of Steel


But of course, those changes are bad for reasons that are obvious in the movies, not just by the virtue of them merely being changes.

I don't disagree with you I just think the Batman films were something that so many people had been sort of waiting 23 years for, if not longer really given the '66 version's camp, so there were a lot of expectations that it would represent canon more than, say, a version of Catwoman that had only existed for 3 years out of the 49-year history of the character up to that point. I, for example, had no idea that this new version of Catwoman even existed in the comics and found it quite jarring. But over time I came to really appreciate Pfeiffer's performance and really the whole thing. She's obviously the best part of that film and is a fun character for Burton's world, given that she's more crazy than smart.

Man, you'll get no argument here.
Schumacher just completely cartoonized Two-Face into a mustache-twirler. Terrible.
And really, one of the best parts of the original Superman saga is how much he frets over the people. He talks to Luthor about it in the first one and Ursa exploits it in the second film before he flees the scene and gets called a coward by the people he's trying to protect who don't realize that he understands his presence is potentially costing lives. Taking that out in MoS really altered the character dramatically. The one thing I don't think you can take away from Superman and have him be the same character even is that he's a paladin. He's Lawful Good. He's a protector. Honestly, I don't know what MoS was supposed to be, that movie was such a mess.

Yup; say what you will about Superman Returns on the whole, but at least it got the character on a fundamental level:

Bro. You really gonna go around defending Pfeiffer’s Catwoman against claims that she was inauthentic then toss around SR being better than MoS because it “gets the character on a fundamental level?”

I didn't say it was better on the whole, I said it understood the character better than MoS did (which is true).

That is exactly the point they were making about Catwoman and spurred your LONG rebuttals.

Still, SR is probably my least liked Superman film.
With Man of Steel and Superman III being close seconds.

Finally got around to watching this. I had heard mixed reviews, but to be honest it was such a refreshing perspective. Surprisingly loved Robert Pattinson and his emo Batman persona worked well. I also loved the aesthetic of the film, as well as the cinematography and score. Looking forward to see what they do next with this character (as well as Cat-Women and detective Gordon).

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No, because one of denim's points was that he wasn't a fan of her Catwoman because it was too different from the other versions of the character, which helped inspire my point about how changing something from the comics or some other source isn't automatically a negative just because it is a change, which is very different from my criticism of Superman's characterization in Man Of Steel, which was a negative aspect regardless of whether it was a change or not (though the unnecessary nature of that change still hurts it further, IMO).

Reread those posts, mate. They say that it wasn’t authentic to the character, too over the top for their tastes (in regards to denim’s specific remark) or too far from canon (all in relation to Kravitz being more authentic). Which is exactly the idea of getting the character more on a “fundamental level.” If you can grasp that, then one preferring that fundamental grasp on the character shouldn’t be too hard to understand.