The high school kids I was teaching this past Winter semester all had very good things to say about this film - some of them saw it more than once at the cinema - so we thought we'd give it a shot, even though it's nearly three hours long. (That's Seven Samurai territory - and let me tell you, decent as this is (as superhero movies go) it's no Seven Samurai.) Notice that this must be different from all those other Batman movies, because it's The Batman (all those others must have been "Some Batman Or Other"). Anyway, guess what, it's a dark take on the Batman story, unlike, well, every other Batman since the '60's TV show. Can't say I blame them, though, they're aiming at teens who go for that emo shit, and the couple of times they attempted to veer from that formula (Val Kilmer or George Clooney anyone?) they met with universal scorn (how dare they not take Batman seriously!) This one is also directed by the same guy who did the re-imagined Planet of the Apes films, so, if anything, it's a bit more cheerful than those. We are asked to imagine a young Batman who's only a couple of years into his caped crusading, not yet with a familiar stable of foes, and working with a Jim Gordon who is only a lieutenant, not yet Commissioner. And yet, he is not haunting the streets of a '40's Gotham, but rather a Gotham of today, with cell-phones and the like (albeit a Blade Runner-esque Gotham, because it's always raining. And dark). So yes, Batman as neo-noir, right up to the fact that the glue of the film is sort of a detective story. The villain is a re-imagined Riddler - re-imagined in that he is not a ridiculous figure in a green bowler hat, covered with question marks. Also he beats people to death. In fact, this Riddler sees himself as something of a crusader himself, as all the people he targets are Gotham City luminaries (starting with the Mayor), all of whom he reveals to have been corrupt at their core. On each corpse (or soon-to-be-corpse in at least one case) he leaves a kitchy greetings card addressed to The Batman, complete with signature riddles. And actually, The Batman isn't that great at them. He does get the first one - Q: What does a liar do when he dies? A: He lies still - but other than that, he needs help, usually from trusty Alfred (played by Andy Serkis, clearly a favorite of the director, as he did the main ape Caesar in those Planet movies) and later even from the Penguin, who is reduced here simply to an odd-looking (Colin Farrell, completely unrecognizable under layers of latex) minor mob boss. (Embarrassingly the Penguin has better Spanish than Batman or Jim Gordon.) And it turns out that, rather than see him as an adversary, the Riddler views Batman as an inspiration and fellow-traveler. In this the Riddler doesn't do himself justice: he's far more effective at fixing what is truly wrong with Gotham than the Batman has been, although he does unleash a MAGA/QAnon-esque squad of social-media-recruited murderous copycats, so, you know, pros and cons. To his credit, our Batman realizes this at the end (along with realizing some important truths about his family) and (presumably) resolves to do better than simply to be "vengeance". Oh, and there's a sexy apparently bi- Catwoman, who also has family connections to the rot that the Riddler is targeting. And who also has a seriously half-assed mask:
Pros: this Batman is fairly grounded and gritty. Yes, he has a Batmobile, but it's just a souped-up sports car rather than a fucking tank like the last one. And, while he does have a sort of flying-squirrel type thing for when he has to jump off a tall building to escape (in this case, from the cops) but he looks suitably terrified using it and comes pretty much a cropper at the end. His Bruce Wayne is super-emo - literally, he has a terrible early-aughts hairdo as of a singer in one of the bands that originated the emo label, not to mention he ladles on the black eye makeup when he puts the mask on -
and he never goes out in public, just sulks around his building when he's not beating up hoodlums (and scaring their victims in the process). But Robert Pattinson is actually a very good actor, so he does his best with what he's given (which includes some seriously bad lines), and, in fact, all the supporting cast is stocked with solid actors (Farrell, Jeffrey Wright, John Turturro (who we've just seen in the far superior TV show Severance), Zoë Kravitz and Paul Dano, creditably unhinged as the Riddler), so it's hard simply to laugh at it. Overall, it's definitely not one of the most inessential Batmans (and honestly, I was less bored than in the much-praised Christopher Nolan Dark Knight films), and a righting of the ship from having Ben Affleck play him, but... Probably could've used the three hours better.
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