Genre: Superhero/Noir/Crime
Premise: When the Riddler starts leaving riddles at all of his murders taunting the Batman, the batster will have to team up with Catwoman to find him before he enacts his final sinister plan on the city.
About: Predictions were all over the map on how The Batman would open. Most were saying it would come in at 100 million. Well director Matt Reeves and his posse laugh at such predictions because The Batman made 128 million dollars this weekend! Stick that in your bat bowl. Reeves’ co-Writer, Peter Craig, burst onto the scene with 2010’s, “The Town.” He’s currently writing Gladiator 2 for Ridley Scott.
Writers: Matt Reeves & Peter Craig (‘Batman’ created by Bill Finger and Bob Kane).
Details: 3 hour running time!
I’ve heard that this Batman is the best Batman film EVER. Yes, even better than The Dark Knight. Could it be? These people are aware, I presume, that Robert Pattinson is playing Batman, right? I kid, I kid. Who doesn’t love themselves a little R. Patty, warts and all.
This is what makes Hollywood so amazing. They spend upwards of 3 million dollars to create a bat suit that makes a scrawny Pattinson look beefy. They get a good DP and gaffer in there to make sure the light is always hitting the suit in just the right way to make Pattison look menacing. Add a moody high quality score and choose an editor who knows how to edit around lousy takes and weird mannerisms. You do all that and now you have yourselves a convincing Batman.
But is it a good Batman? And has this Batman given us a good movie?
Okay, here’s today’s overly simplified summary of the movie. The Riddler kills the Mayor of Gotham. He also leaves a message for “Batman” that states the Mayor was dirty and so were a bunch of other Gotham politicians. We get the impression The Riddler isn’t done yet.
Police Lieutenant James Gordon has no choice but to bring the Batman in to comb over the crime scene. Afterwards, Batman looks over the riddle the Riddler left, which asks what do lying men do after they die. Batman answers “Lie Still,” in under a second, which gives him and Gordon a good chance of being on the next episode of Jeopardy.
After pestering the Penguin, who’s a club owner here, to tell him what he knows, Batman meets Selina Kyle, aka Catwoman, and the two decide to team up. As the crime scenes and riddles stack up, Batman desperately tries to catch up to the Riddler. And just when he’s getting close, the Riddler comes to him, surrendering. Except it’s a ploy. Because what the Riddler is about to do next will determine whether he takes over the entire city.
The thing that comic book movies figured out is that they can keep these films alive by hijacking sub-genres and using them to build a mould around the superhero-y stuff. One of the reasons comic book movies started to get so bad in the 2000s was that they kept going the origin story route. Audiences had gotten so familiar with that structure, unfortunately, that every movie now felt familiar.
So superhero films started experimenting, even though they didn’t really know what they were doing. This gave us movies like Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns from 2006. It wasn’t an origin story but it kind of was. The film just never found its footing. Enter the sub-genre, a strategy that Marvel began implementing. You’ve got the Buddy Cop movie (Captain Marvel). You’ve got the Spy movie (Winter Soldier). You’ve got the John Hughes High School Comedy (Spider-Man: Homecoming ). This gave comic book movies a new life because now, you weren’t really going to see a comic book movie. You were going to see a high school comedy… with superheroes.
The Batman continues this strategy, as it embraces “Film Noir” as its sub-genre. You’ve got a deep baritone Bruce Wayne, narrating the state of the city in the film’s opening scene. Every scene is painted in thick endless shadows. Characters don’t speak so much as pose and try to make the dialogue sound cool. And, most importantly, it all works. The Batman as a noir film is great.
But the screenplay… the screenplay is another story.
Sticking with this month’s theme, I was hyper-focused on the first act. And it pretty much followed the same blueprint I’ve laid out for all of you. We get our teaser, which is that the mayor is killed by The Riddler. Then we introduce our hero, The Batman, along with a couple of other characters. We establish the world (Gotham) they’re in, specifically the fact that crime is a big problem in the city, which is why Batman has gotten involved.
Batman’s intro, where he arrives to take down a group of bullies about to beat a subway rider into submission, quickly establishes that he’s a badass and takes his job of protecting the city seriously. We need to have a good feel for your hero after their first scene. The Batman succeeds in that regard.
The inciting incident is technically the mayor’s murder, which already happened in the teaser. But it doesn’t officially become the inciting incident until Batman is called to the murder with Gordon, and they inspect the crime scene. It is here where The Riddler’s game is introduced, adding a secondary element. Batman will have to solve the murder. But also solve Riddler’s larger puzzle.
Reeves’ decision to go this route was a wise one. When you have a universe as wide and varied as Gotham, which is home to a lot of characters, you risk the reader getting lost in all the noise. So you want a narrative that’s immediately understandable, something to counterbalance the huge complex world you’ll be tasked with bringing to life.
Utilizing one of the oldest story setups in the book – the murder investigation – is a great way to keep the story focused and, as a result, keep the reader clued in. While there were a few places in the movie where I had to think hard to remember what was going on, I was never confused, like I am with some of these movies that have 800 characters. This is because I always understood the core of Batman’s goal: Find the Riddler.
The problem with The Batman is that it thinks too highly itself and, therefore, doesn’t realize that its investigation is kinda bland. The rhythm of the story is too predictable. Go chase one clue, find a dead person with a riddle card attached to them, someone reads the riddle, Batman always answers the riddle within two seconds, this sends them to their next destination, where they find another dead person and another riddle. Which sends them to their next destination. And so on and so forth.
This would all be well and good if the characters were great. But the two most interesting characters, the Penguin and the Riddler, are given limited screen time, while their heroic counterparts, Batman and Catwoman, are given the majority of the time. And while our heroes are pretty cool, they’re not captivating enough for us to truly care about what’s going on.
This partly has to do with the noir genre itself as it often feels like characters aren’t talking to each other, so much as directly to the audience, delivering their lines as stylistically as possible. There’s a detached quality to the dialogue and the line-readings that speaks to the bigger problem with noir – which is that it always looks cool, but, emotionally, feels cold.
Which is a strange thing to say because everything else about the movie – the way it’s filmed, the way it’s lit, the way it’s designed – implies that it’s a much deeper comic book movie than you usually see. But it isn’t. It’s a cinematography class. It’s got costume design up the wazoo. But everything else in the film is skin deep.
Nobody’s going through any internal battles outside of some vague references to Bruce’s difficult childhood. Contrast this with Arthur Fleck in Joker, who’s so very desperate to connect with others. Who’s tasked with taking care of his aging mother. Who must battle a strange disorder daily (his spontaneous laughing). Who must fight off an inner rage. We really feel like Arthur is a person struggling through life. Batman, meanwhile, is just a guy who seems upset that there are a lot of criminals around.
This makes the three hour running time seem ridiculous. You can have that extra hour if you’re going to use it. But if all you’re going to do with that hour is turn 2 minute scenes into 4 minute scenes, and 5 minute scenes into 10 minute scenes, you’re killing your narrative’s momentum. There was this scene about two hours in where Bruce is talking to Alfred in the hospital and I swear it was 15 uninterrupted minutes of them droning on to each other.
I know we say for every Marvel movie, “That could’ve been shorter,” but in this case, it’s true. This movie could’ve lost an hour and it wouldn’t have affected the film AT ALL.
I do think it’s cool that Matt Reeves made this badass looking superhero flick peppering in a 90s edge that included “Seven” references and a Nirvana-inspired Bruce Wayne. But halfway through this movie, when I realized the investigation narrative was going to keep hitting the same beats over and over, I mentally checked out, watching the rest of the film with only a passing interest.
There’s good here. Just not enough of it.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: The Reluctant Team-Up always works. This is when your hero reluctantly teams up with another character, as is the case here with Batman and Catwoman.
