Everyman Bristol
Three hours? That's longer than the Godfather.
It wasn't boring. (Did I mention that it was three hours long?).
But I was left with a gaping question. What was this movie about? What was it for?
*
After his parents brutal murder, Bruce Wayne tells Alfred that he is going to use his vast wealth to combat crime, so that no other child will ever have to suffer what he suffered.
"That's a very good idea" says Alfred. "I have some suggestions. You could invest in real estate, pull down the slums, and build model housing estates. You could put money into the education system, offering college scholarships to disadvantaged youths. You could fund a massive-early intervention scheme to stop kids getting addicted to drugs. You could replace Arkham with a modern, humane facility to treat the criminally insane..."
"I have a better idea" says Bruce. "I am going to dress up as a bat and beat up individual muggers."
Do you think that this joke:
1: Proves that the Batman myth is fundamentally ridiculous.
2: Completely misses the point of the Batman myth.
3: Cleverly uses the story of Bruce Wayne to make a point about the real world, which is what the Batman myth is for?
I suspect you're answer is a pretty good predictor of how much you'd like this movie.
*
Say what you like about Man of Steel and the Snyder Cut, it had a new take on Superman. Not necessarily a good take, but a new one. Henry Cavill wasn't Christopher Reeve, and he definitely wasn't Dean Cain. And the Batman Begins / Rises / Falls trilogy seemed genuinely to be trying to move the whole idea of superheroes forward by a couple of notches.
This one. It was er...a ...Batman movie.
Something struck me forcibly about ten minutes into ther Batman. I suspect it is the same thing that struck William Dozier in 1960. It definitely struck Alan Moore at a comic book convention in the early 80s. It is astonishingly hard not to look silly in a Batman suit.
Or, I suppose: superhero costumes make sense in comics, on cheap paper, with a palette of four colours. On a big screen. Not so much.
Look at ther Batman's first appearance, in the subway. There are a lot of scary thugs in Joker make-up terrorising a guy. For some reason. There is a narration by ther Batman, about how the city is rotten and he is vengeance and incites fear and dresses up as a flying rodent. It is maybe a problem that ther Batman has started to sound like Rorschach: the character has become indistinguishable from the parody. We see the Bat Signal in the sky. I take the point that the signal is not a way for the police to summons ther Batman. If the police wanted to summons ther Batman, a big red telephone would be much more efficient. The Bat Signal is a way to scare the criminal element. Watch out, there's a millionaire dressed as a flying mammal about. And then ther Batman appears through smoke and steam and darkness and scares them away.
And like: he's a guy. With silly sticky up ears and an inconvenient cape. And a gravelly voice.
If this were a comic by Neil Adams, say, then ther Batman's cape would seem to be part of the darkness, and he would seem to be part of the night; an abstract figure of mythic terror. I think Dave Sim understood ther Batman best: the scared little boy who had to become scary so he can scare the people who scared him. (Which is why Sim argues, that Robin is essential to the myth.) But you can't do that in a film. Actually, you probably could and maybe someone should try. But they didn't. They just asked us to believe that guys with ears and cloaks can walk around subways and talk to gangster bosses and stand around crime scenes with police officers and everyone treats it as fairly normal.
I've been reading superhero comics for a hundred and seventy six years. I know the costume is a conceit. I don't know why it struck me as a problem here. Because I'm not as much of a Batophile as I am a Spiderphile or a Superphile and the ghost of Adam West still flutters at my window? Because the Bat-costume is one notch sillier than other superhero costumes? I think that Tim Burton carried it off with visual panache, and the Marvel Universe works a smidgeon harder to make the costumes into uniforms or armour as opposed to long underwear?
This is not the Marvel or DC Universe. This isn't so far as we can tell a world where Superhero is a known social class with a distinct mode of dress, like Punk Rocker or Hasidic Jew. This is a Dark and Serious and Edgy world. Alfred, the comedy Jeeves Butler, is played by Gollum as a former spy. The whole sardonic Jeeves persona has evaporated, but he is occasionally helpfuil at decrypting serial killer's coded messages. Ther Batman operates out of a crypt under a gothic mansion but no-one calls it a Batcave. His hardware is relatively free of Batbranding.
In a sense, ther Batman can't shake the memory of the camp 1960s version; which was only the 1950s comic book spread out to the Nth degree. And maybe he shouldn't. Or maybe we've been there seen it done it, and Dark Knight Returns is now the cliche and "hey, Batman reimagined as a nice guy with a cellar full of amazing toys" would be a refreshing take. There is a bust of William Shakespeare in Bruce Wayne's front room, but I don't think it conceals the controls for any secret doors. There is an older woman alongside Alfred in some of the Wayne Manor scenes, but I don't know if she is meant to be Aunt Harriet.
Ther Batman retains his silly costume; but no-one else does. There are several characters who share names with characters in the comics, but the names seem to be there as easter-eggs rather than adaptations. Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger both played the Joker as a deranged circus clown. The remnants of Ceasar Romero arguably underlay both characters. Ther Batman has a character referred to as the Riddler. This Riddler is not Jim Carrey and certainly not (checks wikipedia) Frank Gorshin. He does not wear a green suit with purple question marks on it. He is a psychopath in a ski-mask, somewhere between Hanibal Lecter and Banksy, committing horrible murders and bragging about them on the internet. Like his green-jacketed name sake, he leaves riddles at the scenes of the crimes. In fairness, they seem like the sort of thing a crazy man might do, rather than the silly plot device they always were in the 1960s. There is a gangster called Oswald who is referred to as the Penguin; but he doesn't have a top hat or an umbrella or anything else to say that he's related to the comic book character.
"How are we going to make a funny man with an umbrella gimmick plausible in a scary grown up movie? How are we going to banish Burgess Meridith and Danny Devito?"
"By not having the Penguin in our movie at all, but saying that we do.'
Perhaps we should have gone with Bruce Wayne as a millionaire crime fighter who everyone calls Batman, but who wears normal clothes? Good or bad, that would have been a new approach.
Unless--for my mind is troubled with a doubt--I am not up to date on my DC Mythos? Maybe there has been a Final Ultimate New Twenty Four Countdown Doomsday Crisis and these are how the olde time villaines actually are in the comic book nowadays?
There is distinctly a plot.
The Riddler is killing the great and the good of Gotham, starting with a candidate for Mayor, because they are corrupt. At one point, it turns out that Bruce Wayne's father was also corrupt; but then it turns out that he probably wasn't. The origin of ther Batman -- dead parents, oath of vengeance, etc -- is taken for granted rather than explained. I think that the myth of Batman has become inflated. It hasn't so much got bigger as thicker. Little Bruce's old-money mummy and daddy who were murdered for their pearls by a faceless mugger on their way out of Zorro has become a zillionaire city-father who was murdered as part of some grand conspiracy, which I suppose makes the idea of Lil' Bruce as the personification of the city literally true.
There is some impressive action: a stonking car chase; ther Batman running down the side of a building. I don't buy him using his cloak as a glider. I think that crosses the line that says that ther Batman doesn't have any superpower apart from being ther Batman -- or, if we go with Ben Affleck, being rich. Commissioner Gordon and Catwoman are believable, although Catwoman is another cog in the grand plot, and I preferred her when she was an art thief who Bruce had an inappropriate crush on. There is a scene in Arkham which suggests that the Riddler had met the Joker which suggests the film is not as stand-alone as we might have thought.
Superhero movies have to go totally apocalyptic at the end, because of the Marvel Universe and the trauma of 11/9. This one ends with the Riddler flooding the whole of Gotham. Ther Batman decides that there are better things he can do than be scary: namely, personally pull people out of the wreckage. Dressed up as a bat. Probably.
It's both too short and too long. Too long to be a movie. Too short to compete with 80 hour multilayered streaming boxsets. There are a generation of kids who never saw the Christian Bale version; but they aren't allowed to see this version, so that's no excuse. If we are going to do a Batman movie, it either has to say something new about Batman, or be such fun that it doesn't matter if it doesn't. This just kind of existed. It's a Batman movie. You've got to make Batman movies.
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