Spoiler alert
This is a review of sorts or a discussion about a movie and as one, contains spoilers. You have been warned.
Info box
IMDB: Batman
Starring: Robert Pattinson, Zoë Kravitz, Jeffrey Wright
Batman is probably the best comic superhero of all times. There are so many great stories both in the comics and on the big screen. The Killing Joke comic story being right there in the top.
On the movie side, there’s been so many Batman movies and series. Tim Burton had a great two-film series with 1989 Batman and 1992 Batman Returns; Joel Schumacher with less stellar but in its own campy way entertaining and star struck 1995 Batman Forever and 1997 Batman & Robin; In the 2000s we got Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy that moved towards a more gritty and dark Batman; DCEU’s Batman v Superman and Justice League were incredibly bad and now we’re in the 2020s with yet another reboot with Matt Reeves’ 2022 Batman.
This movie is so dark that I struggled to watch it on my low-fi video projector setup. Even with all the lights out and the natural pitch black darkness of winter on my side, I was hoping to have a better projector.
There is a fantastic meme about the lack of light in this movie:
Quick sidenote on subtitle translations
I watched part of the movie with Finnish subtitles (as they were on by default) and all of the Riddler’s clever puns fell completely flat on the translation. Translating puns is really difficult but in this one especially it felt that they just translated the sentences, completely failing to capture the intent.
These are the types of moments where you really see the effort put into translation/localisation of media and it’s getting rarer and rarer to see good ones.
I almost always have some subtitles on, either English or Finnish when I watch stuff. Most of the time because it makes eating crunchy chips (crisps) more suitable for movie watching but especially in this movie due to it’s horribly imbalanced audio mixing where dialogue is quiet and action is super loud.
Technical things aside, this movie’s potentially most interesting plotline about Wayne family’s history and legacy is not very well utilised. Similar story is much better told in Batman: Telltale Series (2016) video game which I can highly recommend to any Batman fan. It’s much more about attempting to resolve a mystery that leaves the player/viewer to wonder “hmm, I wonder how much of this is true and how much is just Riddler/Penguin messing with us”.
In the movie, it’s an angsty Bruce Wayne that the movie hasn’t really made us care about, figuring things out almost immediately. That storyline also comes into play very late on the second half, and the first half barely sets up Bruce Wayne as a character which feels disappointing.
I don’t know how to describe it but this movie falls into a category where the story isn’t really advanced through events or action or dialogue but mostly through vibes and mood. Kind of “implied”. I don’t know if anyone feels the same or even understands what I mean.
Even though I didn’t like this movie, I’d still rather rewatch this than the DCEU nonsense. And if there’s something good that came out of this, it’s that Penguin who’s been criminally underused in modern Batman got not only some screen time but also his own spinoff.
After disappointing DCEU Batman and this one, I hope someone would dare to pick up Batman and make the movies less dark — both in tones and in practical lighting. I’m not expecting anyone to go back to 1960s Batman or 1990s Schumacher style but I think there’s a lot of opportunities for a maybe more light-hearted or even mystery-focused storytelling with the character.