The Batman Review: The Best Cinecomics Of This Generation An Intense, Dark And Dirty Neo-Noir Thriller That Joker Fans Will Love
Stars: Zoë Kravitz, Robert Pattinson, Paul Dano
Director: Matt Reeves
Filmhype.com Ratings: 4.5/5 (four and half star) [yasr_overall_rating size=”large”]
The Batman Review (2022): The long-awaited moment has come when we can talk to you at length about The Batman, the superhero’s first solo film after Christopher Nolan’s trilogy that established a chair and became one of the most celebrated iterations of the dark knight of all time, in addition to one of the high points of the adaptations of DC. We already told you that the first impressions of the international press had been euphoric and that they elevated the film as sensational… Well, they didn’t fall short: this is an absorbing film that takes its time to develop and has a final magnificent third.
Matt Reeves, who already blew our minds with Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and War for the Planet of the Apes, once again delivers an outstanding project in which, if anything, its sustained excess of intensity plays against it for so long time. And we explain why: the viewer is going to face three hours of footage in which there are few respites.
The Batman Review: The Story
The Batman is set in Year 2 of Bruce Wayne as Gotham City’s ruthless and vengeful vigilante. The film deals with one of the characteristic aspects of the less exploited character on the big screen his detective facet. His abilities as an investigator will be put to the test with a mystery that connects the villains that will appear in the film Enigma, played by Paul Dano, Penguin played by an unrecognizable Colin Farrell, and Carmine Falcone, played by John Turturro.
After two years stalking the city streets as Batman (Robert Pattinson) and striking fear into the evil minds of criminals, Bruce Wayne is deep in the shadows of Gotham City. This lone vigilante has few trusted allies (Alfred Pennyworth (Andy Serkis) and Lieutenant James Gordon (Jeffrey Wright)) among the city’s corrupt network of high-profile figures and officers. And that has led him to become the only incarnation of revenge among his fellow citizens. When an assassin targets Gotham’s elite with a series of sadistic machinations, a trail of cryptic clues leads the World’s Greatest Detective on an underworld investigation, where he crosses paths with the likes of Selina Kyle/aka Catwoman (Zoë Kravitz), Oswald Cobblepot/aka The Penguin (Colin Farrell), Carmine Falcone ( John Turturro) and Edward Nashton/aka Enigma (Paul Dano).
Warner returns to give a 180º turn on what we have seen on the screen so far and offers us a totally new Batman, something that is no surprise to anyone because we have known many details about this version for months: its protagonist (and the appearance EMO), his main enemies… As I said at the beginning, my general assessment is clearly positive, but now it remains to be seen if Warner/DC have some kind of medium or long-term plan in mind with this character on the big screen. And I hope so because this movie would surely win if it were part of a trilogy or, at least, was continued by another one. However, you have to take this movie for what it is, an entity in itself, and that’s what I’m going to do.
The Batman Review and Analysis
From the beginning the film plays to surprise us: the music of the first minutes contrasts strongly with the Gotham that is shown to us. A voiceover puts us in a situation and it is these words and the way they are pronounced that give us the tone of the film: absolutely serious and serious, without concessions, without a single joke in the three hours of footage.
And this is one of its strengths, the setting of the film, the atmosphere that will immerse us in a gloomy, serious and pessimistic Gotham. An atmosphere emphasized by the almost perennial rain and by photography and lighting, dark and solemn, accompanied by serious musical themes, where percussions and dry and somewhat gloomy sounds predominate, accompanying the viewer as they gradually enter this Gotham. decadent and putrid, from its foundations (and we all know which character is one of the mainstays of Gotham).
The film is long, too long. I don’t know if they wrote a script that needed three hours (or more, we’ll see…) or if they first decided to create a three-hour movie and adjusted the script to this length. I don’t know but of course I prefer the latter. The plot is a little Frankenstein, made with fragments from many other sources (you’ll see scraps from Batman Begine, Cataclysm…) and, therefore, not always very well stitched. The result is satisfactory, but it is inevitable to see some seams. And the fact is that if you stop to think a bit (and in three hours you have several occasions to do so), there are several aspects of the story that, although they work very well on their own, but together they don’t go well and some even contrast too much.
In spite of everything, despite its duration, the film has a rhythm well plotted enough so that it is not heavy, nor slow, much less boring. It is inevitable that there are moments, passages in which that rhythm decreases, but they are brief and Matt Reeves, the director, does not give us time to forget where we are or what we are seeing, a Batman story. And that is the next topic to be discussed, is he a good Batman? Batman is a character that is over 80 years old in comics, as many of you know. A multitude of writers and cartoonists have passed through his pages, giving the character different personalities and aspects. The one we see in The Batman is one more.
Although much of what we see during the film sounds like we have already seen it in other places (especially other film versions and in video games, you understand me), everything is invented, nothing is really as we know from those 80 years of history. But nothing the writers (Peter Craig and Matt Reeves himself) have created for this Batman contradicts what we’ve seen before. Of course, he is outside of cinematic “continuity”: he has nothing to do with either Nolan’s Batman or Snyder’s. If I had to look for some resemblance, I would go to the magnificent, animated feature film The Ghost Mask (1993) for that atmosphere and for that serious, “adult” tone, some might say.
The first thing that stands out is precisely the way in which the story is approached, in the key of a thriller, which connects with films like Seven or Zodiac with the hero in the process of realizing his role as the last hope of a city. condemned to never bottom out, but in which the treatment of certain high-voltage sequences takes us back to the sadistic Saw saga.
Giacchino’s soundtrack seeks precisely to elevate our pulses and that the most monstrous and disconcerting aspect of the world portrayed makes us shudder in the seat due to its brutality. It develops emotional crescendos of enormous forcefulness that yes tend at times to be repetitive. Paul Dano’s work as Enigma is unbeatable he brings to life a twisted sociopath, contained as a bomb about to go off and beside himself when it grows in intensity, but always with a disturbingly mundane aspect.
Many of you will wonder what Robert Pattinson ‘s performance is as Gotham’s Vigilante and it must be said that he more than fulfills both dressed as Batman and detached from his mask. The Batman is a movie full of memorable moments with action sequences unheard of to date but in which there is a lot of texture and a dirty atmosphere is deliberately sought.
Rainy sequences abound, with little or very limited visibility, tinted red or even in which the focus is played with to maintain a certain level of confusion and lack of definition of what is happening. The same thing happens with the types of shots that Reeves chooses to maintain suspense: he often relies on details or very closed shots in which we lack an overview and we are connecting the dots. At the end of the day, as we said at the beginning, this is a detective film in which a devious antagonist shows us his plan in a mysterious and slow way in such a way that we incubate a growing and sustained unease over time.
The Batman respects the spirit of the character, his motivations, triggers and internal contradictions, but he also manages to connect easily with the most immediate current situation thanks to the use of his enemy’s new technologies that allow him not only to have followers, but a community that supports him. endorses and supports that is very reminiscent of the “QAnon movement” and the famous assault on Capitol Hill.
Constantly beating in the background of the film is the question that the true protagonist is Gotham City, a place as battered as the vigilante who bears the responsibility of trying to save it before it devours itself. The same thing that could happen to him if she failed to get past her revenge-seeking stage. The relationships between the characters are also very well worked out: Bruce Wayne mirrors himself in some way in all those he surrounds himself with: from Alfred to Gordon, going through the boy who is orphaned at the beginning of the film or the demons he it faces.
The Batman is, for many reasons, a tremendously enjoyable film for fans of the character who have grown up reading comics, but also for those who are looking for an adult film, with resonances that go beyond fiction and that are the emblem of the best DC stories… as was Joker.
And the Dark Knight, superimposing himself in his psyche and temperament on a young and gloomy Bruce Wayne, too tormented by his own thirst for justice to give weight to his true identity, takes on the unprecedented shades (and never seen in the cinema) of an end and highly skilled investigator, who puts his brain, physicist and gadgets solely at the service of a case to be solved.
A Batman human and humanized to the maximum, as we had never seen him on the big screen, the one painted by Matt Reeves and embodied by a Robert Pattinson perfect on a mental and athletic level. The biggest surprise of The Batman is the psychological depth that the author and actor have given to the character, an almost three-hour long journey in which the psyche of this Dark Knight transforms and evolves, and from a brutal nocturnal animal it becomes a beacon of hope. a hero finally complete, what we deserve and what we need. Pattinson gives life to a Bruce still too young and furious to devote himself to philanthropy, an element that perhaps represents the only flaw of the film: in almost 180 minutes of duration Reeves cannot find much space for Wayne, relegating his precious exchanges with Alfred to a few but significant (and excellent) sequences of great emotional impact. It follows that his performance is more focused on the physicality of the bat man: nevertheless his proof remains memorable, his crystalline talent, the flagship of a cast that is simply perfect in every nuance of him.
The Batman Review: The Last Words
Matt Reeves offers us a journey through Gotham like never before: squeeze the possibilities of the corrupt city creating a brutal detective thriller recreating itself in a dirty atmosphere and a hero eaten by revenge who ends up emerging as the last hope in a dazzling final stretch. The atmosphere and the third of the film in which there is a festival of revelations and all the pieces of the puzzle begin to fit together.
The Batman is the cinecomic that many have been waiting for. Matt Reeves encapsulates the cinematic and comics legacy of the DC character in a film, creating an authorial, inspired, compelling, evil, touching cinecomic. The Batman is once again a tale of origins, but not the canonical ones: it is the beginning of a new mythology, of a renovated universe. Of characters that have already become iconic, of memorable antagonists and a more than convincing protagonist. The Batman by Reeves and embodied by Pattinson is a success on every front, one of the best genre films of this generation, and beyond.
