Batman has become Bat-ubiquitous. Gotham’s protector is rarely far away from the screen; this year alone, there is the return of Michael Keaton’s Bruce Wayne, the cinematic debut of Batgirl, and the animated DC League Of Super-Pets, which features Ace the Bat-hound, Batman’s pet dog. He is everywhere. An icon. The challenge for The Batman’s writer-director Matt Reeves: how to make a totemic, mythic figure of pop culture feel new.
Reeves’ approach, it seems, is evolution rather than revolution. Comparisons with Christopher Nolan’s era-defining Batman trilogy are unavoidable — it shares Nolan’s serious, neo-noirish tone, and one set-piece is reminiscent of The Dark Knight — but the difference to, say, Batman Begins is that this is emphatically not an origin story. There is, gratifyingly, no new recreation of Bruce Wayne’s parents being murdered. Like Spider-Man: Homecoming, this is ‘post-origins’: a superhero still in his early years, grappling with youthful naivety and what his masked identity actually means.
Working with his cinematographer Greig Fraser, Reeves has rendered perhaps the best screen realisation of Gotham so far.
So, in Robert Pattinson, we get a very different Bruce Wayne. Where Christian Bale and Ben Affleck embraced the macho side of the character, Pattinson looks like a boyish vampire, his skin tone only a shade warmer than in Twilight. His is the first screen Batman to be fully seen wearing the eyeshadow required of the character’s costume, which evokes Robert Smith from The Cure. In the suit he’s methodical and muscular; out of it, he’s racked with insecurity and self-doubt. A repeated needle drop of Nirvana’s ‘Something In The Way’ confirms it: this is emo-Bats.
As a new direction, it makes total sense for this most brooding of superheroes. And though the humourlessness sometimes flirts with self-parody — Pattinson’s narration, delivered like Rorschach’s journal, grumbles mainly about vengeance, fear, justice, the usual stuff — the mood is justified by a believably dark bad guy. In a crowded rogues’ gallery (shout-outs to Zoë Kravitz’s instantly charismatic Catwoman and Colin Farrell’s bafflingly convincing prosthetic Penguin), this is the Riddler’s show, anchored by a chilling Paul Dano performance. He’s a bespectacled terrorist of the Trump era, driven by an incel’s misplaced sense of injustice and a love of fiendish puzzles. (And latte foam art.)
Fully embracing the “world’s greatest detective” comics reputation that cinematic Batmen often forget, Reeves thus plays things out like a twisty David Fincher-esque thriller. (Some of the Riddler’s clues could have been ripped from the pages of the Zodiac killer.) Occasionally the knottiness of the plotting will leave you feeling that near-three-hour runtime, but it is never boring, the narrative propelled by a series of grisly conundrums through Gotham’s seedy underbelly.
What will also hold your attention is how beautiful that underbelly looks. Working with his cinematographer Greig Fraser, Reeves has rendered perhaps the best screen realisation of Gotham so far; walking a careful tightrope between gritty realism and heightened pulp (lots of neon, lots of rainfall) without ever overplaying their hands. The result is some remarkable film craft, of a level rarely seen in modern blockbusters. Michael Giacchino’s brilliant, minimalist score completes the effect, building on the hugely effective work of Hans Zimmer — evolution, then, rather than revolution.
