BEN COHEN, Staff Writer—
I did not walk into The Batman with ill intentions. It feels necessary to say that.
Everyone I have spoken to who has seen the newest installment in the protracted franchise tends either to formulate or regurgitate an enthusiastic opinion or perspective on the movie. I then, usually, attempt to contribute my own. It feels ingenuine, however, skirting around the fact of the matter in these conversations: I didn’t really like The Batman, and yet I feel as if I am supposed to.
This review is not a comprehensive analysis of aesthetic, plot, or performance, but rather a drawn out, poorly tied together, gratuitous endeavor. It ought to suit the subject perfectly.
When I first heard about the film a year or so ago it left no impression on me. I enjoyed the Christopher Nolan films somewhat and assumed at the time that the director of the new film, (Matt Reeves, known for directing two decent Planet of the Apes movies and two, much worse Cloverfield movies), would make use of the extant playbook for adapting comic book narratives in gritty, post-Taxi Driver urban grunge-scapes. My assumption wasn’t far off.
The Batman, from the get-go, is a rainy, poorly lit, garbage strewn film. Gotham, in its present form, mirrors that of The Joker’s.
The dialogue between these two films is an interesting one. I doubt the newer one could exist without the foundation laid by the previous, but, purely aesthetically, there are clear parallels: a picture of urban decline akin to ‘70s New York City, a comparable eye for the significance of the shot (owing in The Batman to videographer Greg Fraser), and a similar value placed on the dark street level instead of the sunlit one.
There is something more to be said about the videography, getting at a core problem I have with the film. The Batman is, more than any in recent memory, a movie from the perspective of Bruce Wayne, of Batman.
He is barely ever not onscreen (although one could be forgiven for not making out his black, cloaked figure from the ocean of blacks and navies and browns in which he swims for most of the three-hour runtime). There are numerous shots from the direct perspective of the Bat, one notable one from behind the wheel of his admittedly very cool mobile.
What makes this fact slightly sinister is how it impacts viewers. Subjecting an audience to the musings of a Cobain-emulating, detached Batman without the “billionaire playboy philanthropist” trait is meant to help us understand the psychological journey which takes place through the movie.
Bruce here isn’t able to delineate the two parts of his personality. He is the batman. What little we see of his life as a Wayne is disarray, contempt for society. His heroism is centered, at least initially, in the motive of vengeance, as a personal vendetta against crime, with little care for the holistic wellbeing of Gotham. Batman’s wrath isn’t accompanied by a philanthropic arm of Bruce Wayne’s celebrity, and it is implied that he resents the fame into which he was born.
It follows that we are meant to see his eventual awakening to the value of the public good as heroic. His ability to emerge from the cocoon of self-righteousness as a fully formed public citizen, to truly care about those in the city who he had spent years avenging, and transmute his angst from aggression to benevolence, is the only true character development which takes place, at least as far as Bruce Wayne is concerned.
It is difficult for me to assume the perspective of the Batman in this sense: the struggle of a city very clearly full of suffering, inequality, poverty, one with a total lack of accountability for elites, feels centered around the ability of one rich, White man to find it within himself to care.
It’s not that the transition isn’t rewarding or useful as a device in the context of the plot. It’s that the movie reinforces a harmful constant in American politics: the deification of saviors, the worship of the rich willing to appear to help the poor.
In The Batman, the Wayne family name represents something closer to Carnegie than Chávez. If only the lighting had anything closer to a “thousand points of light,” as well.