Review of The Batman

EDIT 3/22/22: It has been brought to my attention that the Riddler is NOT Thomas Elliot, no matter how I think that would make it work better narratively…

There’s a dull sound approaching you. It’s slow, measured, deliberate. You recognize it as metal against concrete, but the distinct thud, thud, thud betrays a hulking weight behind it. What malice lies in the darkness, what beast has its eyes and salivating mouth and hunger set on you? Every shadowed alleyway is a threat. The night is oppressive. Claustrophobic. The city has already turned itself into your coffin. And there: a pale and smudged face, emerging from the liquid dark, its features coming into clarity. Your tongue is coated with that oily film of an emotion—fear. Judgement has arrived, and you have run out of time.

Such gothic, visceral terror is the pulse of Matt Reeves’ The Batman. His version of its titular character features a relatively young Bruce Wayne, only 2 years into his stint as Gotham’s dark knight, played by Robert Pattinson. The film showcases a grimy, corrupt Gotham, and though there are obvious landmarks that make it out to be the story-equivalent of New York, there is a certain texture to its architecture and filth that turns it from a collection of dirty buildings into nightmare-fuel. While it certainly is not the Art-Deco dystopia of Tim Burton’s Batman (1989), this Gotham has an uncanniness to it—pollution saturated by orange hues, windows fitted with decorative iron grates—that imbues the movie with distinct style and unreality. Here, we can believe this is a city beyond saving.

There’s a lot I want to mention in this review, but I fear it would turn it into a technical rambling of the movie’s cinematography, sound design, and acting performances. Indulging in this film feels…like decadence in a lot of ways. Matt Reeves has certainly created a visual and thematic feast in the film’s 2 hour, 56 minute runtime. In order to focus my interpretation on this piece, I will first provide a brief spoiler-free recommendation: go watch the movie if you like the Batman mythos, the Neo-Noir genre, or serious and broody dramas. If you’re expecting MCU spectacle or superhero popcorn fodder, I suggest you look elsewhere, because while the movie does have high-octane action, it’s less fun cat-and-mouse chase, more slow-burn suspense.

For the rest of this review, I’ll be diving into SPOILERS, so be warned! In order to organize my thoughts around the experience better, I’ll be segmenting this review based on these categories: The World’s Greatest Detective, Sins of the Father, and Vigilante VS Public Hero. By doing so, I think I’ll be able to best summarize how the facets of technical performance and narrative were able to work together effectively, without having to connect disparate vignettes in rambly paragraphs.

First, The World’s Greatest Detective — recent depictions of Batman up to this point typically didn’t lean all the way into this aspect of the character. Matt Reeves not only leaned, he plunged, and the film’s neo-noir tone and flair fits well with this depiction. From Michael Giacchino’s somber and menacing score to Robert Pattinson’s very emo and broody Bruce Wayne, there is a cohesive vibe to the character that makes you believe he is observant to the point of obsessive, that his mind is always working on a case. I’ve seen some reviews criticize the distinct lack of a playboy persona, but I thought that it was quite a sensible character decision considering how this reclusive Bruce is out of practice from being in the public eye. The Batman and Bruce Wayne are one and the same here; he is haunted by his self-imposed mission and hounded by the guilt from his parents’ murder. These factors have burdened him with a single-minded focus that is primarily self-serving throughout the course of the movie.

Moreover, where previous films leveraged the modern tech and gadgets that make Batman ~ cool ~ it’s more of a means to end here. Even the high-tech contacts that repeatedly make an appearance are pulled from exhausted, red-rimmed eyes. There is a practical and archival feel to every piece of technology that I really appreciated, and it adds to the notion that the true machine at work is Bruce’s mind. It is this characterization that makes Batman and the Riddler’s test of wits one that is believable; you can tell that Batman is one step ahead of everyone else but frustratingly one step behind the Riddler. Jim Gordon is effectively used here as a sort of Watson to Batman’s Sherlock; we can hear the thought process because there is a dialogue and partnership between the two characters. The Riddler was a great antagonist for this genre, and his social media extremism brings a modern approach to the myriad of traditional riddles, ciphers, and letters. All in all, the grunge aesthetics of the film work well with its dark Neo-Noir concept to create a modern yet stylistic take on the character.

Next, there is a recurring Sins of the Father theme that is clearly biblical and influences every character arc. The biblical imagery was by far one of my favorite directorial choices in the film. Not only does the film start with an Ave Maria sequence in the Riddler’s POV, the song returns again and again as a musical motif alongside the drone of tolling bells, and it is story-relevant through how the Riddler had been a choir boy at Thomas Wayne’s campaign announcement. This then ties back into how Bruce’s father had basically been the cause for the Riddler’s father, begging the age-old question of if punitive justice carries through the generations—if the Riddler, Thomas Elliot, is getting his due by calling for Bruce Wayne’s death. Selina Kyle’s character arc is also enmeshed with this conversation of fatherhood, and we see that the history behind this triad of characters, Thomas Wayne and Edward Elliot and Carmine Falcone, now haunts the current generation.

We are then asked, what is legacy? Are Gotham’s systemic inequities and faults a result of ancestral sin? And, is the only solution to inherit and address these sins directly? I don’t think the movie really has an answer to these questions on a grander scale, but it attempts to show how justice manifests on a granular, individual level. Selina seeks personal and individualized revenge; the Riddler wants city-wide suffering; and Bruce has waged a futile, one-man war against corruption. Justice, then, becomes a question of punishment versus change. The movie insists that truth cannot hide in the past, and the lies that served as the city’s foundation have festered, which in turn have created the Riddler himself. The Batman forces us to ask: where does it all start? By pitting the concepts of Batman’s masked vigilantism and the Riddler’s anonymous extremism against one another, Bruce Wayne is forced to confront an uncomfortable reality: that by seeking brutal, punitive measures against the city’s crime, he has borne unintended, fatal consequences. He has perpetuated a cycle of violence through embodying vengeance, which the Riddler has further twisted by delusion. Thus, by the end, when the Riddler inflicts a flood of biblical proportion onto Gotham, Batman’s decision to become a messiah of sorts is a crucial one. In a gorgeously rendered sequence, he chooses personal sacrifice and cuts the electric wire, emerges from the water in a pseudo-baptism, and with a torch in hand, leads Gotham civilians through the dark. It’s not enough to save the city. I doubt the city ever will be saved, especially not by one man. But on a character level, it represents an entire shift in Bruce Wayne’s worldview.

This all brings me to the last section: Vigilante VS Public Hero. In the MCU, we have seen its heroes grapple with government control and international responsibility, precisely because they are public heroes who, from the start, have been involved in politics (Stark Industries and the Military-Industrial Complex, Captain America and American propaganda). In contrast, Batman has always been vigilante first and foremost; the city is corrupt because it’s institutions are rotten. He becomes Batman because he does not have faith in these systems. Thus, in The Batman, we see a sort of political uninvolvement on Bruce Wayne’s part—he is a reclusive billionaire that has chosen fists over fortune when it comes to “saving Gotham.” The Mayor-elect even mentions how his family has a history of philanthropy that he has since disregarded. This is an interesting tension to me because the real antagonist to Batman has always been the city itself; the Rogue Gallery supervillains are manifestations of Gotham’s depravity and lawlessness. At the same time, law enforcement itself has become part of the issue because it has been perverted by greed and brutality.

Hence, what will be forever unresolved is that the point of Batman, on a grand level, is to not need him anymore, but he can never trust the systems in place. I think this dynamic is something Nolan’s The Dark Knight did a fantastic job representing; Gotham needed to believe that there was righteousness somewhere in its city, even if Harvey Dent ultimately succumbed to the city’s corruption. There is no “White Knight of Gotham” in Reeves’ The Batman, but at the end, we see Bruce’s deliberate choice to become a symbol of hope rather than vengeance. He has become a public hero and even broadcasted during a humanitarian effort to save Gotham civilians. I’m fascinated by the implications of this decision. I can see it bleed into Bruce Wayne eventually embodying his typical playboy persona in order to reintroduce himself to high society and attempt to drive change there (though this also brings about more implications towards what is Bruce’s social responsibility as the heir to old money?). But what does operating in the daylight mean for Batman as a symbol? In what ways can he continue to chafe against law enforcement and systemic injustice if he now serves as a public figure himself, which is inherently a political position?

One can even interpret that the movie is trying to say that heroism in the light is preferable to vigilantism in the dark, which sounds nice on paper, but when taken into context seems to give a mixed message. I would so far as to say that the ending, for me, sullies the integrity of the Batman symbolism. The movie’s ending almost seems to suggest that “yes, trust in the system, because the system is better than one man’s justice, and reform is on its way” but I think this conclusion is a bit disappointing given the intricate puzzle of original sin and ceaseless corruption that pervades the entire story. It seems a bit too clean of an ending. I don’t want to say that the notion of hope is cheap or a cop-out, but I think entangling Bruce’s personal decision to become a symbol of hope with the vague political hope of “Bella Reál will be the Mayor that Gotham needs” comes off as forced. The former is a result of the movie’s entire build up and central conflicts, while the latter feels unearned and unrepresentative of the city’s struggle to emerge from the muck. Rather than a tension, hope seems to align the missions of Batman with establishment, and while he is not anti-establishment, it feels like a flat answer to not only the question of how does one save Gotham, but the much more compelling one: is the city’s soul, is any soul, salvageable in the first place?

Overall, I’m a sucker for The Batman’s artistic vision; it is a sumptuous delight to the senses, from eye-popping cinematography to a dark, rich score to complex character work. I would go so far as to say it’s my favorite Batman movie to date because of its commitment to the Neo-Noir genre and the palpable onscreen chemistry between the Bat and the Cat. However, it is far from a perfect movie and suffers from a bloated runtime as well as hand-wavy messaging towards the end. Still, I loved the gothic tone and biblical allegories that give this film a different flavor from its predecessors. It’s the little things too: Robert Pattinson’s eye darting underneath the mask, whiter against the smudged makeup; the tactile weight that comes with every action sequence; even Titans’ Jay Lycurgo making an appearance as an extra. The fact that there is such a plethora of content to plumb through and seek my teeth into is a testament to this piece, and I’m intrigued to see what other conversations come to the forefront from this movie.

(And, God, please have the Robert Pattinson and Zoe Kravitz combination return).