Fresh Point of View on The World’s Greatest Detective
Potential (minor) spoilers ahead!
I’ve always said this but everytime I watch a great film, it just feels like eating good food. I came out of the theater feeling like I just came out of fine dining. Matt Reeves’s The Batman (2022) felt like that kind of film.
It’s dark, it’s grimy, it’s hopeful. It’s what a superhero film should be. The Batman gives a fresh personality, a new point of view to Bruce Wayne that is rarely touched on in his live-action counterparts. The choice to show him in his earliest days as Batman and him finding his bearings in his relatively new adopted alternate identity could be one of the best choices made for a superhero film lately. By doing so, Reeves made Pattinson’s Batman much more relatable in the sense of everyone struggles with the way they see theirselves too. He’s no womanizer yet, he doesn’t exude the same borderline pompous persona Bale’s Bruce Wayne had in The Dark Knight Trilogy, and that somehow just makes him much more human.
“He doesn’t know how to be Bruce Wayne, (in this movie)” -Matt Reeves
All the characters are well-built, with layered motivations, and it helps that all of the actors are giving excellent performances. Robert Pattinson exceeded all expectations as both Batman and Bruce Wayne, with his emotive eyes shown in his silent moments of grief. Especially in the second act with the revelation regarding the Waynes, as Bruce Wayne staggers, it’s not the typical grandeur portrayal of grief everyone usually praises but you can see his anguish and how he’s so dumbfounded by the news. How he starts questioning his own reality and principles. The moment then came again as he had his little moment with The Riddler when we find out that both our main protagonist and antagonist are paralleling each other in their own ways — The Riddler’s much more twisted, at that. The scene between them also became a testament to Paul Dano’s acting as much as Pattinson’s as he rambles on about the similarities between him and the Bat.
There’s not a single weak link in that cast, as Jeffrey Wright made a great Jim Gordon — with an even better dynamic between him and Batman — and Zoë Kravitz made an excellent Selina Kyle/Catwoman. And though I was skeptical with the use of fat suit on Colin Farrell as the Penguin, it didn’t hinder him from being such a great Penguin and being such a great comic-book villain adaptation. Also, his accent! I’ve always hated the phrase “X is unrecognizable in new set photos of Y” because I don’t consider how unrecognizable an actor is in a movie as a measure of how good said movie is, but in this case, I really couldn’t recognize Farrell if I hadn’t known beforehand that he is playing the Penguin. His transformation was so mind-boggling to me.
And I love the way the film opens, with Bruce’s monologue about fear and how the bat signal meant so much more, how the signal itself is enough to stop injustices from happening. That was such a masterful way to introduce your main character, much more so when you did a red herring just beforehand, by opening the film from the point of view of your main villain.
Some people argue that the runtime was too long and it was dragging, I disagree. I thought the pacing in the film was excellent and you can pinpoint all the plot points and nothing, I mean nothing, goes to waste. The way Reeves utilizes that runtime to develop Bruce Wayne’s character and the grueling journey he has to go through in order to come to terms with what he is and what he does was just perfect. Every scene became what motivates the next scene and the next and so on.
Other than that, the three hour runtime doesn’t even feel enough when you’re constantly being fed by Greig Fraser’s astonishing cinematography. His use of colors, his choosing of lighting and the way he masterfully make good use of any source of lighting, whether they’re from gunshots firing off or from the neon street lights or the flare gun batman uses in the third act, they always look so calculated, so fitting in a film that is not only marketed as a detective thriller film, but branded as a revival of noir and reintroduction of noir to the mainstream. Reeves’s directing and his cinematography made the action sequences look so interesting, the car chase between Batman and Penguin alone made for one of the best action sequences I’ve seen in a film in a long time. The practicality of it all was admirable; some people said they didn’t like the way the cameras were mounted on top of the cars, on the bikes, but I love it! They’re interesting and out of the ordinary and they made the film look so much more complex. Not only that, the flare scene in the third act became one of my favorite shots in a film as Batman became a literal beacon of hope in the midst of desperation, a role which Wayne had denied himself in the beginning of the film.
Don’t even get me started on the scoring. God, the scoring was just haunting! Batman’s theme blaring everytime he walks in the room just made him much more menacing and imposing. It added so much to his character and to the surrounding theme of the film. Giacchino made a score that is specific to the Batman, and though Elfman’s theme will always be tucked in in a corner of my mind, you can’t convince me that Giacchino’s theme is forgettable. You hear the theme and you can see Batman; the score encapsulates the character.
The Batman was an example of the perfect adaptation of a comic-book character and an even better example of a different, interesting approach to a comic-book movie. I could go on and on and on to praise this film if I could and I’m fully excited to see what Reeves can bring in another rendition of the caped crusader.
