The Batman Made Me Feel Something (In The Way)
Despite easy to spot flaws, it reminded me of the films that made me fall in love with movies.
Obviously spoilers ahead
I can’t pinpoint exactly where I first heard it, but it’s been said that the most important time in a person’s movie-viewing life happens in their teenage years. I think it’s fairly simple why: For the first time, your brain is able to grasp concepts beyond just simple plot points, action, or punchy jokes. As your mind develops, you realize that there is a whole new tier of movies you didn’t even know existed, and as you take them in, they shape your perception of what a good movie is. For me, those movies included the following: Fight Club, There Will Be Blood, Se7en, American History X, No Country for Old Men, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Children of Men, and a few others that all share the common threads of arresting cinematography, deeply troubled dudes, and big scoops of gloomy, borderline nihilistic vibes. Despite flaws that many reviewers have picked through, The Batman transported me back to that magical time in my life. So yeah, I really did love it.
Let’s start with the way this movie looks, which seems to be receiving universal acclaim. There are so many shots in this movie—from the upside down view post car crash to the camera strapped to Batman’s head, pointed at his face as he flies through Gotham—that are both daring and gorgeous. On a technical level the use of light is stunning as is depth of field (wide shots captured with long lenses so objects or people in the foreground are blurry). But there’s something layered into much simpler shots that affected me on a deeper level. There are many moments in The Batman where the film’s voyeuristic leanings are the driving force, and I don’t mean when we are placed POV-style in a pair of binoculars. Nor does The Batman lean on comparatively low hanging fruit cell phone footage like in the new Spiderman flicks. Instead, Reeves’ (and cinematographer Greig Fraser’s) camera often manages to capture what our actual eyes would see if we were looking at Batman in the real world. To me, no other Batman movie has achieved or even fully attempted to do it this way.
The clearest example of this comes towards the very end of the film, right before (or after, I can’t remember and it doesn’t really matter) Batman lifts a piece of scaffolding off a screaming crowd in the middle of Gotham’s version of Madison Square Garden. Before that, we get yet another gorgeous art-level frame as Batman lights a flare in the dark, but as he wades through the water towards the metal, the camera simply looks on from a perch as this man—not a superhero—sloshes about. It’s these shots, not Pattinson’s messy hair, that made The Batman feel like a story about an actual person and the actual people he’s vowed to protect.
The score similarly oscillates between grandiose and minimal, and refreshingly, mercifully resists the urge to be yet another Hans Zimmer-type beat. I’ll be honest…when I heard Nirvana’s “Something in the Way” in the first trailer, part of me cringed. In 2022, Nirvana and its frontman Kurt Cobain have been so commodified (see: that fucking Foo Fighters movie that Twitter won’t stop trying to sell me on) that it’s nearly impossible to recapture the actual angst their songs first injected into youth culture. I was pleasantly and extremely wrong. The song is used only a couple of times in the movie, while the score also has a bass-y guitar strum motif meant to invoke it. Both add real heart and grit to the noir-inspired tone the film is going for, bottling a teenager’s idea of existential sadness and what I now know to be the full strength adult thing.
The scenes that crystalized all of the above for me were two-fold: the first being the when Batman initially enters the Iceberg Lounge, eventually meeting both Selena Kyle and The Penguin. As Batman moves about the (very) dimly-lit industrial space, his strides are labored and thus raw, real, and legitimate. The second was the sure-to-be-talked-about car chase, which places the viewer inside the chaos and cabin to the point that you experience each impact that both Penguin’s Maserati and Pattinson’s muscle car-inspired Batmobile do. (Also, all love to the score, but that sweet, sweet, V8 engine note roaring through Dolby surround sound might be my favorite sound in the movie.)
By comparison, Bale’s Batman, with all of his military-grade tech, felt invincible in the Tumbler. The new Batmobile is basically a stock car painted black—tough and presumably safe, but with thin, tinny construction and sans airbags. (Pattinson also rides a relatively normal-looking motorcycle around with a civilian-style backpack on.)
That vulnerability carries through to Pattinson’s performance as both Bruce Wayne and the Caped Crusader. While I do understand why people are tired of movies where the leading white man’s general direction seems to have been “just look angry all the time,” if any character might end up in a place that warrants always-on brooding, it’s a silver spoon man-child with no friends, endless money, dead parents, and a psychopath out to kill him. I also really don’t think Pattinson oversold it, either, wet bangs and all. Acting in the bat suit is all eyes and chin, and he makes the absolute most of them, aided once again by Reeve’s sympathetic extended shots that hover close to his Julia Fox-level eyeliner. If I have any critiques of any of the acting it wouldn’t be of R.Patz. Instead it would be the moments in which the real Colin Farrell can’t help but sneak through the heavy special effects makeup and even heavier Tony Soprano voice, and Dano’s somewhat generic Q-crazy tone, though that may be a) more on the writing than his delivery and b) a symptom of just how commonplace these kinds of wack jobs have become IRL.
When you add all of this up, you are left with a combination of something I haven’t felt in years: awe, unsettling dread, and real artistic inspiration. That Matt Reeves got a major studio to make this movie in this way is impressive even if it turned out to be a piece of shit (which again, it most certainly is not).
In short, The Batman is way more singular in its vision than it has any right to be. It’s certainly not perfect. There’s an unfortunate ham-fisted fan service sequel setup scene that I wish they’d have just left out. (The quintessential Joker laugh was one of the only actual whiffs in the entire movie and momentarily ruined the spell Reeves worked two and a half hours until that point to cultivate.) Yet, like the movies I fell in love with during my own angst-ridden years, none of these rather obvious flaws really matter, especially not with the benefit of hindsight. Ultimately The Batman is so much more than can be judged by normal movie review standards, which is to say, right now. As time goes on, I imagine this film’s legacy will come into clearer focus, and its missteps will, like Batman overlooking Gotham, become blurred. I wish I could say exactly what it is that I felt watching this movie and the ones that first instilled a sense of wonderment in me. If I knew, I’d have bottled it up and held onto it 15 years ago. Until then, I’ll keep turning up for movies like this.