The Batman

The Batman (2022)
dir. Matt Reeves
Rated: PG-13
image: ©2022 Warner Bros. Pictures

The critical rap on most DCEU films – especially those with Zack Snyder attached, like Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice – is that they’re too tonally dark. They’re often too visually dark, for that matter. While titles like the aforementioned Batman v Superman left me feeling beaten into submission and desperate for a way out, the new take on the Dark Knight from director Matt Reeves, The Batman, had me mesmerized, fully in thrall to the world Reeves created. His film is every bit as dark as Snyder’s, tonally as well as visually. (Cinematographer Greig Fraser, who also shot Denis Villeneuve’s gorgeous 2021 adaptation of Dune, listed Gordon Willis’s muted look for The Godfather as inspiration for The Batman.)

So, why did The Batman work for me where BvS failed? Improbably, I think it’s because of proximity to reality. Snyder’s films are bleak, depressing, and oppressive. They also don’t feel particularly connected to the real world in any tangible way. It’s easy to disconnect from them because the worlds created within them feel divorced from our own. The Batman is so hypnotic – and, consequently, so disturbing – because Reeves, who wrote the screenplay with Peter Craig, has crafted a world that isn’t ours, but that feels (to my great dismay) like it will be ours in another three to five years. That feeling is what fueled most of my discomfort and sick fascination while watching The Batman.

Foregoing the World’s Greatest Detective’s origin story, Reeves set his movie in Batman’s early days of crime fighting. Millionaire playboy – the movie self-consciously downplays that famous descriptor of the character – Bruce Wayne has been fighting crime as the Caped Crusader for two years. He’s established himself in the minds of Gotham citizens, but he’s still learning his new trade.

When a new threat known only as the Riddler begins leaving cryptic messages for Batman on his victims’ bodies, our hero must decipher the clues to stop the killer. That’s the biggest and most interesting departure that Reeves takes with his version of the franchise. The Batman is a serial killer thriller in the vein of David Fincher’s Se7en and Zodiac. It owes a huge debt to both those films. Reeves has said he was inspired by the real-life Zodiac Killer when forming his version of the Riddler character.

Meanwhile, the greater Gotham area feels overrun with psychopaths. In the opening sequence of the movie, we see a gang of white men – think Proud Boys – on a subway car who target and follow an Asian man when he gets off the train. The nearness of this Gotham to our own reality is established in this early scene. Reeves showcases the real-world ugliness of bigoted assaults on Asian-American citizens during the early days of the pandemic, when our then-President disgustingly called COVID-19 the “kung-flu.”

Batman steps in, as you would expect, to stop the gang from assaulting (and, we’re likely supposed to assume, killing) the Asian man. Here Reeves complicates an already famously complicated hero. Much of the film and characters in it are fueled by rage. Batman is no exception. One of the central questions at the heart of The Batman asks if vigilantism as practiced by the Caped Crusader is really any different from the criminal behavior he’s fighting. When we see Batman beat one of the white gang members mercilessly and possibly to death – the movie doesn’t make it clear – we see that Bruce Wayne is as broken of a person as anyone else in Gotham.

The lurid violence Reeves uses in his movie as a signifier of the rage and vengeance that engulfs Gotham is shocking. I stumbled out of The Batman feeling like I knew exactly what audiences in 1971 felt like coming out of the first screenings of A Clockwork Orange.

It seems that Reeves himself felt it, too.

In one sequence, we see the Riddler descend upon one of his victims in order to fit him with a bomb collar. In a preface to one of the later editions of Clockwork Orange, author Anthony Burgess speculates that he invented the half-English/half-Russian slang of Nadsat as a way for him to distance himself from the orgiastic violence he was writing about. In the aforementioned attack, Reeves intentionally blurs the field of vision. The violence that the Riddler unleashes upon his victim is rendered as out of focus shapes engaged in unspeakable acts, because showing it with perfect clarity might have been too much.

And yet, as with Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant and unsettling film version of A Clockwork Orange, Reeves has made a film that is pushing the boundaries of cinema. The Batman is possibly the most avant-garde, experimental art film that has come out of Hollywood since the 1970s.

For those of us who have become disenchanted with the Marvel house-style, which favors crisp, clean cinematography and is safe for all audiences, Reeves’s dark vision sets a disturbing new template for the comic book movie genre. Interspersed between the bleak action set pieces are lyrical passages where sight and sound come together to create haunting visions. Powerhouse composer Michael Giacchino’s unsettling score – the main theme features a relentless repetition of only two notes – is a big part of the dark tone Reeves has crafted.

The cast that the director assembled for The Batman works in perfect concert with the overall effect of the movie. Robert Pattinson’s Dark Knight is the most psychologically disturbed version of the character we’ve seen to date. He’s almost wholly uncomfortable as Bruce Wayne, and his obsession with seeking vengeance as Batman is practically all consuming. The movie feels the same way; we see Pattinson as Wayne in only a handful of fleeting scenes.

Zoë Kravitz is mysterious and broken as Selina Kyle/Catwoman. Kyle is initially an outsider, only tangentially connected to the larger mystery within the plot, until we discover secrets from her past that make her a much more central figure than we at first realize. The great Jeffrey Wright turns up in a handful of scenes as GCPD Lieutenant James Gordon, who is committed to justice and teams up with Batman to catch the Riddler. John Turturro is quietly menacing as mob boss Carmine Falcone. I have nothing more to offer other than what I wrote in my notes as I watched the movie: “John Fucking Turturro!”

I don’t want to be responsible for spoiling it here, so I’ll only relate my complete, jaw-dropping flabbergasted-ness at the actor portraying Oswald "Oz" Cobblepot, who will presumably, in future installments, ascend to his proper title of the Penguin. I cannot overstate the transformation this actor underwent for the role. Even though I went into The Batman knowing who was playing Cobblepot (I unintentionally saw internet spoilers), I still could not recognize him in any way. The actor plays Cobblepot as a chillingly ruthless and brutal mobster.

If we’ve learned anything from past film adaptations of Batman, it’s that the villains are often more magnetic than the hero. Both Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger’s interpretations of the Joker are prime examples of this phenomenon. Paul Dano as Edward Nashton/the Riddler is no exception. I could not look away (though I often wanted to) from Dano’s Riddler. He is crazed by his rage and his own twisted sense of vengeance. There is one moment in Se7en when the vicious serial killer John Doe (as portrayed by Kevin Spacey) screams the word “detective” to get the attention of his hunters when he is ready to be caught. Dano plays the entire role inside of that scream, to horrifying effect.

There’s a funny meme going around about the ever-increasing murkiness of each successive film iteration of Batman:

Aside from the increasing literal darkness within the frame of each movie, the same darkness is engulfing the tone and themes of the films as well. The Batman character is probably the most explicitly right-wing/authoritarian superhero, outside of the Punisher. I was never quite able to get a handle on where The Batman falls in its endorsement of these right-wing leanings.

On the one hand, Batman is a protector of the powerless, like the Asian-American man we see in the opening minutes of the picture. On the other, he, and the movie, explicitly endorses going around the law, if it means getting results, like when he helps GCPD make an end run around getting a warrant.

In a furthering of the “you complete me” ethos from Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight, there is also the sickening realization that the Riddler sees himself and Batman as two sides of the same coin. The mayhem that the Riddler unleashes late in the film by harnessing a group of fascistic terrorists – read: MAGA supporters, in another fun-house mirror reflection of our own world – to carry out his ultimate plan makes the thin line between justice and vengeance disturbingly clear.

All these ideas were swirling in my head when the most unexpected moment happened. For perhaps the first time in a Batman movie, we see a genuine look of fear on the Caped Crusader’s face as he tries to rescue some of the hapless citizens of Gotham from the terror unleashed upon them. That moment gives way to something else we don’t often see in this franchise: Batman helping those same nameless citizens out of danger by personally leading them to safety. Matt Reeves has created the most complex Batman film yet. It disturbed me, but like all challenging pieces of cinema, I couldn’t stop thinking about it after it was over.

Why it got 4 stars:
- I really wrestled with this one. The Batman is disturbing in its graphic depiction of violence and its dark themes. But Matt Reeves has made something that is sickly fascinating. The storytelling and performances are a wonder to behold, even if I felt a little queasy as I was doing so.

Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- In a further sign that the MPA is a functionally useless organization when it comes to film ratings: it is absolutely nuts that this movie is rated PG-13. The graphic violence contained in The Batman probably shouldn’t be viewed by a 23-year-old, let alone a 13-year-old. But, there are no bare breasts, so kill, torture, and maim away, as far as the MPA is concerned, I guess. Anyone who knows me knows that I don’t usually wring my hands about this sort of thing, but the fact that this movie carries this rating is baffling. It shouldn’t be, though, because I worked in a video rental store in college (kids, check out the documentary on Netflix called The Last Blockbuster if you want to know what I’m talking about). I once had a parent/customer approach me to ask about the sexual content of a particular title (I wish I could remember which one). He told me he had no problem with his kid watching violence, but sex was a complete no-go. If you ever wonder what’s wrong with our society…
- I think one of the things that bothered me most about The Batman is the idea that the behavior depicted in it is considered entertainment. Most parents are probably so stressed out and pulled in so many different directions, they likely wouldn’t think twice about sending their kid to see a superhero movie without doing any research first. A Clockwork Orange is art. I suppose you could consider it entertainment, but 60+ years of Batman, from Adam West to (now) Robert Pattinson, is a totally different cultural beast all its own. I’m happy Matt Reeves made a piece of art here, but I hope people research (maybe by reading a few reviews!) before going to see it.
- Along the same lines, while watching The Batman, I wondered if it’s getting harder to treat other people with respect, dignity, and kindness if this is how we’re portraying the world in our entertainment. I’m not for whitewashing the problems in society, but seeing it depicted this way has to have some sort of effect on the society that watches this kind of movie as pure entertainment.
- I didn’t mention Andy Serkis in the role of Alfred. The motion capture titan (his work as the ape Caesar in the latest Planet of the Apes series is spectacular) is very good in the role, and the movie gives the character stakes that (I think) we’ve never seen in a Batman movie up to this point.

Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- I saw this at my friendly neighborhood Alamo Drafthouse. It was an early afternoon screening on a Saturday. The house wasn’t too full, and I have no idea if anyone else there was as affected by the movie as I was.