“I am the shadows."
It’s been a long time coming for Matt Reeves’ The Batman. An entry in the Batman legacy distant from the DCEU, with sights set on establishing a secular universe of its own. Starring Robert Pattinson, Zoë Kravitz, Paul Dano, and Jeffrey Wright, The Batman is engulfed in the towering gothic architecture of Gotham City to explore Bruce Wayne and Batman in a furiously passionate, politically charged noir. It may have a few chinks in its armor, but the emblems of an 83-year-old icon buff out the legacy of the character as a staple of cinematic storytelling.
The Batman is a film that defines itself by the atmosphere. Meaning that the film never stops working to make sure each piece of fabric, woodwork, or mechanical construction is supposed to feel like it was built to embody a world full of ideas. Every building is a mangled maze that treats its characters as rats being used in a narrative experiment as avatars for an idea. Sometimes these avatars run into each other and share a distinct relationship meant to harness a specific mood unrelated to another. Whether it's romance, violence, or companionship, Gotham City is used as a landscape to erect statues of this expansive roster of characters, and it’s accented by overwhelming score composition or lighting structures. The twinkles of love intertwine with the suffocating bass born of the shadows, that eb and flow into a breathtaking marriage of visuals and sound that seem to stitch together the fragments of these characters. All of whom are emotionally and physically tied to the blueprints of Gotham City, and how that architecture has swallowed them as they’ve grown into respective weirdos. They’re all a consequence of negligence, embroidered with a series of wounds around them that they have to reckon with. The Batman isn’t interested in solving riddles to be the answer to that reckoning, but to allow its characters to uncover the answers as to what they are in the face of that.
In the most screen time he’s had in a live action film, the iconography of Batman is portrayed as a terrifying curse. This lumbering force of fear is covered in battle armor that consolidates all of the pent-up emotion within Bruce Wayne. Oftentimes, the only time his life makes sense is when he can put on the suit and monitor dingy alleyways and abandoned train stations. Bruce Wayne is the phantom, and Batman is the physical transformation of spiraling emotions that evolves into the shard of sunlight that Gotham has been missing for so long. Much like David Fincher’s Seven, the atmosphere, tone, and mood are poured over with rain, and the tinge of dry, melancholic humor gives this world a brief sense of reprieve amidst the circumstances. At the same time, it’s only comparative to Seven in mood, but falls more in line with Sidney Lumet’s smothering politics, and Akira Kurosawa’s incomparable patience. This is where Matt Reeves finds the core of his interpretation in Batman, Catwoman, The Riddler, Penguin, and Carmine Falcone. They’re all products of a political tragedy that has a distinct meaning to each of them, that forces them to act in response to it throughout time, until all of their paths begin to merge. The decay that continues to build around them as a consequence of empty promises forms a cage around these animals trying to adapt to an underdeveloped habitat. Bats and cats, penguins and falcons begin to share the same space, and their instincts take over in an attempt to survive with and around each other. In the most feral sense, Matt Reeves understands that these characters are animals. Bubbling with romance and tenacity. Covered in latex, metal plates, ripped suits, and scars. They caw, howl, and purr with emotion as they try and maneuver a ravaged landscape in an attempt to fulfill their vision of what they believe Gotham should be. This is the backbone of the story, and for better or worse, its patient, if not never ending and fringing on being tedious.
The market for Batman is oversaturated and has been for some time. The Dark Knight effectively shifted the entire landscape of film, and there are so many stories of his between 2008 and 2022, that deducing where The Batman will go is unsurprising. It’s a lot of plot that is understandably beneficial, but it never feels urgent or excited about the premise of its revelations. It’s a winding fuse with a dazzling stick of dynamite waiting to explode, but watching that fuse burn down is exhausting. At the same time, that burn seems to service a broader catalog of emotions that are associated with Bruce projecting impossible expectations onto himself. The story that trudges through this plot does relish in his search for emotional connection that feels unbearably redundant, but it’s a distinct trait so ingrained in the culture of Batman that it has to exist to be a proper interpretation. For Matt Reeves and Peter Craig, their screenplay is obsessed with drawing out these moments to be as high strung as possible, but it feels a bit unsatisfying. There are countless reveals and revelations that are disappointing because they never manage to make it unexpecting. Potential is teased the entire time, but the end result is exactly what we thought it was from the very beginning. It leaves us wondering why any questions were asked in the first place, and if there is a rhyme to the riddle at all. This might have to do with how hyper obsessed this team is with establishing a world, but it leaves the plotting and narrative weaves a bit scrambled. Not that the story is unclear by any means, but a portion of its time remains unjustified when the artistic strokes paint the picture by the end of the prologue.
With that being said, The Batman feels like a monumental event. Runtime aside, the theater rumbles and the speakers crackle as the movie does. The hushed voices of the subjects hum with an astounding sense of uncertainty that elevates the ambience of Gotham City. Gunfire rips, and the muzzle flash blinds the audience as it flares across the screen between the pitch-black drapery around every source of light. Streetlights groan to life throughout the night, and the rain patters on railroad tracks and unstable thresholds. Gotham City is half-alive and teetering on collapse at the turn of every hour. Something that is truly emblematic of its roster of characters stumbling through overwhelming production design. Cinematographer Greig Fraser doesn’t whip the camera around with reverence or indulgence. He allows these sources of light masked by windows and projected by screens, to highlight how suffocating the avenues, canals, and shadows of Gotham are. On a similar level, Michael Giacchino turns in an impossible performance as the film’s composer. In a career full of average work, his score composition for The Batman is as good as advertised. How he chooses to incorporate leitmotifs of classical music by intertwining that with the prancing of Catwoman’s theme waging war with Batman’s theme as an opportunity to stoke the steamy coals of love is masterful. Underscoring all of it are the whistles of a choir winding its way around the corners of mystery that sounds like the ghosts of Gotham’s past are observing the monsters they’ve created. The effort within these two departments envelops the audience in a way that very few superhero movies understand how to. It’s almost as if you could peel the grime off the streets and pluck the sounds out of thin air.
Batman is a cornerstone of Hollywood. In some regards, it’ll be no different than what Tim Burton accomplished in 1989, or Christopher Nolan in 2005. The Batman will be a movie that inspires an entire generation of moviegoers who fell in love with this character and use it as the basis for what they want moving forward. This may not be the practical, “could be anyone”, approach that Nolan took, but Matt Reeves’ interpretation of Batman is that he is a nocturnal animal, and his gallery of rogues is no different. Night-clubs pulse to the rhythm of the night like it’ll never end, and just beyond those walls crime runs rampant. Incited by the calculated motivations of psychotic entities giggling and roaring behind masks despite the gusts of shadow racing around to stop them. Robert Pattinson’s Batman is invaded by the hurt and oppression of incomplete systems, collective failures, and individual sins. He longs for what was lost in adolescence. That feeling of a kiss, a handshake, a tear, is so foreign to him because Batman‘s tether anchors him to the streets of Gotham where money can’t absolve Bruce Wayne’s search for absolution. Unlike any other entry in the Batman mythology, no film has managed to master the hyper-obsession of being the Batman. What that expression of violence allows him to unleash as the Batman, that Bruce Wayne cannot. Matt Reeves masters this duality in an effort so overwhelming that a single experience won’t do justice to the devilish details littered across every floorboard, and between every building.
The Batman is staggering. A chilling howl into the night that is punctuated by the questions that plague a man having to come to terms with the legacy behind his scars.
“Who are you under that mask; or are you just hiding some hideous scars?”
“I am.”