Matt Reeves, Robert Pattinson have delivered the finest Batman movie about Batman

Directed and co-written Matt Reeves, The Batman has been a long time coming. It has been in development in one form or another since 2014, braving director, casting and screenwriter changes, production shutdowns, Covid-19 diagnoses, and even a death.
I watched The Batman on Friday, and wanted to let it stew in my mind for a couple of days to eliminate or at least minimise the recency bias I tend to have with Bat-movies. Nope, I still genuinely believe this is the finest Batman movie about Batman, as opposed to a film that just happens to have him in it.

A dark, beautiful, and visceral detective thriller with noirish style, imagery, and influences, The Batman is as much a superhero movie as The Green Mile was a prison movie — which is to say, not very much. Its hero does not have any special abilities beyond money, gadgets and expertise at physical combat. The main ‘supervillain’, a new version of the often cartoonish Riddler (played Paul Dano), is essentially a serial killer in the vein of the Zodiac Killer, similarly confounding his pursuers with clues, ciphers, and puzzles.

The trend of turning Batman and everything around him increasingly darker, which began with Keaton’s Batman in the 80s, has reached its logical culmination. Gotham City in The Batman is a living, breathing character in itself. A dingy, rain-soaked, decaying metropolis, grotesque in an almost Lovecraftian way, it has been rendered cinematographer Grieg Fraser in stunning, stark colours — lurid orange on black, for instance. It’s cinematically lovely with a grim beauty, only quite daunting. A place you would wish to know more about, but from a safe dance. We get only a glimpse of Arkham Asylum (called Arkham State Hospital in the movie), but it appears it is likely be a haunted mansion with gibbering demons as its inmates.
Although heavily stylised, Gotham feels real and lived-in. It is easy to accept the claim that the law enforcement exs merely on paper, and cops are either helpless or paid off the underworld. Thugs have infested its street and it is essentially ruled the mob.
Batmobile emerges out of the shadows like an elemental monster. (Photo: Warner Bros)
The criminal elements of Gotham are, however, afraid to go out at night, because the Batman also operates in the dark. The way Reeves and Fraser introduce Battinson is more like a boogeyman from a horror movie than a hero. More than most who have tackled the character, Reeves knows exactly what makes him so terrifying to criminals. We know he is just a man who dresses up as a bat, but for the more nefarious residents of Gotham, he is a myth, a phantom lurking in the dark, a symbol of a city that has had enough and is fighting back with a vengeance. Even the Batmobile emerges from out of the shadows like an elemental monster, leading to one of the most riveting car chase scenes since The Dark Knight.

Robert Pattinson earned his spurs playing psychologically complex, driven characters in indie movies, cementing his status as a versatile, all round brilliant actor. It’s like throughout his career he’s been working towards the Batman. Because in the cape and cowl, he is absolutely tremendous, vanishing completely into the role and giving a version of the character that is both familiar and unique. His physicality, mannerisms, and even the way he uses his fearsome appearance to quietly intimidate people is, well, classic Batman, and yet he brings little touches of his own.
Without the costume, Bruce Wayne appears to be a haunted, tortured man on the verge of psychological collapse, his eyes every now and then betraying the bottled-up rage inside him. With mask removed and black makeup around his eyes, he looks like a racoon, his vulnerability palpable. Unlike the Bruce we know from, say, the Dark Knight trilogy, with all his charm and faux frivolous playboy persona, this one is dishevelled with untidy hair, mirroring the grungy quality of his city.
A clear dichotomy between the two public personas — Batman and Bruce Wayne — is missing and might bother the purs, but this is a very custom-made portrayal of the character on part of Reeves and Pattinson. The lack of duality can be explained the fact that this is still a Batman-in-training, and would in future develop a public persona for Bruce Wayne — or Gothamites will put two and two together and figure out his secret identity.
Jeffrey Wright and Robert Pattinson in The Batman. (Photo: Warner Bros)
Batman’s most reliable ally, James Gordon, a lieutenant at this point, is played with characteric composure Jeffrey Wright, who should really narrate a few audiobooks in free time. The portrayal is both compelling and quite dinct from Gary Oldman’s always-on-edge Gordon in Nolan movies. He is one of the few in the movie not intimidated Batman, and amusingly, refers to him as ‘man’ (as in ‘whatever you want, man’), as though the superhero were his unruly partner.

Zoe Kravitz makes for an excellent Catwoman, with just the right combination of sass, wit, and vulnerability. Her fighting style is suitably feline and thankfully not over the top, and the relationship that she and Batman develop across the course of the movie is organic and has both physical attraction and scepticism we are familiar with from the comics.
Zoe Kravitz makes for an excellent Catwoman, with just the right combination of sass, wit, and vulnerability. (Photo: Warner Bros)
It is a perennial problem in even great superhero movies that the heroes are overshadowed their villains. The Dark Knight is possibly the greatest movie based on comic-book characters, but it is more of a Joker movie than a Batman one. Here in The Batman, the superhero has three foes to face, each bring their own flavour to the story, but the story stays focussed on Batman. John Torturro as the crime boss Carmine Falcone is clearly having the time of his life, and he is a joy in every single scene. So is Colin Farrell as the Penguin who, as many have noted, is slathered with layers of makeup, prosthetics, and a fat-suit and frankly looks a bit ridiculous, but he does bring a few moments of levity to a mostly gloomy story.
But it is the Riddler, eerily convincing as a durbed-loner-turned-serial-killer, who is the Big Bad, playing Batman and Gordon like a fiddle for most of the movie. He and Batman cancel each other out for they are two sides of the same coin. Both employ targetted violence as a weapon against the corrupt to achieve their goals — only the Riddler has more brutal methods has no qualms killing. When he and Batman finally end up in the same room, their uneasy chemry gives the viewer the payoff for all those procedural scenes that came before. The superhero completes his arc from an angsty seeker of vengeance to a symbol of hope and the protector of Gotham City.
The Batman rules.