A Film That Exists Only To Make Zack Snyder Look Like David Lean: THE BATMAN

Wow, The Batman was really terrible, and the reviews I’ve seen so far are way too nice. I wonder whether the film, and some other insufficiently-panned recent superhero films, is being helped in a way by the feeling that inhibits me as I try to write this Substack: That we deserve for these films to be horrible. We keep buying tickets for them, don’t we, even as we complain that franchises have eaten Hollywood? Or, not so much we deserve this, but when we expect anything from these movies, we are more ridiculous than the filmmakers.

In its efforts to make Batman interesting again—which you don’t really need to do, anyway—the film throws a bunch of ideas at the screen. What if we saw Batman do more detective work, the thing that often works best for him as a comic-book character? This film’s writer and director claims to be influenced by such agreed-upon ‘90s Batman classics as The Long Halloween, in which Batman has a series of complex real cases to solve. You can see how this works in the comics: all the narrative efficiency and propulsion of Philip Marlowe with awesome fight scenes, costumes, heraldry. But this combination needs space—even more space than this bloated three-hour film takes up. It doesn’t give you frequent enough action set pieces for a feature-length superhero movie; it would be more appropriate for one of the sequel TV shows to this movie that are in development, and which even I won’t watch. If you were really going to do a Batman-as-noir-detective movie, you would have to scale everything down to the point where it barely functions as a superhero movie. Setpieces would have to be scenes. The fights would have to actually hurt, to make you wince, as they do when you watch Marathon Man or Three Days of the Condor or The Long Goodbye. Batman’s costume would have to just be clothes, rather than near-impenetrable body armor. It’s difficult to imagine a studio forsaking the very things we expect from a Batman movie—the moments where he beats up fourteen burly dudes with machine guns, and the like—so the glimpses of Batman doing detective work that we get in this film are restricted to things like “Solving comically easy puzzles left by the Riddler,” “Finding the right guys to beat up,” and “Moodily rewatching clips from earlier in the film.”

So that’s one idea insufficiently committed to. Then the film also tries to have political themes. Superhero movies basically can’t get this right, and the more they try the worse they get. I hate the surely-cops-are-our-friends!!! politics of Superman (1978), but I prefer them to the nobody-is-anyone’s-friend-and-that’s-why-you-just-have-to-be-Stronger-Than-Anyone-Else politics of ‘90s grimdark comics. In this movie, the Riddler targets rich corrupt people. There’s a point in the movie where the Batman finally explodes at him, telling him that he’s a weird little freak who will die alone in a cell, which is very strange, because up to that point—neither we nor the Batman have learned about the final scheme he’s planning, which lengthens the movie by an unnecessary half hour at least—there are no grounds, within the film, to think that the Riddler is anywhere near the worst person on the screen. He has committed a string of murders, several of them unnecessarily brutal, but the people he’s killed are of a CIA-officers-who-brought-heroin-to-America’s-ghettoes level of evil. They are the sorts of people I would kill if I had the power to, although I would try to do it as quickly and painlessly as possible. Catwoman, who is the emo girlfriend of this emo Batman, basically agrees with the Riddler—at one point, she gives a little speech about the “white, privileged” people he’s gone after, and I wondered whether this was shoehorned into the script during the summer of 2020—and in following up the Riddler’s clues, Batman becomes the villain’s secret sharer in the task of revealing how compromised Gotham City’s elites are. This might have been an idea for a good film, too—one where the villain turns out to be right, only a little too hasty in his methods, a little too cynical, but where Batman in turn realizes that he has had too high an opinion of officialdom, and they achieve a kind of Hegelian synthesis. This is a decent idea for a superhero movie, but it looks too much like a critique of power, so the Riddler has to turn out to have one more trick up his sleeve—one that kills lots of innocent people and doesn’t fit at all with his announced aims and objectives up to this point—and we get a final act that has the same queasy kick to it that the bomb-at-a-football-game scene in Dark Knight Rises did, the same feeling of our real fears being sold back to us at a markup.

The movie hasn’t got a clear moral code, and neither does its Batman. This also could have been fun: a comedy where Batman is a douchebag who everyone around him reins in. (The Lego Batman movie did this, and as sad as it is that money was spent on making such a thing, and by me on seeing it, that’s a much better movie than this is.) Robert Pattinson, as Bruce Wayne/Batman, has ‘90s emo hair (wildly impractical) and sulks all the time. He treats Alfred like absolute shit. He slut-shames Catwoman. He has the usual Batman no-guns policy (a policy that the Zack Snyder movies had unfortunately jettisoned), but he is otherwise extremely aggro. There’s a heavy-handed pair of moments where he describes himself as “vengeance” and then, at the very end of the film—spoilers for something incredibly stupid—he hears one of the Riddler’s thugs describe himself the same way, following which he does a voice-over about how he has to be more than just vengeance, he has to be Good. This movie does not trust us to follow its themes at all; it underlines them in multiple colors of highlighter. But it might well do so, because it keeps forgetting what its themes are. Batman doesn’t really act much like vengeance throughout the course of the movie. If he were Vengeance he would just let Catwoman shoot whoever she wants; he would join her. He would help the Riddler. His arc in the film is: at the beginning he’s Moody and Vengeful; then for most of the film he’s just kind of a constipated puritan; then he’s Moody and Vengeful again at the very end, triggered into beating a Riddler-henchman almost to death, just so they can do the thing with the callback. The film also tries to weave in a “Bruce overcoming trauma” sub theme just to add a little depth, and it ends up being one more item on the to-do list that is sort of half-done.

But more than its stupidity, its incoherence, its offensiveness, its weird, very 1994 obsession with the drug trade as The Absolute Most Corrupt Thing That Could Happen In a City, the movie just has this sense of nothingness about it. In the way that there are whole X-Men films I’ve forgotten about, or that Superman Returns (2006) seems like a weird dream I had, this movie felt even as I watched it like an unsuccessful first installment in a canceled series that I’m rewatching by chance decades later. There’s just something barely-there about it. By the last half-hour I was just looking at my phone, something I simply don’t do in a theatre. The franchise-obsession of Hollywood has been considered from many angles, but here’s one that I’m not sure I’ve seen (which may just reflect the limits of my own reading): it feels like whole movies now exist just to make us change how we feel about older movies. The Batman doesn’t seem like an experience that I had, really: it seems like something that didn’t happen, a dark-matter that exists only insofar as it shifts my memories of watching Batman on screen, one that retrospectively changes my experiences of the Chris Nolan movies, the Tim Burton movies, and the Zack Snyder movies. It restores Nolan almost to the opinion that I had of him in like 2008, when I was soyfacing over how Rich and Complex The Dark Knight was—I was right to grow out of this opinion and wrong to let anything push me back in that direction—and it makes me just ache for the return of Zack Snyder, of whom I was once so dismissive. When you watch Batman v. Superman, you know you’re watching it, even if you wish you weren’t. To adapt a famous remark of Walter Sobchak’s: Say what you will about the tenets of the Snyderverse, at least it’s an aesthetic.