Hello Darkness, My Old Friend
A quick review of "The Batman"
After more than thirty years and nearly ten cinematic outings, it’s become something of a cliché to observe that each new Batman movie promises to give audiences a “darker, grittier” version of the character than they’ve seen before. This impulse toward progressively sullen takes on the Caped Crusader may well have reached its apotheosis with The Batman, the most recent installment of the series from director Matt Reeves and starring Robert Pattinson as the title character. It’s a movie that drowns in its own gloomy aesthetic and downbeat mood, one that offers up few if any themes beyond its own oppressively stygian atmosphere.
Indeed, if The Batman says anything at all, it’s hard to hear it over the relentless din of the movie’s funereal tone. In that way, it’s similar to Dune – a film likewise so enraptured with its own aesthetic and stylistic choices that it neglects the humanity of its characters and fails to articulate cogent or compelling themes. As far as The Batman goes, though, it’s as if Reeves means to bludgeon audiences to death with the overwhelming sense of claustrophobia he creates throughout the movie. Michael Giacchino’s impressive if occasionally bombastic score helps enormously on that front, but whenever Nirvana’s “Something In The Way” or Franz Schubert’s “Ave Maria” appear the movie verges on the bathetic.
To its credit, The Batman does possess at least a semblance of character development. But overall this growth feels rushed and mostly unearned, crammed into the final act of an already overlong movie. At best, The Batman can be taken as sort of a meta-commentary on the character of Batman himself – namely, how his superficially “dark” aesthetics both explain his enduring popularity and lead many of the Dark Knight’s fans to miss the point of the character almost entirely. After all, Batman is a superhero who famously refuses to use guns and does not kill; in The Batman, for instance, he frequently claims to be “vengeance” but stops Catwoman (a seductive Zoë Kravitz) from exacting revenge. It’s a tension (if not an outright contradiction) that’s run throughout the character’s storied mythos for decades now, one The Batman gestures at but ultimately does little to resolve.