Review: The Gotham Bell Tolls for Matt Reeves’s ‘The Batman’
“Let’s play a game, just me and you.”
In the last ten years, there have been three live-action Batman incarnations on the big screen (four when you count animated). Everyone knows Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, a landmark cultural phenomenon responsible to some degree for the superhero landscape we see today. Then came Snyder’s short-lived Bat-ffleck, retired by way of studio mismanagement and misguided universe building. And now we have director Matt Reeve’s Nirvana-tinged, moody caped crusader making his debut.
His arrival comes in the midst of the DC extended universe’s dismantling, when Warner Brothers appears to be signaling a preference for one-off labels for their DC brand going forward. With Reeves’s take on the Dark Knight falling in this category, he proposes: “What if Batman actually got a mystery crime thriller film worthy of his status as the world’s greatest detective?” The answer to which nets us The Batman, one of the most invigorating and idiosyncratic super hero films in quite some time.
One of the film’s major strengths lies in how it constructs the myth of the Batman, played here by everyone’s favorite sparkling vampire Robert Pattinson. Many cinematic iterations make appeals to what Batman stands for, with Nolan’s version doing it the best. The differentiator here is not only in the framing of the myth, but also how it becomes central to the on screen presence of Reeve’s rendition. At our point of introduction, the Batman has taken up vigilante justice for two years. Much is to be done in Gotham, and while Batman’s impact can’t readily be seen, it can certainly be felt. The film’s opening hooks you with an ominously dark montage of criminal incidents across Gotham narrated by a vengeful Bruce Wayne thinking on his efforts. Crime still runs rampant, citizens still live in fear, and police still turn a blind. But in the shadows, around the corner, and when you least expect it, Batman may be waiting, ready to exact brutish violence as a form of measured justice. Criminals may not fear the police, but they are afraid of an encounter with the Batman, and it’s this concept of fear as a psychological deterrent that evinces Batman’s urban legend status.
It’s clear that both David Fincher’s Zodiac and Seven influenced The Batman. Reeves and co-writer Peter Craig lift the serial murder-mystery plot from Fincher’s Seven and graph it directly to their script — replacing Kevin Spacey with the Riddler, jettisoning a ‘seven sins’ motive and swapping it out with a reoccurring vengeance theme, and retaining the murky moral crusade that motivates our detectives.
The Batman also places an emphasis on the surrounding filth like Seven. Los Angeles in Fincher’s Seven and Gotham are both extraordinarily seedy places where no amount of heavy downpour can wash away the crime-ridden decay taking over the streets. In deep shades of brown and black with a thick layer of dirt, both locales are visual manifestations of social decline that our protagonists come into bitter friction with. As both Detective David Mills and Bruce Wayne embark on their moral crusades, their murderous adversaries test the limits of their convictions with narrative trials that build out the plot’s mystery.
With regards to Fincher’s other serial murder film, the Riddler becomes a pseudo-copy cat killer for the Zodiac, placing cryptic clues written with poor penmanship at crime scenes and adorning a similar crosshair, calling-card logo. For most of the film, he remains offscreen, letting the film’s mystery uncoil one victim at a time. His motive is also not unlike that of Batman’s — the two finding themselves on the opposite sides of the same coin when it comes to vengeance. However, the Riddler just so happens to be characterized as an internet incel in the film, which is a can of worms the film bravely opens in the third act. As soon as the Riddler steps out from the shadows —played by Paul Dano with a going for broke performance — the film becomes increasingly frayed as it tries to raise the stakes and reach beyond the small-scale dynamics of the murder-mystery plot that runs the first two hours of the film.
Reeve’s inclusion of incel culture could be a product of our times, but I think it merits more dissection than it’s given here. In the span of its nearly three hour run time, it is relegated to a character trait, and one that evokes cringe more so than the fear brought on by the Riddler’s offscreen presence in the first two-thirds — Paul Dano doing a YouTube style intro for an Anarchist Cookbook-infused video is funnier than you might think.
That being said, the first two hours of this film contain some of the best comic book material put to screen in some time, certainly since Into the Spiderverse. American blockbusters of this scale with an actual sense of direction are a dying breed these days, but Reeves and company make idiosyncratic choices that results in a film that feels inspired. While some may be tired of the dark and gritty aesthetic, it is the right choice here in large part because the (serial) murder-mystery plot goes hand in hand with a perturbed bleakness, a theme heralding from noir from which this film draws influence. Complimented by a forebodingly dark and ominous score from Michael Giacchino, Reeves knows how to work the ebb and flow of action to deliver on four or five moments that are truly spine-tingling. Batman unloading into a band of criminals with the fury of God and the conviction of vigilante justice elicits both an unsettling fear and cinematic sensationalism. For me in particular, the bat-mobile chase sequence is so remarkably shot and choreographed that I had to hold myself back from clapping at my press screening. This type of gratifying cinema is what I think makes The Batman so great. It’s just one villain and one grand finale away from being truly exceptional.
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