Gotta disagree here. This is my favorite Batman movie. Gorgeous visuals, atmosphere, music.
I admire the new films, too, but they're almost a little too "realistic." To my mind, there's nothing in them to match, say, that great shot of the Joker's bleached hand rising from the green toxic waste, or the Batmobile racing through a shadowy forest with autumn leaves blowing in its wake.
That's pure pulp poetry!
Some good backgrounds and models, just not shot very well. Design work was nice, it just comes together badly and looks cheap. Studio lot sets don't do the movie justice at all and wastes the effort by Anton Furst. The "acid-waste" was cartoony. The models look fake, especially the bat plane.
But it wasn't meant to look real. I loved the fact that it looked like a color version of an old Universal monster flick. The electrical machinery in the chemical factory looked like something straight out of Karloff's FRANKENSTEIN--but with the added bonus of a 1930's pulp-style Batman.
And why shouldn't the toxic waste look cartoony? It's a comic book origin story.
It's funny. When the movie first opened, it saw it twice--with two very different groups of friends.
The first time was with a bunch of hardcore, comics-reading, convention-going scifi fans. We all loved it . . . and breathed a collective sigh of relief that it wasn't a campfest like the Adam West version.
The next time was with some co-workers from the office. They were disappointed. Why wasn't it as funny as the tv show? Where were the cartoon sound effects? They thought it should have been campier . . . .
How times change.
