Just remember - you asked for this.
Batman (1966)
The tremendously popular Batman television series swung over to the big screen and spawned a cult classic. Honestly, though, like many a cult classic, this flick is only entertaining in moments. If you haven't ever seen the Bat-shark repellent scene, you have missed out. But that scene is often featured on specials as a clip, and it's better to see it that way than suffer through what is ultimately a relatively uninteresting movie over-stuffed with villains who all seem to be trying to out do each other mugging at the camera. Even the series' renowned camp humor is a stretched a little thin for a feature length story.
Batman (1989)
The modern Bat-films, of course, started in 1989 with Tim Burton's
Batman. Visually sumptuous with Burton's signature cartoon/Gothic charm, the film's casting was a bit of a head-scratcher back in the day. Michael Keaton hardly fit the comic book's vision of Bruce Wayne as a strapping genius with extraordinary physical prowess. And, in fact, that wasn't what Burton was going for at all. The thing to remember when viewing this movie is that it is an original interpretation of Batman, influenced by comic book visuals, but essentially it's own animal, and that animal is more akin to Burton's other work than it is to the tradition of the Dark Knight Batman. Like most Burton movies, it is quirky and entertaining.
One major strength of the movie is Keaton's oddball performance. He is bizarrely sweet and even sexy as a Bruce Wayne so on the edge that he appears distracted in his everyday life, finding power and dark transformation through the batsuit. He provides the movie with a solid center that evokes identification and empathy from the audience. One major weakness of the movie is Jack Nicholson's hammy Joker, which achieves only in four or five moments any sense of the character as the character. Mostly what's up on screen is Jack Nicholson ACTING, yes, in capital letters, and it interferes with one's ability to suspend disbelief. Worse even than the Joker is Kim Basinger as an inexplicable (and annoyingly screamy) love interest so unlikely that Alfred has to act completely out of character to make the love story work. Many fans strongly object to some liberties taken with Batman's origin, though the story within the film has a decent amount of dramatic resonance. More of a problem is that this Batman doesn't seem to mind blowing people up.
Atmospheric on the one hand, oddly stiff on the other, Batman '89 has genuine humor and some classic moments, but many feel it has not aged well. It is absolutely worth seeing, and probably should be seen by anyone who fancies themselves a batfan. But for those weaned on the Christopher Nolan movies, this will probably strike you as somewhat cartoony.
Batman Returns (1992)
Tim Burton helms a second movie, and like his first outing - this movie is strange. It starts off pretty interesting, but slowly unravels into sheer incoherence. The plot makes little sense and mostly flies on sheer bravura. The Batman who blithely dropped bombs in buildings full of people now grins sadistically as he straps a bomb into a bad guy's belt - it's a little disconcerting. Danny DeVito's Penguin is rather sickly fascinating, again for the first half of the movie, and then he just becomes sick. Christopher Walken as a Big Bad with minimal motive still manages to be entertaining, but mostly you just don't care since he's little more than a cardboard cutout.
Sounds like I hate this movie, right? But I don't. Once again, Keaton's charming turn as a somewhat less befuddled Bruce Wayne combined with a knockout performance by Michelle Pfeiffer as an alternately befuddled and kickass Selina Kyle manages to save this movie from itself. Despite rocket-wielding penguins (that is, actual flightless waterfowl with tiny rocket-launchers strapped to their backs in what may be the most painful three minutes on film since the "Can You Read My Mind" sequence in
Superman: The Movie) and a villain who is supposed to appear frightening when arriving in a giant rubber ducky that moves slower than your grandma driving a Buick,
Batman Returns has at its core a scorching, if off-the-wall, chemistry between the two romantic leads. It's worth watching for that and that alone.
Batman Forever (1995)
After some massive uproar from parents who took their kids to see
Batman Returns completely not expecting a drooling deformed villain, Warner Bros. turned the franchise over to Joel Schumacher with an order to lighten things up. He delivers with an entertaining, if relatively fluffy, piece that once again tends to give more screentime to the villains than our stalwart hero. It also returns to a stock love interest who makes no sense, and manages to shoehorn Robin in there as well, though as a teenager to circumvent those pesky child endangerment issues. Val Kilmer phones in a performance as Bruce Wayne, but Jim Carrey as a plainly homoerotic Edward Nygma (the Riddler) is fun. Tommy Lee Jones' Two-Face is useless. You could see it, you could skip it - it won't really matter.
Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (1993 - animated)
Yeah, I know they're listed out of order. Most people missed
Mask of the Phantasm during its original theatrical run, and it gained its reputation in circulation on video and DVD. A spin off of The Animated Series, this is actually one of the best Batman movies ever made. Before the Chris Nolan movies, it was by far the most faithful to the Dark Knight interpretation of Batman from the comics. Dear to my heart, it has a real film noir flair, combining a gangster story, a tragic love story and a somewaht weak, but still fun Joker story. Like most Batman stories, there's little justification for why Bruce Wayne would fall in love with Andrea Beaumont, but the love story itself isn't bad, and there's real character exploration of Bruce Wayne, something the live action movies didn't achieve until
Batman Begins. Definitely recommended.
Batman & Robin (1997)
The sheer amount of fanboy angst wasted on this movie makes it worth seeing. No, not really. It's bad. I mean, make-your-stomach-ache bad. Yet, even this flick manages a touching subplot that explores the relationship between Bruce and Alfred. But that takes up perhaps five minutes of screentime in two hours, and the character points are fairly standard - you're better off reading some good fanfic. This one tiny bit of real emotion certainly doesn't make up for the hideous, cringe-inducing one-liners delivered with scenery-chewing conviction from Arnold Schwarzenegger and Uma Thurman, two stars who are happy to overact for a nice fat paycheck. Avoid if at all possible.
Batman Begins (2005)
When big budget superhero movies began (counting that from
Superman: The Movie in 1979), they gleaned to a late 70s Silver Age sensibility. They were slightly tongue-in-cheek and fairly cartoonish, even while they had some level of sexuality and violence. They always ended with a clear sense of how the good guy had defeated the bad guy. Even smaller, darker pics like
The Crow and
Blade which both involved the hero dicing up villains, were fairly straight-up depictions of clearly good (if sometimes tortured) heroes overcoming truly nefarious evil men. For all that Tim Burton's depiction of Batman was considered dark in its day, it had an intense artificiality to it that kept it firmly in the realm of cartoons. Schumacher's camp sensibility returned to the days of the Batman tv show where everything was wink-wink at the audience. Both sets of films had big red flags waving on the screen - this is pure fantasy wish fulfillment silliness. Enjoy!
Batman Begins actually falls into this category of superhero films as well. There's little ambiguity to the hero, other than Bruce Wayne's early desire to murder his parents' killer, and the movie ends on an upbeat note with redemption and purpose found through his vigilante activities, despite their clear unlawfulness. What's new and different about this movie is the time and care it takes to explore who exactly Bruce Wayne is, and how he got around to making such a bizarre choice as to dress up like a bat to fight crime. This is not a story about "wonderful toys", or bizarre goons, or strutting about in fetishistic outfits like a drag queen out for a night of rollicking fun. It is a character study - a character study about a man who does something quite impossible, so still fantasy without a doubt, but a serious character study nonetheless.
In the comics Bruce Wayne's motivations are routinely reduced to anger and/or guilt over his parents' murders. One of the most significant things
Batman Begins does is to make the murder of the Waynes merely one building block in the edifice of Batman's creation. I was once discussing superheroes with someone who has been involved in the production of more than one major superhero blockbuster, and she just shook her head at the mention of Batman. "Why should I, or anyone, care about some rich guy acting out his personal pain by buying a bunch of toys and beating the crap out of criminals? He's just not relatable." It's a fair criticism, one that Sam Hamm, writer of the 1989 film
Batman agreed with. In his introduction to his graphic novel
Batman: Blind Justice, Hamm says when he was invited to write that story, he sat down and contemplated Bruce Wayne's motivations. He eventually came to the inescapable conclusion that Bruce was a spoiled rich man who irresponsibly uses his power to selfishly make himself feel better through violence. Not a flattering portrait.
Where
Batman Begins triumphs is that it takes this question head on and makes of it the very core of Bruce's journey. His oldest friend, Rachel Dawes, tells him flatly the difference between justice and revenge - and the difference is selfishness. Then, in what has to be my favorite scene in the movie, a criminal looks Bruce in the face and taunts him about his mopey self-indulgence. And in a brand new moment in the Batman story, Bruce throws away his money so that he can taste desperate. It places him in a completely new orientation to heroism. While previous stories in the comics have Bruce traveling the world and suffering hardship in order to train his mind and body, none have ever assigned it this reasoning before, and it is this, finally, of which a truly compelling character is made. Bruce's journey from pained rich boy to angry seeker to driven vigilante focuses this movie on character more so than any superhero movie yet made. Christian Bale's performance is earnest and committed, evoking both the broken child deep within the character, and the fierce warrior that he becomes. It is also surprisingly dotted with a warm humor that has long been missing from the character of Bruce Wayne in the comics.
Nolan and David Goyer, the screenwriter, introduce some delightful new elements, most notably the reworking of the character of Lucius Fox. Played with impish delight by Morgan Freeman, Fox doesn't seem fooled by Bruce for even a moment, and yet his motivations for going along remain intriguingly obscure. The inspired casting of Gary Oldman, who positively channels the human, heroic Jim Gordon of
Batman: Year One, and Michael Caine, who brings a loose familiarity never before seen to Alfred Pennyworth, adds solidity to Batman's support system.
Batman Begins also does something relatively unheard of in Batman movies as well as just about every other medium - it creates a love interest who is believable. Most superhero stories are written by guys who are mostly concerned with producing a wish-fulfillment fantasy of being a badass, who maybe gets a little tail in the end. Thus, most superhero love stories boil down to "he fell in love with her because she was really hot". But even a cursory analysis makes it plain that Bruce Wayne is a particularly difficult character to write a convincing love story for (as readers of fan fiction know all too well). This is a man whose looks and money mean he can have any woman he wants, but he apparently sublimates most of his sexual energy into crime-fighting, and works all night every night. He desperately fears happiness, and particularly romantic love, for it equals death in his mind, and his survivor's guilt probably makes him feel it's a betrayal of his parents to actually find happiness. Rachel Dawes, however, is able to represent justice and goodness to Bruce, as well as an innocent time from before his life was ripped apart. She is dedicated to fighting crime, she's smart, and she'll stand up to him without hesitation. It makes absolute perfect sense that he would love her, and desire her approval. It also makes perfect sense that she would reject him, at least for the time being. Her lovely line, "The man I loved, the man who vanished - he never came back at all. But maybe he's still out there somewhere..." both outlines the deep changes wrought in Bruce over the course of the movie, and again add an entirely new element to the Batman mythos. This Bruce Wayne thinks Batman is merely a temporary measure, not a lifelong commitment. That was a brilliant innovation for the telling of Batman's story when you only have two or three installments to do it in. It adds a level of inner conflict that plays out with harsh consequences later o.
The final innovation of
Batman Begins is the rescuing of a villain. In the comics, Ra's al Ghul is sort of a bad Bond villain knock off. Nolan and Goyer merge Ra's to Henri Ducard, a mercenary Bruce trained under until he found out Ducard was an assassin for hire. They also give Ra's a new motivation - to restore balance to a corrupt world by periodically destroying the world's greatest city when it reaches the pinnacle of decadence. Many found this a tad convoluted. I adore it. It allows the focus of the final struggle to be Gotham, which is exactly as it should be. It is the city that Bruce loves and protects, and it is the city that any villain must want to destroy. Liam Neeson plays the father-figure mentor and corrupt villain with equal control, bringing Bruce's struggle to a close when he has to "destroy the evil father", who represents revenge, in order to find the light within and dedicate himself to justice.
Despite a clumsily cut climatic sequence,
Batman Begins is not only a triumph of storytelling, but one of style as well. As far removed from Burton's and Schumacher's sound-stage constructed Gothams as it is possible to be, this movie places the city in the world, a statement made explicit by the bird's eye shot from the plane provided as Bruce returns home. The cool blue, gray and sepia-toned lighting of the cinematography is beautiful, but it also conveys a decidedly noir flavor of urban starkness. While much fan angst has been spilt over the quick cut, up close fight scenes, they convey a sense of speed, power and mystery that are exactly what an attack by Batman should feel like. The movie is well-paced, with compelling villains, and a more compelling hero. It is one of the best superhero movies ever made, and one of the best Batman stories ever told.
I'll spare you my even longer look at TDK - at least for the moment...
I don't see it.
