Robert Pattinson IS The Batman

re: violence, I think there's not a lot of on-screen bloodiness, but what's implied is pretty brutal

the actual fighting goes hard in a couple scenes. the fighting at the end felt like it was inspired by the Batman: Arkham video game series, he's just grappling/punching/getting shot at/doing takedowns constantly

not to mention the Riddler's murder count, direct or indirect, is insanely high

Not sure if anyone else noticed it but there was a nice shout out to Good Time at the beginning of this.

I didn’t love the Bat/Cat romance - the actors have great chemistry but Bats acted like a jealous boyfriend almost from the moment they met and it felt like she should’ve socked him at least once early on for stalking her at home. Zoe Kravitz was terrific otherwise though.

Re Bruce Wayne: it’s implied that he hadn’t yet developed a Bruce Wayne persona at this point - seems to be a deliberate set up for the sequels where he’ll be forced to grapple with the Wayne family legacy. But RPattz is great as Batman, conveying a lot of rage and sadness with minimal dialogue and just the slightest shifts in body/eye movement. (I also think he’s kinda Bruce Wayne irl anyway, in that he has a reputation of being a total weirdo recluse but somehow still manages to show up at every cool Hollywood party and everyone wants to hang out with him.)

Loved the Riddler as Gotham’s Zodiac Killer/Jigsaw.

The main Batman score was very reminiscent of the Imperial March, that felt rather deliberate too.

it's just the cello part from 'something in the way'

I had no idea that was Colin Farrell as the Penguin until hours after the movie was over.

I very much enjoyed this. Very neo-noir.

Could have done with some mood-lightening at points (I mean Bogart movies were fuckin hilarious), but I liked that it wasn't an action-fest, more Batman the detective. and I enjoyed Riddler (surprised it was Dano!).

and yeah good call on Zodiac connection, he even says "This is the Riddler speaking" and uses ciphers, very obvious Zodiac allusion

the unnamed prisoner in Arkham at the end was confirmed to be The Joker, but they say he's not going to be in any of the sequels...which, frankly, that's fine, I'm tired of him being our only villain in the cinematic universe.

I enjoyed this as well. The score didn't register with me much during the film but there was a solo piano piece during the end credits that I loved a lot.

the discourse around this made me realize that Pattinson has been baconed or is at least on the trajectory

Interesting perspective here: my daughter, who has never seen a single Batman anything besides Lego Batman, apparently snuck in with a friend to see this yesterday and thought it was great.

this was ok. pattinson is probably my favorite of the modern batmans. the politics of a batman movie are never going to be good but this felt especially confused. turturro and farrell were really good. kravitz was solid, though I thought her chemistry with pattinson was just ok. overall too long and the last act didn’t work at all

what was the Good Time connection? I missed the first 5 minutes

the convenience store being robbed by one of gotham's criminals was called Good Times Grocer

Could have done with some mood-lightening at points

found myself cracking up at a lot of the overly serious scenes like sorry, a guy in a batsuit bellowing "I am... VENGEANCE." is objectively hilarious imo

also when they said the Riddler had 500 online followers and made it seem like it was a HUGE number

and Penguin making fun of Batman and Gordon for not knowing basic Spanish lol

the spanish thing was a serious side-splitter. but that was about it

i dunno, i think i went in a good mood cause i thought there was a lot of humour, just not wisecracking MCU kind of funny.

just little things like the forensics photographer following Batman around and taking photos of all the things that he was looking at, "thumb drive", the way Batman popped into the shot at the end of car crash, Selina calling him "vengeance" in every sentence...

There are lots of entertaining Batman movies but IMO the only "good" ones are Mask of The Phantasm, Batman Returns, and the Adam West one.

Always wanted to see a Batman-as-detective movie even if this one sounds cornily gloomy; I'm glad they seem to have avoided being influenced by the terrible Batman comics of the past ten years.

It was...portentous. I will give it this much, it maintained pacing surprising well for a three hour movie?

Yeah I thought it was paced well, definitely paced better than the Dark Knight, which to me felt longer. though I wouldn't have minded chopping off the final action scene in this new one and just letting it end on a down note. Good movie overall

i enjoyed this! i did not expect to enjoy this. i thought the substantial opening section was particularly good, as was the car chase.

the latter generating striking images and moments out of a submerged impressionistic feel which conveyed comic book images and kineticism in a new way - reminded me slightly of a bill sienkowicz feel.

there was something appealing about the fight scenes esp early that i couldn’t quite put my finger on and would want to see again - they felt appropriately bound by the confusion of dust ups somehow.

the overall emo tone worked surprisingly well too, generating a consistent melancholy and dream-like tone to it all. and yes, three hours is always too long, but it was fine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqvQeI_ekVA

Fizzles, you're not wrong re the Sienkiewicz influence on the visual side - they even got him to design a promotional poster for the film:

https://www.ign.com/articles/how-the-batman-poster-was-made-bill-sienkiewicz

Overall tho, I would say that this is the Jim Lee Batman.

oh, interesting! thanks WF.

saw this again last night. feel about the same, decent movie

colin farrell doing fat 90s deniro is by far the best part about this. A++

I just couldn’t stand the score. face-meltingly banal and dreary

also thought jeffrey wright’s scenes just didn’t work well at all. his gravelly, almost whispery tone of voice is too similar to the batman’s, and it makes their scenes strangely monotonous

wright is one seriously limited-range actor

I got to wonder what type of advanced degree one would need to have a career designing something like this below.

https://static3.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/The-Batman-Robert-Pattinson-Little-Caesars.jpg?q=50&fit=crop&w=960&h=500&dpr=1.5

I have eaten the Batman calzony

I'd suppose you would have to have a couple of engineers involved with such a piece of foodtech, if nothing else to come up with the die-cut to be able to make the dough.

But to think going through some industrial engineering program and perhaps the biggest project you ever worked on that people might 'know' was the Batman calzony is either hilarious or sad or both. Either way you got paid I suppose, Batman's got to bat and people got to eat pizza.

it’s not really a non-standard cut per se, but a fold introduced over a normal pizza shape

wright is one seriously limited-range actor

― akm, Wednesday, March 16, 2022 1:51 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

OTM. The fact he continues to work, while playing everything in the same drudgy tone since Day One, perplexes me.

how quickly you forget peoples hernandez
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVj6PbUV7bU

i love wright but that may just be felix lighter talking

An important thread from a board veteran

I'd like to make a The Batman thread so I want to warn people of a spoiler please don't click thru to this thread if you plan to see The Batman but I need to make a specific comment that is a spoiler. DONT CLICK THREAD.

— ally millar (@allyzay) March 18, 2022

loved this. maybe my new fave version of batman?

thought rpattz was excellent. loved his moody emo Bruce Wayne, and i liked that the alterego stuff wasnt featured as much as it usually is.

Enjoyed the detective angle, and jeffrey wright was really good, no beef w him at all.

lots of Zodiac nods for sure, not only the cipher but the chintzy greeting cards were very similar as well - that device was used a few times irl to taunt the press & detectives

here’s one https://cdn.history.com/sites/2/2017/11/Zodiac-Letter_16.jpg

had no idea it was colin farrell as penguin at all, he was great!

cinematography was great, it never felt “too” dark which is probably a hard balancing act to pull off. opening scene was really cool looking - and that car chase w penguin was gr8. i liked how the “Times Square” area of Gotham somehow looked like the 1940s in a few wide shots, and the way just faces were illuminated a few times during the car chase

oh and Paul Dano. fucking great. always reliably great, no exception this time. when he goes big he goes BIG. so great.

zoe kravitz was rad, god they had such good chemistry- i did think it was a shame she had so much exposition to deliver all the time, i feel like it hampered what she could do with the character somewhat

oh and I liked Batman’s physicality in the fight scenes, he seemed heavier somehow, more like a boxer or a streetfighter, not so lightfooted and nimble. it was cool.

Thought it was bold they cast two actors I didn't know as Riddler and Penguin only to realize afterward they cast two actors I'm very familiar with lol. To my credit, I did recognize Turturro

also i mistook Saarsgard for Corey Stoll (House of Cards, The Strain etc)
i mean, i think i can forgiven, he does play a lot of weaselly bald govt officials

He has hair in West Side Story, but he's still kind of a weaselly govt official.

i think what it is is Sarsgaard plays the movie roles that Stoll would do on tv lol

Deleted scene between Batman and Barry Keoghan's Joker.

I like it - very Silence of the Lambs of course, but am also into the idea of the Joker being just one in a line of bad guys that Bats has put behind bars. Kinda hope he just stays in there throughout the sequels.

watching that reminded me why i don't really care about this franchise at all and i promise i don't mean this to belittle people who do, but i simply cannot look at a man dressed up as batman and take him seriously, much less find him intimidating
you're dressed up as batman for crissakes

but he’s so goth

xp when there is a tender scene bw the batman and the catwoman im just like, girl run hes wearing a furry suit i know hes cute but cmon ur zoe kravitz

this movie was great tho

i just think its gonna be funny in 100 years and ppl are gonna be like "why did so many adults in the 21st c tell stories of other adults wearing onesies with cute ears on hitting bad men" and we're gonna be in the nursing homes just beside ourselves

I like the more detective-y/psychological Batman stories. Kinda curious if they’ll have Calendar Man as another Arkham interview subject later in the series

"why did so many adults in the 21st c tell stories of other adults wearing onesies with cute ears on hitting bad men"

I remember hearing an interview with Christopher Nolan where he was talking about how they arrived at the Joker's look, and he was going on about how influenced he was by gritty realistic 70s crime movies like Eddie Coyle et al, and said his approach was instead of taking the traditional Joker and adding elements to make him look grittier, he started with a character from one of those movies and did the bare minimum needed to make his look read as 'the Joker'? And I remember wanting to reach into the radio and grab him and go "if this is your mindset, why are we involving jokers and bat men at all? just make that movie instead! "

because he got hired to direct a Batman movie and they paid him

ah i see

not trying to dunk on batman movies on the batman movie thread, just echoing forks that the quest for grounded & realistic batman movies seems quixotic to me, as soon as you have anyone having a normal conversation with a costumed person & not mentioning the costume we're already wayyy out of the realm of reality, always confusing to me that people want to run away from that. would love a batman movie where he shows up places and people are just constantly like "nuh-uh, not a chance, please wait outside sir"

tbf there’s a moment in half of the franchises where that happens, then he stops some sort of ridiculous scheme that’s about to kill thousands or breaks some gun-wielding thug’s face and the onlookers are just like, “well, as implausible as it is that this vigilante who looks ridiculous is topping crime, he now intimidates me, so I’ll fall in line”

it’s still corny as hell, and funny that they keep doing this