I want to start off this post with a Confession, back in the era of the Nolan Batman movies being the culturally dominant take on Batman I was among those who chose to express my fandom of those movies in part by hating on Tim Burton's Batman movies, saying those were acceptable when that was all we had but now Batman's finally being done right.
I wasn't as virulent about it as some, I never denied that I'd enjoyed them and I even enjoyed re-watching them at the time. But I was definitely one of those who felt the Nolan movies were more legitimately Batman because of what I personally prioritized in the Batman Comics that I personally liked the most.
So I'm Sorry, this is my Apology to the Burton movies and their fans who had to deal with a lot of crap from idiots like 19-27 year old me.
I still have my criticisms of those movies and they may actually be relevant to a future post of this blog, but they are ultimately very good movies and legitimate takes on Batman.
But now here we are a decade later a new Batman Reboot is out and the cycle is repeating with people coming out of the woodwork about how Nolan's Batman movies were always cringe and embarrassed to be what they were and now Matt Reeves has finally made a Legit Batman movie. And now it's like Karma, I'm in the position of those I was once annoying to.
I don't hate The Batman, I respect a lot of what it does. But it is in my current mental rankings my least favorite Live Action movie containing Batman characters, and the gap between it and second lowest is pretty significant. I actively like every other live action movie with Batman characters in it that exists, including each versions of movies with more then one version, even the ones that were contentious when they were new. And there are now a lot of those, it's kind of doubled since the time when Rises was the most recent.
One thing that amuses me is how they keep hyping up finally getting Batman as a Detective, and I recall how that was literally one of the hooks for The Dark Knight as well, the little subplot about the Bullet, and even when I was at my most blindly loyal to The Dark Knight I kind of had to admit that was it's most underwhelming aspect. In The Batman he fails at being a Detective, every single time he doesn't figure out anything till it's too late. We still don't have a good Batman Detective film, if you wanna see what one would look like watch a Detective Conan movie.
What this movie is more then any other Batman movie is Film Noir Batman, accept as I've said in a prior post that is undermined by the big action movie ending.
Trashing Nolan's movies in contrast to The Batman feels kind of sillier to me then trashing Burton's take to hype up Nolan's because Burton and Nolan absolutely had stylistically different approaches and because of David S. Goyer Nolan's movies drew on more actual Comics. The Batman is largely drawing plotwise on the same specific Comics as Nolan's movies with a mostly similar gritty and realistic style. And as I've also said before the entire premise feels like what online fans were imagining Nolan's 3rd movie would be before Bane was announced, people wanted it to be The Riddler doing some Se7en/Zodiac/Jigsaw knock off BS, a lot of those Fan Trailers are still on YouTube I think, and I was into them at the time but when I got older I saw how cringe that premise would have been, but now The Batman did exactly that and people unironically love it, though a couple people have done YT videos on why it's bad actually.
There are more reasons to prefer certain Batman movies over others then just recencey bias/generational bias. A lot of the people who preferred Burton's take even when that opinion was at it's least popular liked that it felt like the earliest Golden Age Comics. Nolan's movies, or the first two at least, while drawing specific plot points from other eras and writers, in their overall vibes and tone were like Denny O'Niel comics of the 70s, that's why O'Niel was chosen to write the Novelization of Begins. While The Batman's stylistic vibes feel like they are going for the Scott Snyder audience, which is perhaps key to why it doesn't appeal to me, I've always hated Scott Snyder's Batman stories, even Court of Owls I never liked.
TheOverlySarcastic people went on about how obvious it was to them Nolan hadn't read any Comics till working on Rises. And that's just laughable to anyone who actually remembers that era, how Nolan and Goyer were constantly talking about exactly what Comics they read, they talked about their love of O'Niel's stuff from the 70s, and his Man Who Falls story from the 80s, but also how elements were being taken from Year One and The Long Halloween.
Breadtube has long been criticizing the politics in Nolan's Batman movies, but The Batman is ultimately the same, it includes some systemic corruption as a plot device but in the end says ultimately most cops are good, it says the Police simply need to be reformed not abolished. Both are at their core ultimately Centrist like most Superhero movies. But at least TDK has an explicit rejection of Hobesianism that an Anarchist viewer can cling to.
The fact that Nolan's movies bent the No Kill rule has always been a little controversial, but at least the No Kill rule was part of the story. In The Batman he doesn't kill but that doesn't mean anything, no one was trying to get him to kill or arguing that he should. I'll take it actually being part of the story but having some holes in the execution over it never coming up at all.
All of that aside, I again do like aspects of The Batman, the performances are all good, and I think there's potential for it's sequels to be better. But right now it's the cinematic representation of the Batman Universe I have the least fondness for.
Mostly this post is a cautionary tale, I want fans of Battinson to be prepared for what criticism their film will receive when the pendulum swings again, and to maybe stop themselves from going too far down this Nolan hating road, because we aren't at the height of where it could be yet, it was in The Dark Knight's year that the anti Burton stuff reached it's apex.
My tastes have changed enough since the Nolan era that those films are less my ideal take on Batman then they used to be, but as overall films I still like them the best even over the Animated Batman movies. However my favorite Batman actor going off the performance itself is Ben Affleck now, especially in Suicide Squad and the Theatrical Cut of Justice League.
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