I saw the movie a few days ago. From that, I would say that one takeaway was that I feel like I’m already starting to forget the movie a little bit. It was fairly well made but it didn’t have anything great enough in it to really linger.
In general, I was hoping that it would be a good detective story. As it was, while they showed Batman as being very quick at solving riddles, there really wasn’t all that much deduction and not all that much detective work either. Alfred did most of the code cracking, Selena figured out about half of everything, and there were no Sherlockian / surprise “putting together the pieces” to arrive at conclusion moments.
Probably the largest success of the movie was selling the concept of there being a costumed character running around - without him looking like a nerd (e.g. Kick-Ass) or like a comic book character (e.g. the Clooney Batman). Part of this was, I think, that Pattinson was never given a traditional Bruce Wayne “playboy” persona. They didn’t have him out there romancing the chicks or being all smooth. In general, he came across like a obsessive compulsive guy with improper emotional development. It sort of makes sense that he would form a nerdy fantasy like dressing up in a costume and then be so obsessive about doing it in an insanely efficient way. He’s less like James Bond and more like a dour Sheldon Cooper. If they do a sequel, I think they would do well to continue his development in that direction.
The other big win was, among the endings, they turned Batman away from being driven by vengeance and towards being, simply, a good human being who wants to make the world a better place. That worked and it worked very well. If the movie had ended there, my appreciation of it might have been a lot higher, in fact.
Instead, though, we continued on to the (almost) last scene at Arkham with the Riddler and Joker completely destroyed almost everything that they’d worked on through the whole movie to make it all realistic-ish with a bit so cheesey that it wouldn’t have been too out of place in the 60s TV show. It looked like they’d done up a clown version of the Crypt Keeper puppet and put it in a silhouette for a laugh-off competition. Major thumbs down.
Other complaints:
- Catwoman simply looked too small and skinny to be an effective fighter. I could buy her as a gymnast and cat burglar but she looked like she’d break like a twig against everyone she fought with in the movie. Good looking lady, perfectly good acting, but when you’ve got Batman wearing a powered tank-suit, and she’s keeping up with him, that just ain’t hitting right.
- Likewise, her apparent ability as a cat burglar came across as so competent that it made the whole plotline about her having a room mate and living in debt make no sense.
- I would agree that they tried to put too much into the story. Like, sure, yeah they tied together the Riddler, Falcone, Catwoman, and the Wayne Family. It all - more or less - made sense. But from a storytelling standpoint it felt like there were two or three stories that had been developed independently and woven together like the A Plot/B Plot structure of a serial TV show. In a serial, you’ve got the A plot of dealing with the big bad and the B plot that develops on a character. You’ve got something for the plot-driven viewer and something for the character-driven viewer. Here, though, It’s two A plots getting in the way of one another and they didn’t quite finish the B plot on the Wayne Family in any notable way. It all felt a bit muddled, with no central strand to hang on to and enjoy its conclusion.
- And that said, I have to hedge on the plot making sense because the Riddler’s agenda against Bruce Wayne was internally contradictory. They tried to steal the idea that he’s a Se7en-style crazy serial killer, from his note books and puzzles, but at every stage he seems to be tightly organized, well researched, and methodically executing a political grievance. On that, they were strong. But from there, we’re supposed to buy that his obsession with Bruce Wayne is at an even higher level - given how he starts chanting the name “Bruce Wayne” the once. But his attempt to kill the guy was a quick mail bomb and he didn’t even check whether it succeeded? As said, it felt like the glue that they used to connect the storylines simply wasn’t strong enough in this section.
- The music was hella, I say hella bombastic. 3 hours of a tuba fart dirge is really just not a good feel.
- The director really liked fully automatic pistols. This made it very difficult, after a bit, to buy the idea that Batman would magically never get hit in the head. Maybe if his coif didn’t fold like a thin sheet of latex, I might buy that he just got lucky. But knowing that there’s almost no mass protecting his entire head - that man’s a dead duck after all the ammunition pumped his direction.
But, all those negative points aside, I did enjoy it. Despite the quantity of flaws the overall whole is a net positive.
If you like Batman, it is probably one of the better entries.
