Don’t get me wrong, Batman and Robin is a bad movie. But I didn’t particularly care for any of the Batman films. Batman Returns is the least bad (Michelle Pfieffer in that outfit sure helped a lot). It’s not like the first 3 were masterpieces but this one was an unexpected turd. The first Burton film was dark, but boring. Returns was dark and depressing. Forever was campy and silly, and Robin was more so.
So why the intense hatred for a film which, while not particularly good, wasn’t much worse than the preceding films in the series? Was it a case of people who got sucked in by the overwhelming hype back in 1989 finally realizing the emperor has no clothes? Fan-boy unease with the blatent homoerotic imagery? Simple dog-piling of a bad movie, (a la Gigli, Hudson Hawk, or Last Action Hero) where the perception of a bad movie becomes that of a horrible film just through sheer reptition?
Help me out. (For the record, I saw 1 & 3 in the theatre at the time of release, and 2 & 4 on video a few years after their respective releases).
Punstruck Schwarzeneggar, nippleless Batgirl suit, chunky ass Alicia Silverstone’s secret origin come from “Uncle Alfred’s” CD-ROM, inarticulate Bane, too-embarrassing-for-John-Waters camp from Uma Thurman, the wall-climbing Batmobile… F’crissake.
Oh, no.
I remember now. It’s all coming back to me! FOR GOD’S SAKE, MY PACT WITH SATAN TO SURPRESS THESE MEMORIES HAS FAILED!!! AAaaAAaaaAAAaaargh!!
The first film was great. So in my view, they went steadily downhill. I figure Batman and Robin is hated cause of the “trick me twice” idea. People also disliked Batman Forever, but only after they saw it. And B & R seemed like more of the same so they could hate it without seeing it.
It’s all of those things and more. The horrible subplot involving Batgirl (with an atrocious performance by Alicia Silverstone to match) and its attendant horrible dialogue. The lameness of the villains. The perfunctory effort to give the story a famiial “theme.” And worst of all to my mind, the senselessly frenetic editing that made it all but impossible merely to follow the action.
Taken singly, none of these flaws is a deal breaker. Taken together, they make for a movie with literally no redeeming qualities, not even the gawky sincerity that can redeem even the most incompetently made film. When you consider how much money and hype were put into “Batman & Robin,” its badness becomes downright offensive.
(Interestingly, I noticed that B&R isn’t even in the Bottom 100 Films on the IMDb, so it can’t be that universally reviled.)
The thing I hated the most was Schwarzenegger’s performance as Mr Freeze. There’s a fine line between cheesy good and cheesy bad and he crossed that in the first few minuts of screen time. God, his puns were horrible.
Burton’s Batman & Batman Returns are both respectable, serious films. They take a seemingly childish subject, a comic book superhero, and present it in a very adult way. He made it both semi-believable and very artistic. He concentrated on the pivotal (and very dark & unseemly) idea that Batman was made borderline psychotic by witnessing his parents murder and that his eventual crimefighting alterego could have just as easily turned out to have been a serial killer.
Schumacher, while a respectable & competant film maker, is no artist. In fact he was brought in (and Burton pushed out) for this very reason. Schumacher is the epitome of the ‘studio director’ vs. the ‘ar-teest’. And while sometimes one is better suited than the other, making non-kid movies about guys in rubber masks is not one of those times.
Baman Forever was ok, but it showed where the franchise was now headed (i.e. to Batman and Robin). Val Kilmer did a pretty decent job of keeping Batman similar to the Keaton version, but Jim Carrey & Tommy Lee Jones were just cartoons. And that is a critical mistake. Nicholson was funny & entertaining, but he was also very clearly a sadistic, murdering, thug. Both when he was Jack the ganster and then The Joker. And DeVito was an absoutely unholy, depraved, serial killing, R-rated monster!
By the time B&R came around, Batman (and even more Robin) didn’t even matter anymore, and the villians were complete, campy schlock! They weren’t criminals, they weren’t even human beings, they were live-action cartoons! That film was literally millimeters away from having the Biff! and Socko! graphic overlays on the fight scenes like in the Adam West version!
In other words it literally became a comic book, not a movie. This is why 99% of all comic inspired movies fail. And, why when they do fail, they are embarrassingly bad. You have to be both entertaining and treat the subject seriously, otherwise its a grade school subject given a 100 million dollar budget projected onto an enormous screen. Eek!
One thing that bothered me: Chris O’Donnell was too old for the part. Robin is not the Young Adult Wonder. He is not the Teenage Wonder. He is the Boy Wonder. When he first joins Batman, he should be no older than twelve. That’s how it was in the comic book.
Of course, what was a perfectly acceptable comic-book plot device in the 1930s – a preteen boy sidekick for a superhero – might be harder to put across in today’s social climate. Back then, nobody objected to Batman/Bruce Wayne being Robin/Dick Grayson’s “guardian” – i.e., surrogate father, with parental responsibilities of guidance, care and protection – and then taking the kid along on crimefighting adventures where villains might try to kill him. Why not? Everybody was doing it. Captain America had Bucky, the Human Torch had Toro. And this wasn’t that many decades after the time when a “drummer boy” was a perfectly normal thing for an army to bring to a battlefield. And remember the 12-year-old midshipman in Master and Commander?
How did we become so squeamish about putting small boys in harm’s way?
Now this bothers me, as being “like a comic book” is not inherently a bad thing. So many movie reviewers throw this term around, usually derisively–“so and so is too comic-booky.” It is obvious that these people haven’t read comic books since they were kids. Nowadays there is a lot of great graphic literature coming out, some from the “big two” mainstays, DC and Marvel Comics, but quite a bit from smaller, more risk-taking publishers, comics that strive to be Art and Literature, comics aimed at discriminating adult readers, meant to take storytelling to new levels that even film cannot capture.
What many people don’t realize is that comic books aren’t all “Blam! Pow!” brightly-colored violence for children. Even Batman has moved on and matured, probably since the late '70s. He is a darker, more complex character, with a high tolerance for pain, a keen intellect, a rock-solid code of ethics, and protocols that can prepare him for any challenge–very far removed from the campy Adam West TV show of the '60s, and the ridiculous Schumacher films of the '90s. It is clear that the “suits” at Warner Brothers aren’t reading the very comics a different part of their megacorporation publishes at DC, as they show very little understanding of their characters from the versions that are made into films. Schumacher and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman created this goofy “living cartoon,” Batman and Robin, that completely trashes and disrespects the source material–they thought they were too good for it, and they created a cinematic disaster as a result.
The upcoming Catwoman movie looks like it will be another major embarrassment–a campy farce that takes everything cool and interesting about the comic book Catwoman (a fascinating antiheroine written by Ed Brubaker) and changes it into a bad Halle Berry film with an almost unrecognizable character (she won’t even have the same name as the comic version!). I don’t know how these filmmakers managed to put Halle Berry into a revealing black leather costume and make her look so un-sexy, but they did it! This movie looks like it will be the Gigli of superhero movies–a bomb that will hurt Halle, WB, DC, and the future of comic-adaptations in general.
I’m on a roll now, so allow me to continue. The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen? Based on an excellent comic by Alan Moore (known as the best writer of comic books of all time), but turned into a terrible hack-job of a film. Characters were added and changed for no reason, and the director constantly clashed with Sean Connery for control of the project. It was a mess, as anyone who has seen it will attest.
Daredevil? Badly miscast (sorry, Ben), a bad-looking costume, and too many characters with not enough time to develop any of them. Daredevil is a favorite character of mine, a tough, street-level vigilante who doubles as a defense attorney, and has been written by excellent comic writers including Frank Miller and Brian Michael Bendis. None of the depth and characterization they established came through in the movie version–I’m still not sure what that was about.
I didn’t even see the most recent Punisher movie, but when diehard fans of the comics tell me that the low-budget 1990 version with Dolph Lundgren was the superior Punisher film, I know I haven’t missed much. Often the source material, the comics, are just fine, but Hollywood studios meddling is what ruins the movies we end up seeing.
What about the good movies based on comic books? I personally don’t believe “99% of all comic inspired movies fail.” Most people liked Spider-Man and the X-Men films, but they seem to have been made with more loving standards of care, by writers and directors that appreciated and understood the source material. That’s why those are often cited as the best superhero films–they took beloved concepts and universally-known characters and retold their stories in a way kids and adults alike could enjoy. They didn’t rush or cut corners–they stayed true to the stories that made the movies worth making in the first place.
And comics are so much more than just superheroes, as almost everyone forgets. Road To Perdition, the gorgeously-shot movie with Tom Hanks as a hitman on the run with his young son? Graphic novel. Ghost World, a coming-of-age drama with Thora Birch, Scarlett Johannsen, and Steve Buscemi? Graphic novel. American Splendor, the story of one “everyman’s” struggle with everyday life? A series of comics. Even From Hell, which was a completely passable gothic horror movie with Johnny Depp, started out as an amazing comic book series, deep and dense and heavily-researched and based on fact (and no surprise, originally written by Alan Moore). Nobody accuses these films as being “comic-booky,” even though they are based on some of the best comic books around. I guess they didn’t have enough rubber nipple suits in them.
Geez, I’m really going on now. I apologize to everyone who has read this far, but I hate the negative stigma of calling a movie “comic-booky,” and dismissing all comic books as “grade school subjects.” That’s just a real pet peeve of mine. I’d wager to guess that there’s a lot higher caliber of writers working in the comics industry than churning out mainstream Hollywood scripts, a more discriminating audience for comics today than for mainstream movies, and a lot more entertainment to be had from the graphic novel shelf at Borders or the rusty spinner-rack at a comic book store than at your local multiplex.
I’ve never been a great fan of comic books (although I do have kind of a weird fascination with Batman, him being such a weirdly fascinating character), but if somebody puts a really good graphic novel or bound series into my hands, I won’t turn my nose up at it. I think comic books are just as “valid” an art form as any other type of literature or graphic art.
I’ve only seen the first Batman movie, but one of the things I loved about it was the comic-book feel of the book.
I’ve mostly repressed the memories of Batman: No Man’s Land, so someone will certainly be along soon to correct my mistakes of fact. But my impression of the series goes something like this:
Gotham City falls prey to an earthquake, destroying most of the city. OK.
The US government decides it is unsavable and cuts all the bridges after the rich and middle class flee so that no one can enter or leave. Comic-booky.
The JLA decide not to help the million or so people who remain because, well, it’s Batman’s name on the cover. Comic-booky.
Batman doesn’t bother to show up for 120 days because the writers need time for the plot mechanism to get into place. Comic-booky.
The city is cut up into enclaves by all the villains out of the Batman archives. Comic-booky.
Plucky citizens and the police joined by a grim but revitalized Batman beat up the bad guys and take the city back issue by issue, I mean, block by block. Comic-booky.
With my gorge risen to record levels, I stopped reading somewhere around there, but I understand that President Lex Luthor (comic-booky) cuts a deal to enrich himself by enabling the now restored Gotham City. Comic-booky.
Gotham City continues in the future looking exactly as it did before the havoc. Comic-booky.
That’s why, despite all the good, interesting, and deep works that Big Bad Voodoo Lou mentions, being “like a comic book” will always be a pejorative to everyone except the tiny minority of the American movie-going public who has read Watchman. The comic books that most people have read, the characters that most people recognize, the things that most people associate with comic books - whether up-to-date or not - are really, really, really stupid, done solely so that megalomaniacal plots with caricatured villains can stretch across glossy panels featuring unreal technology, absurd physiognomies and physiques, gaspingly idiotic decision-making, and a general lack of subtlety unrivaled since silent slapstick comedy.
And I’m a defender of comics. Imagine how the detractors think. :eek:
As for Batman and Robin, I pretty much agree with ftg. Movies are not comic books. They are forced into certain elements of reality that the drawn panel need not adhere to. Things that work well in comics look ludicrous on screen, because actual human beings are portraying them. Combine bad scripting, poor design, inept direction with Arnold, Uma, Alicia, Elle, and Jeep {Jeep?} and you have a catastrophe that stinks up the room.
That’s why we have to remind people that there’s much more to comics than superheroes, and that even superheroes can be really well-written at times. That’s why I will go on to namedrop Watchmen, Starman, Preacher, Sandman, Sandman Mystery Theatre, Sleeper, Point Blank, Transmetropolitan, Planetary, Authority (Ellis), Wildcats (Moore and Casey), Stormwatch (Ellis), Grendel (Wagner and Robinson), American Flagg! (Chaykin), Hellboy, Madman, X-Force (Milligan), Catwoman (Brubaker), Gotham Central, Queen and Country, Courtney Crumrin, Daredevil (Miller and Bendis), Alias, The Losers, Swamp Thing (Moore), Hellblazer, Terminal City, From Hell, V For Vendetta, Promethea, Top Ten, The Golden Age, Box Office Poison, Why I Hate Saturn, You Are Here, I Die At Midnight, Y: The Last Man, Justice League International (Giffen and DeMatteis), The Tick (Edlund), Powers, Greyshirt, Finder, Books Of Magic, Black Panther (Priest), The Broccoli Agenda, and similar works that raise the storytelling bar for the entire industry.
(And some of these would make damn good movies, too.)
If you’ve ever seen the behind the scenes footage, you can see Director Joel Scummucker imploring Arnold to be “bigger! bigger!” and more over-the-top in his performance.
Everything that’s wrong lies at the feet of the director, and his hand chosen script hack.
It’s quite true that there are plenty of really bad comic books out there. There’s also no shortage of throught-provoking, intelligent, even brilliant ones. The same is true of novels, short stories, music, videos, and any other entertainment medium one could care to name - some are great, some awful, most mediocre. But why, in a case where a movie has “bad scripting, poor design, [and] inept direction”, is the blame for the poor quality always attributed to the medium of the source material? No one sees a bad movie based on a book and say “Well, it’s based on a novel, so what did you expect?” Only the comic medium bears that burden, and generally the public doesn’t hear the words “graphic novel” or “comic book” associated with a movie unless the movie is about superheroes, or really, really bad.
Don’t even get me started on how “comic book = superhero genre” in so many people’s minds, or we’ll be here all night.
Sorry, I meant it became a child’s comic book (i.e. Donald Duck-ish). Bright colors, slapstick humor, even some goofy sound effects.
See, that’s often exactly the problem. This is precisely how studio executives view them.
In reality, almost all movies are made as comic books first. That’s essentially all storyboarding is. But in the hands of a less than adequite director, they’ll look at the comic and say, “Wow, the movie’s half made already!” and they skip the creative, interpretive process entirely and just film the visuals. So what you wind up with is a boring, souless, lifeless, meaningless, series of visuals.
