4.5/5 stars.
Possible spoilers ahead.
The latest Batman reboot sees Robert Pattinson (Twilight and Tenet) don the cowl to fight crime in Gotham City. Directed by Matt Reeves (Cloverfield and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes), The Batman portrays the dark knight as the darkest yet and ultimately brutal.
From the off, the film sets up a murder mystery that spans across the film’s three-hour runtime. When we aren’t being bombarded with action packed fight scenes (of which there are plenty), we are being immersed in a world of crime through the stunning cinemaphotography (Greig Fraser) which perfectly captures the dark essence of Gotham City; it feels like we are being submerged into a world straight from the pages of a Batman comic.
Reeve’s The Batman is a crime movie at heart. Drawing on elements of the noir film genre, it showcases the vigilante as the classic detective character that DC Comics fans will be familiar with. Pattinson perfectly catches this element of the superhero that no previous iteration has before by stalking around various crime scenes like the hard-boiled detective archetype from noir films.
Unlike any other Batman reboot, this is not an origin story. Whether you are a fan or not, everyone knows the origin story of the character – a boy who became an orphan after his parents were shot dead. Similar to Marvel’s Spider-man: Homecoming this movie picks up around two years into Bruce Wayne’s crusade of fighting crime; he is stripped back and doesn’t yet have all the fancy gadgets, instead he relies on his two greatest weapons…fear and his fists.
Paul Dano (Prisoners and The Guilty) plays a psychotic Riddler of whom is the perfect rival for our hero. The last time we saw a big screen adaptation of this character was when Jim Carrey wore bright green spandex in Batman Forever, but Dano’s Riddler is unlike any other we have seen and constantly ups the stakes throughout the film.
Support is given in the form of Zoё Kravitz’s (Divergent and High Fidelity) Catwoman. She too is conducting her own investigation over the course of the film, and eventually crosses paths with the Dark Knight. The two have great chemistry and of course their relationship turns romantic like it has in previous reboots. What is fresh about Kravitz’s character is that she is not overly sexualised like previous renditions, such as Halle Berry in the 2004 Catwoman film.
Overall, The Batman is worth the watch because it delves into the character in a way that humanises him and cements Robert Pattinson as maybe the best Batman yet; what is cooler than saying, “I am vengeance.”
The Batman starts streaming on HBO Max and on Demand on April 19th.
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