The Batman movies have been getting darker. After the bright and silly 1960s series, everyone though

The Batman movies have been getting darker. After the bright and silly 1960s series, everyone thought the 1980s Tim Burton Batman was dark. Then the 2000s Christopher Nolan Batman happened. Surely, we benighted simpletons thought, it can’t get much darker than this? But here we all are. Every twentyish years we get a new, darker reboot. Pity the cinemagoers of 2045 as they leave the new incarnation of Batman (Timothée Chalemet) in stunned silence, afraid to go home and drag their loved ones into their new, despair-ridden worldview. The Batman (Robert Pattinson; he’s fine, don’t worry about it) isn’t just dark thematically, it’s dark literally. Everything happens at night or during the day in badly-lit buildings with high ceilings. Even in The Dark Knight, there is a scene in the sunlight where Bruce Wayne spends the afternoon on a yacht with an entire Russian ballet company. There’s none of that in this movie. The only light is from the reflection of red-and-blue police car lights or the oddly muted illumination in the nightclub which forms one of the main locations.Whenever Bruce Wayne makes an appearance, he is almost indistinguishable from Batman: sullen, dark, antisocial and somehow simultaneously looks like he just got up and he hasn’t slept in three days. This is the first movie where I want to look like Bruce Wayne more than I want to look like Batman, who seems awkward, lumbering and sometimes even clumsy by comparison. In every scene he’s in, Batman stomps around in big clumpy boots that he got from Demonia and they do not look or sound conducive to the gymnastic combat stuff you expect from Batman.  He gets knocked out to the point of unconsciousness. Twice. He keeps missing obvious clues and he ultimately fails to prevent the bad guy from executing his evil plan. In one scene he completely mishandles his bat-glider (or whatever that thing is) and whacks off a bridge and a lorry, smashing into the ground at high speed. If this were literally any other Batman movie, it would be a laugh moment. No one laughed in my cinema. There was a collective sharp intake of breath, though. Apparently, we were more concerned that he might have actually hurt himself. It’s that kind of movie.Although they’ve never been a priority, his people skills in this movie are genuinely awful. Any time he is confronted with a genuine human emotion of any kind, he freezes wordlessly in what I’m hoping is fear and not revulsion. The script is good enough, however, to lampshade the old joke about Batman’s superpower being privilege (repackaged by a black Catwoman in a comment about the bad guys as “white privilege”).One thing very much in its favour is that it’s not trying to be a Marvel movie. Don’t expect a fast-paced, witty action movie. After the success of Joker, it looks like The Batman is not connected to any of the Extended-Universe-Justice-League movies we all know and tolerate. DC might be figuring out that its best bet is to stop trying to copy the billion-dollar Marvel juggernaut and keep making great standalone movies. If you make a good movie, people will want to see it regardless. This movie is more like a dark, brooding police procedural. At times it could almost be an episode of Law & Order directed by David Lynch. It’s a proper, old-school Batman movie minus anything whimsical or humorous.It’s paced (and even plotted) like one of those 1970s psychological thrillers with Gene Hackman, except in those movies everything is a shade of brown and in this one everything is a shade of black. It moves slowly, proceeds in a straight line from beginning to end and it involves a massive, all-encompassing conspiracy between drug smugglers and law enforcement which threatens to destroy the only good cop in the city. If you’ve seen The French Connection, you’ll recognise a lot of this. That’s a good thing.  -- source link

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