Warner Bros.
Tim Burton’s Batman turns 25 today, believe it or not. And in the quarter-century since the movie was released, superhero movies have turned into a genre all their own. Some of have been more coherent than Batman, some have been slicker, some even more enjoyable. But none have been as off-kilter, confused, and passionate as the 1989 film—and that doesn’t bode well for the future of the genre.
Let’s get this out of the way first: Batman is not necessarily a good movie. Yes, there’s a lot that’s good about it—Michael Keaton made a surprisingly great Bruce Wayne, despite the fan outcry at his announcement, and the movie looks amazing thanks to Burton’s direction and Anton Furst’s production design—but overall the movie is as uneven as a mountain range. A lot of that can be put down to the performances, which range widely in intensity; at times, two people sharing a scene seem like they’re acting in entirely different movies (e.g., Michael Gough’s Alfred with Kim Basinger’s Vicki Vale, or Jack Nicholson with… well, anyone, really).
But the movie also reflects a struggle between Burton and Warner Bros. over just what a Batman movie should be. Burton came into Batman with a particular mission: to show the public a cinematic Caped Crusader as fraught as the one who first surfaced in Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, then continued in projects like Batman: Year One and The Killing Joke. Burton’s Batman, in his mind, would drop the camp caricature the vigilante had been saddled with since the 1960s television show and replace it with something more befitting of a character nicknamed the “dark knight.”
In rebuttal, Warner Bros. offered this:
No comments:
Post a Comment