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Batman movies have not traditionally started with amusing scenes. But the opening sequence of the latest in the series serves above all to introduce an important plot element via the subjective perspective: a camera embedded in Batman’s contact lenses, with which the superhero preserves everything and also analyzes what he sees via Internet access.
And a little later he enters (and films) an apartment in which a murder actually took place. The victim is the mayor of Gotham, who is currently running for re-election. The vote would have been in five days.
All hell broke loose in Gotham City for five days
During those five days, all hell descends upon the city, and the ruler of darkness is a man who calls himself The Riddler. Of course, he’s familiar to Batman cinema connoisseurs; in Joel Schumacher’s 1995 Batman Forever, this supervillain was played by Jim Carrey, with a thousand mannerisms and the motley costume one would expect from that actor.
Paul Dano, as his successor, now puts him on in a completely different way: clad in a sinister mask and outfit in the style of S/M fetishes, he embodies more than just the night side of Gotham City (which Batman himself represents). This Riddler is the embodiment of perpetual darkness, brutally decimating the city’s elite. And after each new murder, he makes his victims’ misconduct public, so that these former luminaries also become part of the all-encompassing social darkness.
In fact: none of the seven other Batman films since Tim Burton’s huge success of 1989 has painted the world of the “dark knight” so black. The current work had to try something else, because it is the third new beginning of the same well-known story: a boy named Bruce Wayne, traumatized by the murder of his parents, uses the immense family inheritance to avenge the crime. Armed with all the tech tools that money can buy and skill can use, grown-up Bruce is Batman, who cleans up Gotham City’s underworld on his own, regularly coming into conflict with official law enforcement.
What makes The Batman different from its predecessors
Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher made their four films from 1989 to 1997, which build on each other in terms of content, primarily visual spectacles, while Christopher Nolan emphasized the psychological component of the damaged film in his “Dark Knight” trilogy (2005 to 2012), which tells everything again heroes. Matt Reeves is now starting his adaptation (there is already talk of two more firmly agreed parts) as a deconstruction of the overall picture of the Batman world. Actually, there is nothing left to save in Gotham City, even the ideal image of Bruce Wayne’s murdered parents is dragged into the dirt. What remains is the loyalty among outsiders: Batman’s traditional allies are his butler Alfred, whom Andy Serkis equips with a grandiosely overemphasized English accent to distinguish himself from the other cultureless rabble in the metropolis, and Jim Gordon, Gotham’s only incorruptible senior police officer. Jeffrey Wright plays him as if Edward Olmos’ Lieutenant Castillo from Miami Vice had been copied into the scenes.
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