- Tim Burton's Batman was released June 23, 1989, 25 years ago today, and it is the best mainstream comic-book movie ever made.
My absolute biggest and unforgivable issue with Tim Burton's Batman was the absolute desecration of the origin story. Making The Joker, a villain that Batman can and will defeat, the man who killed his parents, absolutely takes away his character. The whole point of his parents' murderer being a faceless thief that he can't put to justice is what drives his fight towards all crime, as opposed to this singular person he can take his revenge on. Not being able to get his revenge is what drove him to insanity and the desire to take it out on all crime. So by having their murderer be a villain he faces and defeats in the first movie, not only does it ruin his backstory, but it takes away the actual and original motivation for being Batman. Because in the end, Batman isn't a hero, he's a selfish vigilante who was warped by his parents' murder and takes it out on "crime" by dressing up as a bat and beating them senseless. While it wasn't an amazing movie, I feel like Super had the right take on that, by showing that he's nothing more than a violent schizophrenic beating the hell out of people for reasons ranging from absolutely necessary to completely arbitrary. I don't mean to say I hate Tim Burton's Batman, I think Keaton has played the best Batman/Bruce Wayne so far, I love Jack Nicholson as The Joker, Prince's soundtrack is unbeatable, and the look of Gotham is perfect for the campy feel of the movies. And on the campy note, I feel like Tim Burton hit the perfect amount of camp and darkness, unlike Schumacher who tried way too hard to bring the cheesy and homoerotic tones of the Adam West-era back and failed. So I love the movie, and I would begin to agree with the author that it could be the best, but the muddling of the origin story absolutely removes the poignancy of Batman's character.
A good point re the origin story and his parents killer. Hard to believe that the Schumacher version made so much money. $336mm bix office with a $100mm budget. -more "family friendly." I'll re-watch the Keaton Batman's, not the Kilmer one though.
I can kind of understand the Schumacher's take. I mean, Nightmare On Elm Street 4 is the highest grossing one in the series, and even the highest grossing slasher of the 80's. Once you've built up the successful legacy, people will go to see it. And definitely the lighter campier tone. Plus, I feel like Val Kilmer, Jim Carrey, and Tommy Lee Jones are a bigger box-office draw, especially for the family audience he was going for. I got one of those budget packs that had both Tim Burton's and both Schumacher's together. The first half is legitimately good, and I actually think Batman Returns may be a bit better than Batman. The Val Kilmer movie is for nostalgia and goofball, Batman & Robin is to get drunk and laugh at with friends. Jesus, the way they squandered Poison Ivy and Bane still hurts me to think about.
I think the problem with Schumacher's Batman is that it's not just campy, it's campy AND the audience isn't being let in that they are in on the joke. So it feels insulting. But I totally understand his take too, it just wasn't executed well. In the 1966 Batman, we see Batman doing ridiculous things, for example, this scenario: But we laugh, and it's campy, and it's fun because we're IN on the joke. In Batman and Robin, are we trying to be serious? Does Bruce Wayne really have a Batman line of credit? Why is Bane so stupid? Is this the same Uma Thompson who was in Pulp Fiction? What is happening? It is funny how these conversations always lead into Shumacher's movies though.
Schumacher's movies are pretty much the elephant in the room for any Batman discussion. And I totally agree with your criticism of Joel's movies. Tim Burton's get praise because they managed to toe the line between the "campy" and the "dark" sides of Batman. Schumacher's basically took a serious(ish) script, directed it in the campiest way possible, and tried to paint it black. Adam West's camp worked because none of it was serious. Christopher Nolan's worked because it was deathly serious. Tim Burton, I think, really got lucky. He managed to get the perfect one-in-a-million combination of the two, but he also had to sacrifice important parts of Batman's mythology to do it. Plus, Jack Nicholson's Joker can go from terrifying, to dancing around a museum with Prince playing perfectly. He nails the dichotomy of Joker's character. But Jim Carrey's Riddler and (ironically) Tommy Lee-Jone's Two-Face are just so uninteresting and so one-sided, that the attempt to draw the same parallel just doesn't work. And it's a shame Two-Face was wasted without any attempt to mine his fantastically powerful backstory. Batman And Robin just felt, for me, like the precursor to Spiderman 3. It was hampered by too many unnecessary villains and taking the comedic portion of a rather serious movie way too over the top. And similarly, it wasted one of the best villains of the series with Bane, just how SP3 wasted Venom. And I swear Uma almost ruined her recently catapulted career with that shit. EDIT: I also like to think of the entire ending sequence of Dark Knight Rises as an homage to "Somedays, you just can't get rid of a bomb"
Way to miss the complete point of the Nolan Batman, which is, if we were all paying attention at all, BATMAN IS NOT A GOOD GUY Batman is the reason we have an increase in super-villains in every movie. Bruce Wayne makes more money than god, and instead of giving to the police department, or helping education of impoverished Gotham, he uses it for crime fighting toys. He has money to support non-corrupt politicians but chooses to stay out of politics. Batman is not a good guy, he is a bad guy who dresses up like a bat to pretend to be a good guy. (At least in the Nolan universe) But let me step back for a moment, and address one of the other problems: No they didn't in fact. I would still argue that no super hero film has ever gotten any origin story right. But, I would say that origin stories are unimportant, and will remain unimportant until movies get their stories straight.By contrast, Christopher Nolan's Wayne is a narcissistic Boy Scout and a paragon of virtue, just like his do-no-wrong dad. There's no catharsis there. In '89 Batman, the stakes are that Bruce Wayne might be cuckoo. In 2005 Batman, the stakes are that Bruce Wayne might make Katie Holmes sniffle. Christopher Nolan and Christian Bale stripped Bruce Wayne of his dark side and turned him into a spoiled billionaire, like Tony Stark. Their movies suffer for it.
But the origin story — that essential background that provides the "why?" behind the "WTF?" — is exactly what Keaton and Burton (and scriptwriter Sam Hamm) got right.
> I would still argue that no super hero film has ever gotten any origin story right. But, I would say that origin stories are unimportant, and will remain unimportant until movies get their stories straight.
This is my problem here, a movie split between origin story and main story is going to either drag or leave people unsatisfied. I would say you could possibly devote a movie to origin story, but I really don't feel like many superheroes have an interesting enough origin story to devote an entire film to. Personally, I think they're interesting, but they also tend to bog down the movie with unnecessary exposition (the first Spiderman) or they're just poorly executed (Fantastic Four). Now personally, I think Batman Begins did it fairly well, and I initially hated that they squandered the Ras Al Ghul storyline, but of course that was alleviated during Dark Knight Rises. Actually, Batman Begins is probably the only movie I can think of where a sequel improved my view of the original.
Maybe I need to trim my neckbeard, but that was the most infuriating and pretentious article on Batman I think I have ever read. And I loved Tim Burton's Batman. It also commits numerous sins against the character of Bruce Wayne and Batman. And it is not the best Batman film. Having the Joker kill Wayne's parents was a blatant cop-out and a cinematic cheat to make the Joker's evil more real. Since all he had been up to that point was cartoonishly evil. But a person who kills the protagonist's parents in cold blood makes the connection and conflict personal. Bruce Wayne is incredibly dorky and awkward in this iteration of Batman. Something he is pretty much not, in any other interpretation of the character. This is blatantly poor characterization. Bruce Wayne projects a persona vapidity and self-interest to deflect the idea that he might be Batman. He occasionally lets down that shield to people whom he becomes close to, see The Long Halloween and Batman: Mask of the Phantasm if you really want to see Bruce Wayne emotionally vulnerable. But he is pretty much always self-assured. But that would probably be too nerdy for this enlightened scholar of modern cinema. After all, these are just "funny-underwear films" right? These are not stakes. Batman has always been partially to completely insane. No superhero is not at least somewhat unhinged. Batman is just slightly more so. And the actual stakes in both films are widespread death and chaos, so...did the author even watch these movies? Or just read the Wikipedia entries? Seriously, some parts of that article read like they deliberately calculated to piss comic fans off. Come to think of it, they probably are.In '89 Batman, the stakes are that Bruce Wayne might be cuckoo. In 2005 Batman, the stakes are that Bruce Wayne might make Katie Holmes sniffle.