We don’t see him working with minions or setting up a gang to take on the police or Batman. He’s visceral, brutal and secretly loves the fact his meticulous plan is going so well. His style is not unlike Heath Ledger’s Joker from The Dark Knight. For this contemporary interpretation, we’ve been given an incel-type that goes around murdering major public figures because he believes he holds the answer to the mystery of Gotham and its founders. Let’s move from Patman and on to the main plot of the film. Vengeance is precisely what he’s channeling. It’s fitting as that would be the defining emotion made up of everything he’s feeling at this time. Which, I think, is why he goes around referring to himself as ‘Vengeance’. He’s smart, but doubts himself to the point where he overlooks things. He’s doing what most men in his position would do – trial and error and always by the seat of the pants. He misjudges his flying, he stalls his car, he has to infiltrate nightclubs with a backpack to then change into Batman. It could feature as an amatuer bad guy’s car in the next Fast and Furious film. He uses a squirrel suit to ‘fly’ and his car is a Frankenstein’s monster of various muscle cars. Patman, however, picks up from Bale’s makeshift ninja outing. Next time we saw Bale in a costume was as the finished article. He hurt his ribs after a misjudged leap towards a railing. Nolan touched on it in Batman Begins where we saw Bale’s Bruce Wayne make his first outing in a makeshift ninja costume. This is something that’s not really been shown in a Batman film before. He’s two years in and his rage and hatred more than compensate for his lack of finesse and refinement at this point. It doesn’t matter that he hasn’t figured out the subtle art of intimidation yet. He gets knocked down, shot at, kicked and knocked out…twice. He’s brutal, ruthless and gets lost in his rage right to the point where murder is about to happen, then he pulls back. Not that it matters because, once the criminals start the fight, Patman ends it. This Batman hasn’t figured out how to lurk from the shadows in a convincingly intimidating way. I think Reeves leaned into Pattinson’s natural awkwardness and it works. He’s allowing his dark, destructive emotions to manifest so that he has to go out and beat seven shades out of criminals whilst dressed like a bat.Īnd as we get our first look early on at this new version, it’s clear he’s not mastered his art. What he’s not doing is taking Alfred’s advice (an underused Andy Serkis) and getting back out in the world, running his father’s company and doing some good in the public space. He writes a journal (several volumes, by the looks of it), he hides in the basement of Wayne Enterprises, he pores over news reports and police feeds and…he works on a car. Lost in arrested development because he just doesn’t know what to do with all the destructive emotions he has. Whilst many critics have complained about his take as being too ‘moany’, ‘whiney’ and ’emo’, I see this Bruce as stuck. It opens with a hushed, weary monolgue from Robert Pattinson’s Bruce Wayne. My own novella has my home city as the setting for my Bat-inspired story.īack to The Batman. The city itself might as well be Gotham at this point with The Batman filming first, then Batfleck scenes shot last summer for The Flash and, now, Batgirl has been shooting for over a month with Michael Keaton. I was there when they shot scenes at the Necropolis in Glasgow. It looked like it was trying too hard to be dark and gritty rather than just being. Needless to say, I wasn’t confident in the direction. The trailer didn’t help by making the film look like a ripoff of Seven being spliced into a pseudo-seedy Gotham where wannabe criminals were routinely beaten by a pseudo-Batman. After being decidely disappointed by what Zack Snyder failed to do with Ben Affleck’s older, grislier and disenfranchised Caped Crusader, I was cautious about this new iteration. I decided to take myself to the opening night of Matt Reeves’ ‘The Batman’ as I was curious on what his take on the character would be like.
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