STACK #212 June 2022

MOVIE FEATURE

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STACK 'S TOP3 BATMAN MOVIES

We’ve seen many versions of Batman over the past 80 years, but Pattinson’s is a totally new Caped Crusader – Batman as a troubled rock star. "I wanted to seen him as the playboy,” explains Reeves. “So instead, I thought, ‘What if he’s more like someone do a new and definitive version of Bruce Wayne, because I felt like we’d

1 BATMAN

BEGINS (2005) The definitive origin tale brings the Dark Knight into the real world, where a superhero is only as good as the best

tech a personal fortune can buy. 2 BATMAN

RETURNS (1992) This blackly comic sequel is a bona fide cult classic thanks to Tim Burton’s signature style, a carnivalesque tone, and Danny DeVito’s grotesque Penguin.

who is from the lineage of royalty where something

tragic had happened to some of the major figureheads of the family and he was the

3 THE BATMAN (2022) The ‘Darkest Knight’ is less superhero spectacle and more slow burn crime procedural, exposing the depths of corruption in Gotham City.

It's been ten years since the Dark Knight's last stand alone movie. The Batman returns the character to his roots as more sleuth than superhero, with Robert Pattinson as a cool new incarnation of the DC icon. Words Gill Pringle P itting Robert Pattinson’s Batman against Paul Dano’s Riddler, The Batman plays more like a tense psychological drama than a typical superhero movie. Leaning into the character’s origins as “the world’s greatest detective,” it draws heavily from film noir and the New Hollywood movement of the 1970s.

child, living in the wake of that and

had kind of become a recluse that people would consider sort of a screw-up; somebody who had maybe become a drug addict?’ And I thought, 'Well, he is a drug addict, but the drug that he is addicted to is being Batman.'”

Robert Pattinson as Bruce Wayne

“I started thinking of a rock star like Kurt Cobain and the idea of being addicted to your work and being that haunted guy inside a beautiful old kind of Wayne Manor... And, for some reason, that was the flip side of Batman that I also saw in Rob. I thought he had that kind of Cobain-like handsomeness and sensitivity.” Pattinson was well aware of the legacy. “There’s something about the history of it, like with any of these characters that have been reinterpreted. It’s on a level of doing Hamlet, where the only thing you can really do is just give everything to it, and not think, ‘I’m doing a superhero movie’. I never for one second thought that you could just kind of allow for a certain story point to go through because it’s a superhero movie. It felt like an incredibly serious movie to do, for me,” he explains. “We took it as seriously as the fans take it. It means the world to people who are Batman fans. And it feels like if you’re a Batman fan, you’re a fan for life and you see every iteration of it and read all of the graphic novels, and you’re still anticipating things. My parents’ friends are talking to me about it, and they’re in their seventies! “They’re imperfect characters, so they can be consistently argued about how they should be interpreted and what they really mean, or what the metaphorical aspects are. You can really go deep with it.”

Writer-director Matt Reeves, formerly best known for the Planet of the Apes franchise, describes the process of making The Batman as “a real labour of love” and insists it isn’t a Batman origin story, but rather “the original story of every rogues’ gallery character that you come across. Selina Kyle is not yet Catwoman; The Penguin is not yet the Kingpin…”

When a sadistic killer begins targeting Gotham City’s elite, the Batman must follow a trail of cryptic clues into the underworld – aided by his old pal Lt. James Gordon (Jeffrey Wright) – where he encounters characters like Selina Kyle (Zoë Kravitz), Oswald Cobblepot (Colin Farrell) – aka The Penguin – and Carmine Falcone (John Turturro). And at each crime scene, a letter is left for the Batman. “The whole idea of being the Batman is that your power is in being anonymous, so the idea that suddenly someone is shining a light on you, that would be very unsettling for him, which I thought was a great way in,” explains Reeves, who was inspired by the Zodiac Killer’s disturbing cyphers left for both the police and newspapers. “I thought that actually sounded like a horrifying version of the Riddler. So the Riddler was part of the conception very early on, in figuring out which of the rogues’ gallery characters would communicate with Batman in that way,” teases the director.

• The Batman is out on June 1

Paul Dano as the Riddler

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12 JUNE 2022