His most potent tool, or maybe quasi-superpower of all when combined with his other skills repertoire? “I am rich”. Ultra-playboy billionaire Bruce Wayne, his connections to the underworld, to mob bosses, to the Ninja Assassins of the Far East and his judicious use of his membership card in the Justice League, calling in favors from some of this planet’s and this galaxy’s
most powerful beings.

The Batman of the 1980s was a far cry from the TV series of the 1960s and the United States and the USA had made giant cultural leaps from the Happy Hippy era and into far more serious texture and tone, as the 1980s turned away from regional skirmishes in Vietnam and elsewhere and set its sights on global economic wars and the international markets.

Michael Keaton’s Batman (1989) strove for a more ominous and serious characterization.  However when the second movie (1992) with Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman was met with lackluster response, Warner Brothers decided to switch gears and, woe be the unfortunate decision making, ultimately fell back on an updated version of the campy 1960s show with Val Kilmer and George Clooney playing the Dark Knight in more Adam West style, assisted by Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jim Carey as Mr. Freeze and the Riddler.

While Superman (1978) catapulted the studio to the forefront of big cinematic superhero movie productions and gave Warner Brothers license to adapt more DC Comics titles, it was Batman (1989) that captured the big box office, in HUGE numbers, its revenues from ticket sales 10 times its budget, while Superman as amazing and revolutionary on the heels of 1977 Star Wars was only six times its budget in sales receipts.  However, we should remind you it is not a straight comparison.

Superman had three sequels, with diminishing box office power.  The budget dollars for the Superman movie are not inflation adjusted for Batman’s 1989 budget dollars and the box office tickets in 1989 were twice the price of the 1978 admission ticket.  A straight comparison would be extremely fraught with error.

Whatever the financial chart for both the initial Superman and Batman cinematic series, you have to see it from the studio’s perspective.  Superman has just played itself out in four movies and attendance was thin.  The studio may have been unable to craft exciting big screen adventures for our hero because of limited technical capabilities to make the audience believe “a man can fly”.  Thus they turned to a fresh and equally powerful selling title in the DC Comics repertoire.

If audiences are tired of Superman and are laughing at some of the special effects sequences in Superman III and Superman IV The Quest for Peace, (even though by all counts Superman II outclassed the 1978 original in action sequences) then WB may have reasoned, we bring on a new superhero with a vastly different setting and less complicated special effects requirements.

By the time Warner Brothers released the 1997 Batman & Robin film, the series was once more mired in campy, albeit more expensive clones of its1960s Batman TV show sibling.  The more important milestone at the time was The Matrix (1999), where breakthrough digital effects heralded a new era for the studio, a new age of super visuals that could be brought to bear on its DC Comics franchise.

Yet Christopher Reeve was still holding the Superman mantle despite a severely debilitating injury that eventually caused a premature death from physical atrophy in 2004.  Someone at Warner Brothers may have advised it would not be a good time to reboot the Superman franchise, as Reeve was very much in the public eye and the national vernacular.  He was OUR SUPERMAN.

Clearly at that point in time, Warner Brothers’ prized trophy was the darker, broodier superhero.  After their decade long foul-up with the first Batman franchise, WB goes for a reboot in 2005 with Inception maestro Chris Nolan and Christian Bale. 

No other movie presents the Batman as The Angel of Hell, or as a Wraith and The Grim Reaper rolled into one as does this movie, but Pattinson’s performance and Reeves’ direction constantly shows the human being underneath, sulking, conflicted, tortured, questioning himself and … growing both as a superhero and as a person.

And for die-hard lovers of The Nolan trilogy starring Bale as The Dark Knight, Pattinson’s performance is so satisfactory and wrapped in the atmosphere Reeves has created for this adaptation of Miller’s novels, it feels self-contained and does not in any way trample over or nick the previous franchise’s stamp.

Pattinson’s portrayal is of course half an act without Zoe Kravitz as Catwoman.  Although she had been toiling around in movies for some time now, this is the first time ever I noticed her, and her relationship to her famed rock and roll musician father, Lenny Kravitz.  Her mother is Lisa Bonet of The Cosby Show fame and Marisa Tomei (Spiderman’s Aunt May) is her movies famous godmother (Untamed Heart, What Women Want, The Ides of March).

Zoe’s movie credits include X Men First Class (2011), the Divergent trilogy (2014-2016), Mad Max Fury Road (2015) and Fantastic Beasts the Crimes of Grindelwald (2018).

As Selena Kyle she plays the Batman love interest without any hint of Fifth Wall winks, or pandering to the built-in innuendo of the alter ego criminal/justice vigilante.  Deadpool was a definite No Show!  The Dark Knight finds another twisted freak in her, a kindred spirit with whom sparks fly and the chemistry between the leads is palpable.  Reeves wasn’t tempted in adding any human cats meowing and purring although Pfeiffer was excellent, and Anne Hathaway provided a progressively better interpretation of the character.

Colin Farrell and John Turturro round up the rogues’ gallery of villains in this movie as The Penguin and mob boss Falcone.  Although the supporting cast of villains sports both highly skilled actors, the breakout performance, perhaps simply because of the storyline or lines for the actor, is Paul Dano who managed to deliver a chilling performance as The Riddler, making you believe, as ought any decent powerhouse horror movie, that our main villain is truly deranged – worthy of a cell in the garish nuthouse, Arkham Asylum.

Nowhere is the Batman’s gothic flavor more apparent than in this movie.  The Nolan trilogy repackages the Batman in a modern metropolis on footing with New York or Chicago with very little of the Batman roots to show for it.  It was a great movie series from Nolan to yank the character from the drenching of camp it was basted in for decades.

So, when Warner Brothers handed over this movie to Matt Reeves (star director of the recent Planet of the Apes series) and Matt, and his team, brings the gothic elements, the chill full force to the story of decay, deceit, corruption and crime that are always awaiting The Batman after he is done adventuring elsewhere with his friends from The Justice League.

You may not be especially a fan, however, there is more in the Batman of the aesthetic of Steampunk, a look of broken or malfunctioning gears, tools and old, used up machinery and world, grafting the modern dysfunctional world we live in today onto an artistic visual style that has emerged since 1980s as a reflex to pop culture’s inundation with Cyberpunk (Ghost in The Shell and Blade Runner are excellent examples of cyberpunk aesthetic).