The Size Of A Tangerine

The Batman

starring Robert Pattinson, Zoe Kravitz, Jeffrey Wright, Paul Dano, Colin Farrell, Peter Sarsgaard, John Turturro and Andy Serkis

directed by Matt Reeves (The Pallbearer, Cloverfield, all the modern Planet of the Apes ones)

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Have you seen this film? No? Then why are you reading a write-up by someone who saw it already? DON'T ACT LIKE YOU DIDN'T KNOW THERE WOULD BE SPOILERS. You knew. You knew.

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You're probably thinking exactly what I was thinking when you heard this was getting made: finally! A Batman movie! By my count this is... at least the 10th released in my lifetime? But if you math it out, that's only one every 4.8 years or so, which is a pretty decent spread. The numbers get a little worse if you consider the first one didn't come out until I was 15 or so, but if there's one thing we're not going to do is ruin this pop culture moment with a bunch of arithmetic. The gloomy Twilight kid is Batman! Let's think about that instead of Ukraine! At least for a few minutes!

I didn't really know a lot about Matt Reeves. I've still never seen all of Cloverfield, but I did see all the newer Planet of the Apeses and they were all actually seriously excellent films, taking these silly stories about monkey wars (a premise I've never cared at all about) and making a good-faith effort to turn them into art. They're meticulous, they're deliberately paced, well acted, thoughtfully constructed, absolutely gorgeous to look at and they have a point of view. It's possible to boil the point of view down to "I told you we shouldn't have trusted these monkeys" if you're not trying too hard, but that has the benefit of being both simplistically reductive and pretty fucking solid advice. They look like us and they're all like twice as strong as people? Take the warning.

This has a less graspable immediate takeaway, except maybe to anticipate that the next celebrity serial killer is going to be an online pasty white guy with a vocoder and a smaller Instagram following than he thinks he deserves.

All the Batman movies of my lifetime have been blessed with enormous (relative to their time) budgets, so that always means stellar casts, and this is no exception. Pattinson and Zoe Kravitz are two of the humans most beloved by the camera, something Reeves takes advantage with Pattinson in particular by just pointing the camera at him in all his masks (the bat-cowl, sure, but they really roll out some extreme looks with makeup a few times for the un-cowled Bruce Wayne) and letting the jawline and cheekbones do a lot of heavy lifting. It helps that Pattinson especially is actually a very good if eccentric actor, so even under all that, he's doing something measurable and interesting. Zoe Kravitz's charisma is of a slightly more conventional type, but she's also given more to do; she's either about to start or just finished kicking someone in a pretty interesting way on either side of her dialogue scenes.

Michael Keaton played Bruce Wayne as an awkward, nervous weirdo, like a jittery bag of nerves only slightly under the surface, which made the decisive and taciturn Batman all the more striking (ha) a figure by comparison. He moved methodically and directly through his obstacles, like a slow-motion bullet but with a Darth Vader stride, a decision probably only partly informed by the fact that he couldn't turn his head or neck in any direction because of the limitations of his dope-ass looking but largely non-functional costume. Christian Bale's portrayal leaned the most into the Bruce-is-the-real-mask-Batman-is-who-I-am set-up, where the civilian in the excellent suits was the obvious and showy put-on. You could even argue there were three personas in those films: Batman, Bruce Wayne With People and Bruce Wayne Alone With Alfred, which is still an excellent and effective way to go, especially if one of them gets to get stuck in to some meaty two-hander scenes with a full Cockney Michael Caine.* In the few times we got to spend with Ben Affleck's Bruce Wayne he was a fully realized psychopath in Batman v. Superman with zero capacity for pretense, just openly servicing an incandescent rage that could have been actually fascinating (and closer to the more subtle Keaton version really) if he wasn't required by Zack Snyder to turn into something world-breakingly silly because the plot needed him to get into that bitchin' armored suit.

Pattinson doesn't really do any of these things here. The anger expresses itself in some of the Batman confrontations in the disproportionate scale of violence he's willing to snap into at any level of provocation. A lot of Batmans (Batmen? I'm not sure) will brood, sure, be he seems to skip that in favor of just being actively sad. He breaks out and kisses Catwoman at one point, but it's one of the elements of the movie that feels pretty perfunctory and unearned.

And that's saying something because this movie tries to earn everything. Is it too long? Reader, it is. The first I'd say 1 hour 45 minutes of this thing, I would have told you I was watching the Batman film I've been waiting my whole life to see. It's billed as a "Batman as detective" film, which is kind of is, which I got out of comics as a kid, but it really does happen here and I loved it. Add to that really bravura star turns in supporting roles by some of my favorite actors like Jeffrey Wright (an active shoe-leather Jim Gordon), John Turturro (not in nearly enough stuff!), the second Rachel Dawes' real-life husband and Colin Farrell (fucking sublime, unrecognizable, really perfect) and I was enthralled.

But then it just. kept. going. At a certain point the bad guy gives himself up, the chase ends and the movie becomes... something else. It becomes slightly about how Batman didn't solve everything and kind of fucked some things up (elements I really liked!) but also morphed into some conventional superhero stuff where the threat becomes "we have to save the city!" after what had been a contest of minds and methods between antagonist and protagonist. It dragged on for a good 45 minutes longer than it needed to, resolving subplots that didn't matter. You could have had John Turturro in this thing without him being Catwoman's dad at all, man. The plot was structured so him and his choice of mustaches still would have mattered.

In the end the big villain plot was just... a lot of non-catastrophic property damage? Like a week or so with some mobile pump trucks and a shitload of new carpet and we're pretty good. They probably weren't, but those beats sure felt like studio notes. Or left over from drafts when this was still a Ben Affleck movie with a totally different plot. In the end, Batman lost a battle of wits with a serial killer Riddler. Interesting! And then spent the better part of a whole 'nother hour basically just getting his suit wet. It sounds how it sounds.

Did I like it? I did, on balance. Am I going to watch it again? I mean, parts of it maybe. Possibly all the way through once more in a few months to get some fresh eyes on it. In the meantime, I'll wait to see what they do about a sequel and keep myself busy with the four to seven Spider-Man movies they release in the interim.

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*We know there's really no other version of Michael Caine. He never sounds more Cockney than when he plays an American in the few times he's tried.