![]() Director Tim Burton and his special effects team have created a visual place that has some of the same strength as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis or Ridley Scott’s futuristic Los Angeles in “ Blade Runner.” The gloominess of the visuals has a haunting power. It’s classified PG-13, but it’s not for kids. This is a hostile, mean-spirited movie about ugly, evil people, and it doesn’t generate the liberating euphoria of the Superman or Indiana Jones pictures. And there was something off-putting about the anger beneath the movie’s violence. I remember The Joker grinning beneath a hideous giant balloon as he dispenses free cash in his own travesty of the Macy’s parade, and I remember a really vile scene in which he defaces art masterpieces in the local museum before Batman crashes in through the skylight.īut did I care about the relationship between these two caricatures? Did either one have the depth of even a comic book character? Not really. I remember an astonishing special effects shot that travels up, up to the penthouse of a towering, ugly skyscraper, and I remember the armor slamming shut on the Batmobile as if it were a hightech armadillo. Remembering the movie, I find that the visuals remain strong in my mind, but I have trouble caring about what happened in front of them. The movie forgets to allow her to be astonished. ![]() The strangest scene in the movie may be the one where Vicky is brought into the Batcave by Alfred, the faithful valet, and realizes for the first time that Bruce Wayne and Batman are the same person. Kim Basinger strides in as Vicky Vale, a famous photographer assigned to the Gotham City crime wave, but although she and Wayne carry on a courtship and Batman rescues her from certain death more than once, there’s no chemistry and little eroticism. Nicholson’s Joker is really the most important character in the movie - in impact and screen time - and Keaton’s Batman and Bruce Wayne characters are so monosyllabic and impenetrable that we have to remind ourselves to cheer for them. Then it turns into a gloomy showdown between the two bizarre characters. The screenplay takes a bow in the direction of the origin of the Batman story (young Bruce Wayne saw his parents murdered by a thug and vowed to use their fortune to dedicate his life to crime-fighting), and it also explains how The Joker got his fearsome grimace. ![]() Gotham is in the midst of a wave of crime and murder orchestrated by The Joker ( Jack Nicholson), and civilization is defended only by Batman ( Michael Keaton). The streets of Gotham City are lined with bizarre skyscrapers that climb cancerously toward the sky, held up (or apart) by sky bridges and stresswork that look like webs against the night sky.Īt street level, gray and anonymous people scurry fearfully through the shadows, and the city cancels its 200th anniversary celebration because the streets are not safe enough to hold it. The movie is set at the present moment, more or less, but looks as if little has happened in architecture or city planning since the classic DC comic books created that architectural style you could call Comic Book Moderne. “Batman” discards the recent cultural history of the Batman character - the camp 1960s TV series, the in-joke comic books - and returns to the mood of the 1940s, the decade of film noir and fascism.
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