Ah, good old Batman, a guy who never seems to leave the screen for very long. This 2022 effort was released shortly after the pandemic, but filmed considerably earlier, and I remember all the updates in magazines and entertainment shows. The pandemic delay of certain big movies meant that the rest of the world got a taste of the anticipation I felt to see the movies that were everywhere but in prison.
Which was paradoxical, I suppose, since Batman never really left! Cable has consistently made a meal of the “Dark Knight” films and every once in a while AMC or TBS would bust out the 90’s era movies. The Institutional Movies even brought us not only “Batman V. Superman” and the theatrical “Justice League”, but also “The Lego Batman Movie” - harmlessly clever comedy, of course, but savagely apt parody of Gotham’s ubiquitous protector.
As someone who grew up with comics, I carried a nuclear excitement for “Batman V. Superman”. If you liked superheroes, that was the one movie you had waited your life to see. The result was… not well-received, to put it lightly. But while the outside world mocked the movie’s over-the-top histrionics, I do feel as if Zack Snyder and company tried their best to create something big and operatic, unable to be pierced by the glibness and quips of other blockbusters, particularly the ones from the Marvel Universe.
That being said, much of the mockery was on-point. Snyder’s Batman was a brick craphouse brawler with a relentlessly bleak worldview. Since this was an older Batman, Snyder felt a comfort in depicting a guy who had been doing a job for so long that he only expects the worst out of people. It’s actually a smart storytelling decision given that Snyder was pitching a multi-film character arc, causing Bruce Wayne to reevaluate his priorities when it comes time to be a part of a League that dispenses Justice, and I appreciate the long game. But it does mean that “Batman V. Superman” starts this character out with a miserable introduction, spouting hateful diatribes against aliens in a way that juuuuuuust avoids tipping towards an ugly direction.
It’s good that Matt Reeves tried a different tack with his reinvention. His Batman is the most plausible yet, a guy in a costume who has no idea what he’s doing. He embraces the typical theatrics, with the added benefit that he can convincingly throw a punch without a camera cut obscuring the fact the suit is inherently bulky and uncomfortable. But he is uncertain, even scared. The idea that Bruce Wayne could be a peak human and also the World’s Greatest Detective has always been a stretch, so Reeves has no problem even making Batman seem a step too slow. There’s a monologue near the end where, halfway through it, you see Batman realize, ah, wait, NOW I get it! That moment of surprise isn’t the sort of thing we’ve seen from this character since Michael Keaton.
Superficially, this is more of a miserablist Batman than we’ve seen, and this has always been a character in need of a cheer-up. But the whole point of this film is to give the character a real victory, not a Pyrrhic punchout that supposedly resets the status quo. In a more linear approach, it almost feels like a critique of the Nolan films, where Batman was obsessed with cleaning up a city even though he seemed to know nothing about it and barely interacted with anyone within. These movies need to interrogate the idea of a superhero in a modern day – what does it mean to be a “good guy” and a “bad guy”? From 2016-2020 I watched the country support a President who spoke almost entirely using supervillain rhetoric, the sort of thing that makes you wonder if people really even like the “good guy” anymore.
Movies like this, where Batman truly understands that “doing good” means more than vanquishing a colorfully-dressed baddie, can help further a necessary conversation. Unfortunately, it is unavoidable, at least for this movie, that Batman is going to send his enemies to an asylum (where, it is made clear, they will meet other villains). But maybe we can understand that everyone needs help. By the film’s close, after Batman has taken down all those creepy internet incels, he is sticking around and assisting those who have been displaced by a nasty flood. He’s helping.
Everyone has their judgment towards people in prison, how they got there, when they’re getting out, what they’ve done. But when you’re there, surrounded by hundreds of men, you see their dissatisfaction. You see them alone, struggling to put together a schedule, struggling to find meaning. They all need help. They’re not getting help.
In my first spot, I sought therapy. But they downgraded me, believing that I wasn’t necessarily someone in psychological danger, someone with poor mental health. This despite two stints on suicide watch (one of them an accident, but that’s a long story). In my second spot, they only offered group therapy, and it was fairly generic and anodyne, focused on “criminal behavior” and “anger management”. Well, I think – I registered for the latter, but they never accepted me. These programs are run by officials who were at the prison all the day, who saw the men in great psychological disrepair, particularly during the pandemic. And if they didn’t care, then how could we get the public to care? Whether Batman is involved or not, we need to remind ourselves that everybody needs help.