Why Robert Pattinson’s Grim Batman Is Cause for Optimism
In The Batman, Matt Reeves’s long and grim superhero epic, Robert Pattinson plays a brooding sophomore of a dark knight. He wears mascara. He journals. He is vengeance. He is the shadows. But despite all the memes and fanboy hand-wringing generated from the Twilight actor’s casting, Pattinson’s is a back-to-basics Batman. He isn’t the tired, aging crimefighter played by Ben Affleck, nor is The Batman the umpteenth pearl-scattering origin story for the character.
Pattinson’s Bruce Wayne is young and still figuring out his role in Gotham. He pummels streetgangs in clown makeup like any Batman, but he also plods around looking for clues with Jeffrey Wright’s Jim Gordon. The pair makes for a melancholy Holmes and Watson, gumshoeing around a city whose mob boss has fallen but where crime only seems to get worse.
It’s a new kind of Batman, but also possibly the most comic-accurate film portrayal ever. After all, the caped crusader emerged from 1930s detective comics, pulpy noir stories about sleuths and gangsters instead of world-conquering supervillains. But despite Batman’s comic billing as “The World’s Greatest Detective,” past screen versions of the character haven’t relied on his mystery-solving so much as his gadgets and the haunted inheritance that paid for them.
In making The Batman a noir-mystery, Reeves showed both the limits and possibilities of today’s big-budget filmmaking. If you want to make an epic movie, the stars need to be wearing capes. But with audiences so used to superheroes, the film’s success shows there may be room to experiment within the genre.
Staff writers David Sims, Sophie Gilbert, and Spencer Kornhaber discuss The Batman on The Atlantic’s culture podcast The Review. What does The Batman show us about the state of superhero movies? How does Pattinson’s Batman compare to past iterations? And, most importantly, is this Batman emo or grunge? Listen to their conversation here:
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The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity. It contains spoilers for The Batman.
Today, we’re here. The newest film iteration of the Caped Crusader is directed by Matt Reeves and stars Robert Pattinson as Batman/Bruce Wayne. The movie is already the highest-grossing film of 2022, but surprisingly, it’s the first stand-alone Batman movie in a decade. came out all the way back in 2012, which makes me feel really old. There’s been no shortage of comic-book movies in that time, it is true, but it’s interesting to reconsider Batman now and think about the genre without all the weight of universe building and connected franchises. So with this in mind, David, maybe you can share some thoughts on this subject to kick us off: What does say about the state of superhero movies right now? What should we read from the success of this film?
