The Batman
★ ★★★ ½
Despite being indoors while watching this film, I felt drenched with rain when the credits rolled. Somehow director Matt Reeves leans even more into the darkness of the famous Bruce Wayne character. Just by watching one trailer, I knew The Batman was going to be a gloomy tale. As one friend said to me, "I don't know how excited I am for a grim, 3-hour Batman movie." What I didn't expect was a David Fincher-like detective story with social commentary on class and angst.
The Batman truly evoked moments of fear in me. Reeves uses Gotham and these characters to tap into the existential dread that our whole world has felt during these unstable times. It's not on accident that you will inherently connect events like the January 6 insurrection and Hurricane Katrina to the events that unfold in this movie. But I was also surprised to find a message of hope at the end that is rightly earned, reflective and not too heavy-handed.
I was shocked by how fast this movie moves for a three-hour film. It's mainly due to Reeves not wasting time on focusing on things that other superhero films get distracted by. He puts the plot and story first and lets the audience fill the gaps on other matters. He has perfectly cast this film and lets all the actors ground their roles in reality. Gotham City has never embodied its characters so well and Reeves knows how to not oversaturate this movie with the villains.
The overall broodiness of this film is a little over-the-top at times. The use of Nirvana's Something In The Way particularly made me laugh and totally made me think of a college's student pet film project. But besides some little miscues, The Batman is a solid cannon in the film franchise and has nudge itself into, "Is this one of the best comic book movies ever?" conversation.
