BATMAN RETURNS (1992)
No matter how many times we’re introduced to a new actor playing Bruce Wayne, or a new director at the helm of the latest Batman film, they will always compete with Michael Keaton in Tim Burton’s BATMAN RETURNS.
As much as Nolan may have reinvented the genre and taken the comic book out of the comic book movies, I severely miss that cartoon-like filmmaking.
I grew up watching the Batman films of the ‘90s, including 1989’s BATMAN, but it was the other three I found myself returning to more and more.
Around the same time, I watched Batman: The Animated Series, and through these four films and the series, I slowly started to create my version of what I thought Batman stood for and represented. Constantly a figure that bends and changes based on the creator controlling him.
Before we get Matt Reeves’ take on the caped crusader—which seems to be going down the path most of us have been begging for years, showing us that he truly is a great detective first—we had Zack Snyder, who wholly misunderstood most of the Justice League.
We also had Christopher Nolan, who was more interested in villains than Bruce himself, which is fine. Most of the time, the rogue’s gallery deserves the spotlight instead of Batman, but Nolan would also use them as foils/mirrors of Bruce to make him look at himself at what happens when villains change him, to the point where they’re not that different. It’s the line that was once great turned joke, “you either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become a villain.”
Before this turns into a DC vs Marvel fight, a defining factor ends up being within their films, how they utilize their villains. Not only utilize, but almost idealize and make them the lead character. Batman sometimes feels like a supporting character in his films, but not in Tim Burton’s films. Yes, Jack Nicholson’s Joker steals the show, as does Michelle Pfieffer’s Catwoman and Danny DeVito’s Penguin, but it always goes back to Batman. The film is defined by their relationship together, and in BATMAN RETURNS it’s a sort of love triangle.
Joel Schumacher would tackle Batman across two films only three years after BATMAN RETURNS. He will take the groundwork that Burton has laid out, and he’ll turn the dial way past 11. While Burton’s Gotham is taken straight out of films from the German Expressionism movement, Schumacher’s Gotham looks like a television set. Mimicking the almost slapstick-like caricatures we once saw in the original ‘60s television series (and Silver Age comic books). That was the Batman that Schumacher knew. Between the awful Mr. Freeze puns to the dutch angles, we moved past what made the first two films work so well.
BATMAN and BATMAN RETURNS sit in the middle of the spectrum of realism and cartoon.
There’s a sense of urgency. We understand what we’re watching is possible, but never in the reality we’re living.
Keaton plays Bruce Wayne as someone in on the joke, understanding the absurdity of what we’re watching, occasionally a moment away from winking at the screen but not doing so to break the illusion. The audience doesn’t want the fantasy to break.
We want the ridiculous gadgets, the Batmobile, the Batwing; we want it all. It’s why we see every new iteration of the Batmobile move away from the silly (but incredible) design of the vigilante’s car of the ‘90s. As time passes and we move to tanks and muscle cars, the Batmobile loses its magic. It’s no longer Batman’s vehicle, but a secondary weapon claimed and then used to suit him. It’s another mirror to show us the man under the cowl this time around.
Christopher Nolan lit a flame that seems will never go out by reinventing Comic Book Movies, and as someone who is both exhausted and excited by the current slate of them, I miss what we had. The CBMs of yesteryear were allowed to be colorful, cartoony, and filled with camp. BATMAN RETRNS hits all of those marks in ways that we might not have seen since, or ever would again.
