The Batman breaks free of the Dark Knight trilogy’s legacy by literally breaking Batman
polygon.comThe Batman, the new DC comics-inspired thriller from War for the Planet of the Apes director Matt Reeves, struggles to create distance from Christian Nolan’s still-impressive trilogy. Both are inspired by seminal Batman texts, including Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli’s down-and-dirty Batman: Year One, and rely on top-tier cinematographers (Wally Pfsiter on the Dark Knight films, Dune’s Greig Fraser working with Reeves) to create hyper-realism in contrast to Tim Burton’s gothic vision, Joel Schumacher’s living cartoons, and Zack Snyder’s mythological frescos. But Reeves finds a unique spirit through a simple pleasure: beating the living crap out of Batman. Robert Pattinson can’t body slam into enough walls, in my opinion.
Christian Bale’s Batman was more vulnerable than the screen incarnations before him — who worried more about surviving a horde of evil penguins or being turned into a block of ice by Mr. Freeze — but between armor and high-tech gadgetry, he was still mostly untouchable in skirmishes with the common Gotham goon. There are a few moments of brutality across Nolan’s trilogy; a pouting young Bruce has his ass handed to him in a Bhutan prison early on in Batman Begins, but he’s just (Batman) beginning, and we know he’ll be walloping back in the immediate future. After the psychology-heavy The Dark Knight, Nolan wrote Bane into The Dark Knight Rises to deal maximum pain, recreating the scene from Batman: Knightfall when Bane cracks Bruce Wayne’s back. Nolan pushed the franchise to extremes, and if anything was going to derail Bale’s Batman in the final act, it was going to be the ultimate takedown.
But in The Batman, Reeves asks Pattinson to become Bruised Wayne. His millionaire goth kid dons the cowl,
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