The Batman's Riddler Is An Incel And That Should Be A Grim Message To Us All

thegamer.com:

The Batman is a surprisingly grounded film. Superhero movies have become so obsessed with world-ending threats and larger than life adversaries that when the stakes are brought down to a human level it can feel underwhelming. There isn’t a generic beam of light bursting into the sky that our heroes need to stop, so there’s a chance that mainstream audiences might grow bored and zone out completely. Here’s looking at you, Suicide Squad.

When I heard that Robert Pattinson’s turn as the caped crusader was pushing three hours in length, my initial fear was that it would attempt to be a pretentious and overly indulgent slice of detective drama that fails to recognise the appeal of the character and veers much too far in the opposite direction for its own good.

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It is certainly overlong and oftentimes ponderous, but The Batman is so brilliant because it understands the past successes of Nolan, Snyder, and even Burton while seeking to weave a narrative unlike anything we’ve seen in the genre before. It’s brilliant because it doesn’t want to be a superhero film, it wants to subvert our expectations and draw us into a dark, grounded, and miserable vision of Gotham that I didn’t want to leave.

Matt Reeve’s depiction of Gotham is rather cartoonish. Architecture is fittingly exaggerated, and its inhabitants are underpinned by rampant crime as they hope their political system is somehow able to pull them away from the clutches of inevitable dystopia.

It’s a grim place, one dominated by a seemingly endless cover of darkness and so much rainfall that I now believe that Gotham is located somewhere in Wales. Despite its outlandish qualities, the entire city rocks