As every year during the Christmas holydays, good old Pops and me had somewhat of a movie marathon. On even-ending years, we watch Star Wars and on odd-ending ones, we diversify. As you might have guessed from the title, this year we decided on Batman – not the Nolan trilogy, not the Adam West versions, but the ones I remember with fondness from my childhood – my classics. I emphasize on the world remember because I expected to watch some nineties trash, but boy oh boy did were there things I did not recall!
This article will feature some friendly banter on four movies that may be considered mediocre but because of the memories I have about them, I will forever cherish. I am talking about: Batman (1989), Batman: Returns (1992), Batman: Forever (1995) and Batman & Robin (1997). Tim Burton directed the first two while Joel Schumacher made the latters. I will not go in detail and explain the plot or talk about the different actors that portrayed Batman. I will at least mention that the movies can boast phenomenal actors, especially the ones that acted in the roles of the villains (Jack Nicholson, Michelle Pfeiffer, Jim Carrey, Arnold Schwarzenegger to quote some of them).
Since this will be more for laughs than not, I would like to say that there are so many scenes that would never work in movies today and that somehow someway, for these movies, worked like a charm. Nonetheless I will still make fun of some scenes. Let’s skip the some of the classical tropes like the fact that in the first movies the costume was so rigid that Michael Keaton had to move his body rather than only his neck, and the fact that many of the later Batman costumes had nipples (we will just say they were anatomically correct). Other things that would not make sense in other movies can count Joker literally carbonizing a man with an electric buzzer, the fact that the Penguin has and armada of penguins with rockets attached to them, Nigma’s sense of fashion, chemicals are a perfect way to have a change of look and so on. So many more scenes would beg for the question: Yeah, but why? Well, because Batman, that’s why and I will leave it at that.
Sure enough, there are moments when things are serious and grim, but the movies themselves do an interesting job of pairing these instances with other looney and wacky moments. For some reason this does not however hinder the overall quality or ruin the immersion. It makes up for a juxtaposition that makes perfect sense. In my opinion this is mainly because, after having a very differ Batman with Adam West (remember that the guy had a shark-repellant spray), there was no room for a brooding superhero with just the bleakness that usually accompanies Batman.
The first movies had some one-liners and some puns, some of them not being even that good; on the other hand, Batman and Robin featured a galore of bad comebacks, idiotic jokes, and wannabe-witty-remarks, but they all worked somehow. I mean, the first thing that Mr. Freeze says is “The icemen cometh” after freezing three police officers; and we are not even five minutes into the movie. Some of these jokes are not even jokes, they are just random things the characters say, but they just seem to fit so well – and let us not forget that in this very same movie Batman has a Bat-credit-card, so yeah, makes perfect sense.
[On a side note to this last part: let us not forget that we are speaking about a movie from 1997 – merely a year later Blade would deliver the badass “Some motherfuckers are always tryin to ice-skate uphill” line, which to this day still does not make any sense whatsoever but how he says it, just makes you want to punch a vampire in the fangs]
There are however two things that remain common throughout the movies: music and scenery. Somehow, in spite of the one-liner galore and some of the dubious action scenes, these two things manage to make everything feel as a whole. Both Burton and Schumacher beautifully depicted their version of Gotham, but I would not be able to describe a precise style that they used. It obviously has that comic-book vibe, but it goes beyond that. The city itself has different architectural styles that merge and fuse to a degree that can only be called a new style. If we consider the skyline and the buildings, I would say it has some baroque or maybe gothic elements that combine with futuristic concepts, and yet the interior does not reflect the exterior. The alleys can be dark at times, that much is true, and some buildings can be engulfed in that typical ‘vanishing’ mist that makes Batman disappear, but seldom we see thugs with fluorescent masks and weapons that represent a style that I would identify as neon-punk (or a predecessor of it). And these are merely some of the core notes that I have picked on.
As I already said, all these normally heterogeneous elements of styles, stories and stylistic devices, make up for four movies that may seem inferior but if contextualized have their reason of having been made like that. I will always remember them with fondness.
I would rate this a solid 7 nostalgic bats out of 10.
That’s been all from this Bat-article, have a nice one.