The best Batman movie is not what you think

The best Batman movie is not what you think

Since 1943, Batman has had more than a dozen major, starring appearances on the silver screen, from the original black and white serials all the way to 21st-century shared universe blockbusters, and each has an irreducible fan-base ready to argue that their favorite is The best. Well, except for soap operas. Looking back, we are all pretty much in agreement with those who were terrible.

Every other adventure that brought the black knight to the screen, however, has a strong case for being the best. For most, it really depends on what you're looking for, whether it's the best villain, the best plot, the most striking imagery, the most brutal fight scenes, or even the most egregious ice puns. if it's your thing With so many appearances, each of them is the best at something, but there is only one who does everything better than the others, and he might not be the one you think. The best Batman movie is not the Dark Knight, it's not Tim Burton 1989 Batman, and it's not even the Adam West Batman from 1966. It's the movie that takes what these movies do the best and do it even better.

The case against (and for) Batman '66'

To understand which Batman movie is the best, you can not just look for the best things about each one. You must take each film as a whole, judge it by its flaws as much as you judge it by where it excels. You have to consider the intention behind the film, and the legacy it has left with the audience, and in that respect, it's pretty easy to claim that Batman '66 is in the top rank, even super movies hero in general.

It does, after all, do an amazing job of accomplishing the goal of bringing to the big screen the things that made the live-action Batman TV show a hit. He juggled a huge team-up between four villains reunited as the Uni-sub-world who are mentioned in the script as a monstrous rectangle, which is perhaps the best way four people have ever been mentioned in a movie- and gave the viewing public a taste of the epic, sweeping adventure with scenes that involved the Batman custom helicopter and speedboat, a nuclear submarine, and a shark in blast. He even boasts of a really good emotional content in the form of Bruce Wayne's grief when he realizes he was fooled by Catwoman.

Unfortunately, Batman '66 is also firmly rooted in the approach of the source material from Campy to Batman. This is not necessarily a bad thing - the comedy is both intentional and really hilarious, with Batman's unfortunate attempt to get rid of a bomb holding up as a little astonishing physical comedy over 50 years later but the actual Superhero adventure at the heart of the STO Ry does not really hold. The villains' attempt to vaporize the international delegates of the United world is a satire to the point of being a joke, and to cap things, Batman and Robin are not actually fixing it in the end. Instead, they screw it up so badly that they decide to sneak out the window. It's a great movie, but maybe not the best representation of Batman.

Style and substance in the Tim Burton movies

Next up came in 1989 from Batman and 1992's Batman Returns, directed by Tim Burton. At the time, they were hailed by fans as a return to Batman's darker roots, but really, Burton was just doing Batman '66 with a Gothic coat of paint: brightly colored Gas Knockout and a wildly theatrical villain, Goons in matching satin jackets, satirical touches with reporters try to avoid poisoned makeup. The "Penguin runs for mayor" plot in Batman returns was raised directly from one of the two-part adventures of the show.

That said, you can not deny that Burton's gothic spin is striking. Anton fururet's creations for Gotham City are a beautiful nightmare of urban sprawl, with art deco facades impacted by pipes and industrial vents. Returns in particular has some of the most striking images in the Superhero genre, making a Gotham winter as the monochromatic game for a morality game. Catwoman's wary shot at a department store through the sneering logo of a cartoon cat engraved on the glass is a perfect example of how much style the Burton movies had.

Unfortunately, they are also deeply flawed. The Batman we saw in the movie 89 is an eccentric lunatic for whom heroism seems to be a mostly unintentional side effect of a quest for revenge that finds him by passing dozens of henchmen. Returns is even worse on this front, with a script that has been Frankensteined together from several drafts, with the seams between them almost as blatant as the imagery on the screen. From a plot point of view, it's a confusing mess where the only character with a clear motivation is Christopher Walken as a bad industrialist, and even then his motivation is just about "be Evil".

Joel Schumacher takes style to the extreme

If Burton's Batman films were marked by stylistic excess, then his successor, Joel Schumacher, took this idea to the extreme. Every Burton element played with in these movies is exaggerated in Batman Forever and Batman and Robin, and the most charitable way to refer to the results is "decreased returns."

Schumacher's films took on the influence of the 1960s TV show and raised it to levels that went well beyond the 1960s, including scammers-pusher, femme fatale villainesses , and Robin's introduction, which was adopted by Bruce Wayne despite the fact that Chris O'Donnell was pretty clear in his mid-twenties when these movies were made. Even Gotham himself was set up, from drawings that fururet described as "like hell bursting through the pavement" to a weird cityscape with buildings held high by massive statues, where everything was soaked in kaleidoscopic Neon Light.

Needless to say, these films have a very bad reputation, to the point where Schumacher apologized for them. Really, however, they are not so bad, especially the insults Batman and Robin. Like Batman '66, it's a movie that knows exactly what it's doing and looks at its Campy aspects. It's just not as good as this movie by a long shot, and even its most conflicting advocates will admit that "not so bad" is a long way from "the best".

The Dark Knight Trilogy's flawed masterpiece

When Batman returned to theaters in 2005, it was really darkest to take Burton movies to be confused. It was still undeniably a superhero movie, with a plot that revolved around a secret Ninja cult and a plan to destroy Gotham City with the fear of gas, but it made an attempt at a slightly more ingrained version of Batman himself. That alone makes it a weird movie to look at in the context of its sequels, which move through morality play in the Straight-Up fable which is the Dark Knight Rises, a movie where a flash drive can erase your criminal record and where every police officer in a city of millions can be trapped in a hole for six months by a wrestler in a CPAP mask.

Between them, however, is the Dark Knight, a film that is rightly considered a high point of its kind. His tight and complicated plot is driven by the incredible depiction of Heath Ledger of the Joker, whose chance "chaos agent" persona is a mask of smoke masking a complex plot built around revealing the worst of human nature. It's a film where Bruce Wayne loses being unable to save the woman he loves, while Batman wins by showing that if they have an example to show them the way, people can be something better than the violent crowd the Joker paints them as.

The Dark Knight is easily the safe choice for the best Batman film of all time, and with its compelling characterization and intensity that the great book and Christian Bale bring to their roles-not to mention Aaron Eckhart, who holds the his as a two-sided version that might not be further away from Batman Forever landscape chewing Day-Glo Circus clown-he lives up to the hype. But he has flaws, and his faults are magnified by the way he does all the rest. Its end is oddly cynical given what comes next, and the weird ball-rebuilding pseudoscience is Goofy enough to feel completely out of place in the orderly clock of the rest of the plot.

Batman v Superman v explosions

Finally, we're left with Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, and in all honesty, compared to most of the other movies we've already gone through, it's not even in conflict. From the moment we are introduced to Batman in the context of DC's current cinematic universe, it feels like we are missing something, which is probably because we are.

Of course, we get the Waynes to be murdered again, but by the time Superman fails to save someone in Metropolis, it's a Batman who has apparently already been through a long career that includes the death of a Robin and fight the bad guys enough that they can train a suicide squad of tires. That's all we could want to see to get an idea of ​​why we should love this Batman before it is effortlessly handled in a super-hero fight by Lex Luthor, but we do not get it. Instead, it's a Batman who is cabotage on all the movies that came before him-as well as the imagery raised directly from Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns-and the assumption that we should already have everything know about this guy and what his agreement is. It's a lot to assume when you tell the story of what is ostensibly a brand new Batman who meets Superman on a movie screen for the first time.

What the Batman of society did for him is a handful of shattering fighting scenes and the foresight to be the brains behind the establishment of the Justice League, even though Lex Luthor seems to be the one who did the homework on that one.

So, if none of these are the best Batman movie, what's left? The one who does everything right: Batman: mask of fantasy.

Mask of the Phantasm: the best Batman film

It is interesting to note from the beginning that the fantasy mask is not perfect. It was originally intended for direct release to video, and the decision was made for the film to hit the theaters on Christmas Day 1993 long after it was already in production.

It shows as well. Not only has the public been treated to a bad sounding trailer that looks like it was set up in an afternoon, fantasy mask often falls short of how it looks. The animation of the film is far from the sharp visuals that the audience might have expected at a time when animated films were set by the Disney Renaissance, but there is a reason for that. Just look at Aladdin, who had been released the previous year. When the president of Disney Studios demanded a complete rewrite in April 1991, just 19 months before the release of the film, it was such a big deal that the hosts called it a "black Friday". fantasy mask, on the other hand, had a total production time of only eight months and had to deal with making a movie intended for the standard definition of VHS tapes look good enough for the big screen.

But that does not mean you have the shade mask of fantasy on a curve. For all its shortcomings, it does not really do everything the other films try, but better. As...

Bringing the Animated Series to the big screen

Batman: The film managed to bring what worked on television to an epic on-screen adventure, and the Burton movies were marked by a distinct and definitive visual style that worked wonders for Batman and his world. Mask of fantasy managed to accomplish these two feats, but without the flaws that the 1966 and 1989 films had to contend with.

Part of that, of course, comes from the fact that they work with entirely different source material. While Batman '66 was rooted in producer Lorenzo Semple Jr. of the notion that Superhero comics were an inherently stupid genre that could function as a comedy just by presenting them as if they were serious-with' 89 following on his Traces-mask of the fantasy was building on the foundation that its producers had already established with Batman: the animated series. It was a show where the idea was to strip Batman to the strict necessities of what worked, embracing swings and character rather than camp, and the film takes these ideas to the next level.

Who translated to the visual style, too. While the animation was a bit lacking, the AGV designs of a retro-futuristic art deco Gotham City were beautiful on the big screen, and the fantasy mask put them in front and center. The Extended "City of the Future" sequence and the climactic battle between the Joker and Batman where they ransack as Kaiju across a scale model of the city are fantastic showcases for the revolutionary style that would define the vibrant universe of DC for the next two decades.

Emotional content

Nolan's films succeed largely because we are shown Bruce Wayne as an imperfect human being who transcends himself to become something more, and the sacrifices he endures to pursue a life like Batman. Mask of fantasy brings these same elements, but in a way that balances and mixes one's emotional heart with super-heroic action.

The scene in the cemetery, where a young Bruce Wayne pleads with his parents to forgive him for breaking the vow he has made as a child to avenge their death stands up against any emotional scene in any other Batman movie. The way he is tortured by the fact that keeping this vow would mean giving up the only happiness he had felt since their murder is a fantastic illustration of the tragedy at the center of his character, and for an audience that had mainly seen Batman as an unstoppable ideal who rolled around rocket cars and swung grapples, he added layers.

What it does best, though, is something that other films often struggle with. By presenting the fantasy, he shows the difference between a quest for revenge and a search for justice. Andrea Beaumont has every reason to hate the people she goes after, just as Bruce Wayne does, but as far as we can understand, there is a clear distinction between the hero and the vigilante.

Origins and influence

One of the most interesting things about Batman: the anime series was that, although it gave original stories to some villains like the Riddler, Batman himself-with the Joker, Catwoman, the Penguin, and others-arrived fully formed. It works very well on the show, but the film allowed them to explore the early days of Batman in a way that feels different.

As Batman begins, which drew on Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli Batman: year one, he is bringing his strong inspiration to the page. In this case, however, the elements of the first year are combined with the plot of Mike W. Barr, Alan Davis, and Todd McFarlane Batman: year two, in which the Dark Knight takes a villain who bears more than one resemblance of passage to fantasy. Unlike Begins, however-and unlike Batman v Superman attempts to recreate Dark Knight returns-it's not enough to make a cinematic version of something that had already been done. Instead, he mixes these elements together in a new way, combining them with the bare aesthetics and direction of the show for something that feels truly unique.

It's a film that's full of bold choices, showing Batman's human weaknesses, giving him a villain who eventually escapes, and using the Joker as a secondary threat looming over what's ultimately a story very personal. He takes risks no other Batman film has, and in almost all cases, they pay, at least in terms of narration. Unfortunately, the fantasy mask was the only Batman movie ever to flop on its original release, but the years since have seen a critical re-examination that has placed it right where it should be: at the highest level of cinematographic adventures of Batman.

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