How Christopher Nolan Ruined Batman
Batman, who is my favorite fictional character in any medium, is a character that has existed for nearly a century, and public interest in him practically guarantees that he’ll be around for at least another one. But it hasn’t always been all roses and grappling hooks for the Caped Crusader…
While Batman comics have always sold well, Batman’s on-screen adventures have had somewhat mixed results over the years.
Early Batman films and TV shows like the racist black & white cliffhanger serials from the 1940s and the madcap psychedelic TV series of the 60s were well received for their time, but are viewed as quaint artifacts now.
Tim Burton made a bizarre but fun Batman movie at the end of the 80s that earned a shit ton of money for Warner Bros, however he followed it up with an even more bizarre but much less fun Batman movie where Catwoman is shoved out of a skyscraper and killed, chewed back to life by alley cats, and has a nervous breakdown before teaming up with The Penguin. In the comics, the Penguin is a dapper gentlemen’s criminal but Burton saw him as a sewer-dwelling, bile-spewing mutant that eats cats.
This did not make as much money for Warner Bros.
As I’ve said before, box office money butters the bread that builds these superhero sandwiches, so when a Batman sequel made less money than its predecessor, Warners decided to change directions. This resulted in “Batman Forever”, which was meant to correct all of the problems of the previous Batman film by taking Batman much less seriously, setting everything in a similar tone to the 60s television series that Schumacher had grown up with, and casting Jim Carrey to do his Jim Carrey thing. In fact, Jim Carrey was a selling point that Warners was banking on heavily, so heavily that he got paid more than Val Kilmer…you know, the guy who played Batman.
In spite of these drastic changes, Joel Schumacher’s “Batman Forever" was a hit for Warner Bros, making them considerably more money than Tim Burton’s weird German expressionist version of Batman did. So you can imagine how disappointed they were when Schumacher’s next Batman movie was a giant fucking guano pile that almost killed off Batman movies…um, forever.
It was so bad, so unflinchingly awful, so damaging to their bottom line, that Warner Bros was terrified to touch another superhero movie. They immediately canceled a project being directed by Tim Burton that would’ve seen Nicolas Cage as Superman (no, seriously, this was inches away from actually happening) and shelved the Batman franchise indefinitely.
And frankly, it’s hard to blame them.
Numerous attempts were made to get Batman back on the big screen, but nothing made it past the early stages of development.
It wasn’t until 2002, when director Christopher Nolan, known for his somber, mystery-driven thrillers, was approached by Warners and asked how he would do a Batman movie. The result of this was 2005’s “Batman Begins", which aimed to do two things; 1.) Reestablish Batman as a box office heavyweight and 2.) Get audiences to take Batman seriously again. It did both of these very well.
Nolan’s next Batman movie, 2008’s “The Dark Knight" was the most successful Batman movie to date, raking in just over a billion dollars. How much of that was due to the passing of its belated star, Heath Ledger, is still up for debate, but the third Batman film in Nolan’s trilogy “The Dark Knight Rises" is still a memorable experience and is still considered a success, even if it didn’t make as much money for Warner Bros as the Joker did...
So how then, you might be asking, did Christopher Nolan “ruin” Batman?
Well, ironically, it’s the very same way he saved Batman. Remember, Warner Bros was afraid to go near another superhero movie for almost a decade, until Chris Nolan came along and said “Hey what if we did it this way?”, setting his Batman in a stylized reality where everything had to look and feel like it could exist in the real-world, and every last detail had to have a functional explanation.
And that approach worked for what they wanted to accomplish in the early 2000s, but now it’s created a problem…
In my last article, I mentioned how successful ideas in Hollywood are like a venereal disease, once one catches on, they tend to stick around for awhile and spread themselves about. And thanks to the success of Nolan’s Batman movies, Batman now seems to be trapped in this “real-world" aesthetic that Nolan put him in and Warner Bros seemingly have no intention of letting him out of it.
Zack Snyder’s “Man of Steel" attempted to do for Superman what Chris Nolan had done for Batman (set Superman in a realistic world and erase the corny 1970s version of Superman that existed in everyone’s minds), but as I’ve already covered, Zack Snyder is an absolute fucking hack who doesn’t give a shit about superheroes or making good movies about them, so Warner Bros has since given up on his “vision" after its dismal box office returns.
However, it is worth mentioning that he also attempted to emulate the success of Chris Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy by grounding Batman in a forgettable, generic world that was even less visually interesting than Nolan’s.
Yeah, that’s right. It’s been almost ten years since it ended, so I feel ready to talk about it now: Chris Nolan’s Batman movies are not exactly eye candy. They’re great films in their own right, much better than anything Zack Snyder could ever hope to churn out, but they’re not terribly interesting to look at.
When I first heard that he was going to be shooting them in Chicago, I was excited because there are many parts of Chicago that could pass for a Gotham City which both felt real and matched the Gotham we see in the comics.
None of those locations made it into Nolan’s movies.
Instead, it seems like Nolan went out of his way to shoot the parts of Chicago that could be from virtually any other city, and they’re just not as interesting to look at for me.
Now sure, you could say that Marvel has done the same thing with their movies, but their heroes are colorful and funny and shoot pink laser beams while engaging in witty banter, you know, things that Batman doesn’t do (nor should he). Marvel can get away with mundane locations and set pieces because their heroes are visually captivating already.
Batman wears black & gray and does a lot of brooding in the shadows, but Batman comics have always been appealing to the eye. Just look at these classic Batman drawings…
Now juxtapose these with the bland brown & gray worlds created by Chris Nolan and Zack Snyder. See the problem here?
Film is just as much a visual medium as comic books, so why wouldn’t you want your Batman movies to be as visually appealing as their ink & paper counterparts?
I get that they’re trying to establish these characters in the “real world" (a real world that apparently has “focused microwave" McGuffins and interplanetary beings with superhuman abilities), but here’s the thing: I don’t want to see Batman in the “real world". I don’t want to see Superman in the “real world". I read comics and watch movies to escape from the real world.
Somewhere along the way, Warner Bros seem to have forgotten that these characters and these movies are about escapism. The real world is shitty enough, I don’t need my fictional characters to live here too.
I want to see Batman and Superman in the worlds crafted for them by their original creators. There’s a reason these characters have lasted for so goddamn long, and Warners needs to remember that.
But for now, they’re still trying to make Batman movies that exist in the “real world", and their latest attempt is Matt Reeves' “The Batman", starring Robert Pattinson as a younger Batman, who’s just getting started in his crimefighting career and has yet to find the balance of being both Bruce Wayne and Batman.
And don’t get me wrong, I think all of that sounds great and I’m looking forward to a Batman movie with none of Zack Snyder’s dirty fingerprints on it. Except I feel like I already saw this movie. In 2005. When it was called “Batman Begins".
It’s deja vu all over again, as we see yet another Batman in his early 30s starting to make a name for himself in a grimy, realistic Gotham that looks like it could be Any City, USA. Are they seriously just trying to emulate Nolan’s aesthetic again? Holy rerun!
Not only is this “real-world" approach visually unappealing, it’s creatively stifling. When you set everything in the “real world", the focal point suddenly shifts from “How do we tell a good Batman story?" to “How do we make everything ‘real’?”. Everything starts to revolve around stripping away all of the fantastical elements that make Batman visually enjoyable and as a result, Batman and his world begin to feel less unique.
This is why the Batmobile went from looking like a cool, iconic movie vehicle to a boring-ass piece of military tech.
Furthermore, there are certain Batman characters that just wouldn’t work in the “real-world" prison that Nolan has built for all future versions of Batman. Iconic villains such as Killer Croc and Man-Bat would never be allowed to exist in the “real world”. Quirkier villains like Mad Hatter or The Ventriloquist would likely never see the light of day in a “real-world" Batman movie.
And yes, I’m aware that Killer Croc is in “Suicide Squad" but that’s not a Batman movie, it’s a Suicide Squad movie. And it has its own problems that we’ll get into another day…
So how do you fix Batman, you might ask?
Well, for starters, stop starting over again. Every time we get a new Batman, we have to see him start from the ground up. It’s overplayed and it’s burning audiences out on this character.
I mean, is it too much to ask for a Batman movie where we’re just thrust into an already-established world, where we don’t need to learn the origins of every single Batman character over and over and over, ad nauseum? Am I the only one who’s tired of seeing Batman and his rogues gallery “reinterpreted" every time a new director comes along?
And for fuck’s sake, please stop showing me the Waynes being gunned down in Crime Alley. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it more times than I’ve seen the back of my own eyelids. I’ve seen it so many times, it’s lost its impact. It means almost nothing to me now.
Everybody already knows Batman’s origins and motivations for fighting crime. It’s so ingrained in our cultural subconscious, babies come out of the womb with the innate knowledge of how Batman’s parents were killed.
Batman comics manage to print entire volumes where they don’t feel the need to remind us that Bruce Wayne’s parents were killed in front of him during his childhood at the start of every issue. We don’t need to see it every time Batman is in a live-action adaptation.
I get it. They’re dead.
And it seems like every time they die, the world they die in gets a little bleaker, a little grayer, a little more depressing, and a lot more boring…
Can we stop taking Batman so fucking seriously? It’s boring!
Batman isn’t supposed to be taken that seriously anyway. He’s an exaggerated version of Dick Tracy. Watch or read literally any interview with the guys that created him, Bob Kane & Bill Finger. They’ll tell you. He’s a combination of Dick Tracy, Zorro, and The Scarlet Pimpernel. Three characters that should never be taken too seriously. Dick Tracy himself is supposed to be an exaggerated version of classic pulp noir detectives.
It’s a fine line to walk, to be fair. If you don’t treat Batman seriously enough, you wind up with campy 1960s Batman, or movies where Bruce Wayne apparently decided to put nipples on the Batsuit for some reason.
But if you take him too seriously, you run the risk of ruining everything that makes Batman fun. DC’s desperation to make their movies super-darrrrk is its own punchline now. Even Deadpool jokes about it in “Deadpool 2".
Unless you strike the perfect balance, either approach dissolves into self- parody real fast.
That’s why I think Tim Burton really hit the nail on the fucking head with his first Batman movie in 1989. He managed to find that perfect balance. His Batman was dark, gritty, and serious when it needed to be, while still managing to have fun and be silly at the right moments. His Gotham City (designed by the late Anton Furst) was garish and other-worldly but still felt like a real city populated by real people. His characters were complex and introspective without having to constantly brood or use dry sarcastic humor in each scene. And it pulled all of this off without ever once feeling like self-satire.
Sure, we can argue all day about the questionable story elements, such as Joker being the guy who murdered the Waynes instead of a random street thug, or Alfred letting Vicki Vale into the Batcave, or Bruce Wayne being a bit of an unhinged psychopath…and we all know that Burton would make a very different Batman film with a very different tone two years later, but I think he was really onto something with his original take on the Dark Knight, and it’s a magic that has yet to be recaptured in any Batman movie since.
So on the off-chance that anyone at Warners happens to be reading this, is it too much to ask for an on-screen Batman that’s not an absolute bore or a human caricature? Is it too tasking to craft a Batman film that doesn’t feel like it’s trying to ape what worked with the Dark Knight trilogy?
Can we take a risk and maybe take Batman beyond what Chris Nolan did?
Every time I see some new Hollywood fuckweasel come along to direct a new Batman movie, he always gushes about “the opportunity to present audiences with a fresh, original take"…except nothing nothing “fresh” or “original" has been done with Batman movies in nearly 16 years…
You know what would be fresh and original? Making a Batman movie that feels like the fucking comics…
