Batman: The Corruption

When is a superhero movie not a superhero movie?

Well, it's when Christopher Nolan uses a comic book hero to explore the darker side of human nature and redefine what a superhero movie can be.  Overshadowed by Heath Ledger's untimely passing, Nolan's second Batman movie is an exploration into the corruption of power.

The Dark Knight is a movie of epic proportions.  It is a movie of ambition and flawed morals.  Characters are no longer bound by their home territory, Batman has no jurisdiction and Nolan uses this to expand his characters and story.  The Dark Knight is the best superhero movie ever made, despite it's flaws.

At the centre of The Dark Knight is a triumvirate of individuals: Batman; flirting with fascism as he relentlessly chases The Joker; a 'dog chasing cars' and Harvey Dent; holder of a virtuous jawline and seemingly shining like the Phial of Galadriel.

After Batman Begins a sequel was always on the cards and before long the 'I believe in Harvey Dent' whispers began and pictures of Heath Ledger's Joker appeared.  Ledger's casting caused some consternation as people only remembered A Knight's Tale and not Candy.  It wasn't long before his excellent performance raised the debate pitting him above Nicholson.  It's fairly pointless comparing Ledger and Nicholson's portrayals of Batman's nemesis.

One is not better than the other in the same way that Mark Hamill wasn't better than Cesar Romero.  Posthumous Oscar's aside Ledger is the Joker in this incarnation just as whoever comes next will make the role his own.  This time The Joker doesn't have a grand plan to poison Gotham or kidnap a prominent citizen, he simply wants to run amok and have some fun.  He plays games with organised crime and police alike as he seeks to remove the boundaries he sees as constraining society.  This is why Batman can't beat him.  Batman has rules: no guns, no murder whilst The Joker is happy blowing up hospitals and police stations.  Whilst Bruce Wayne seeks his exit strategy The Joker makes Gotham burn to reel him back in.  The symbiosis is diagnosed excellently in the interrogation room and the theme strengthens until the very end when The Joker invokes a paradox and WrestleMania II.  Yet Ledger's Joker is better when he's not saying anything at all, hanging out of the police car window in silence and giving the new commissioner a slow hand clap are masterful actions to flesh out the character.

The abandonment of the Tumbler/Batmobile is a turning point for Batman alongside the deaths and fires that change Gotham's landscape.  Nolan's insecurity causes him to cloud the storyline with a secondary villain (scarily obvious from the start) and force Batman to employ ever more unconventional and brutal means of locating The Joker.  The insidious side of a smartphone unfolds alongside a morality play which is largely unnecessary and dampens the showdown we're expecting.

Let's face it, we all know Apple have a room like this.

The Dark Knight benefits from continuity in the form of returning characters and actors.  Lucius Fox, Jim Gordon and Jonathan Crane are all welcome returns and despite Maggie Gyllenhaal's best efforts we could do without Rachel Dawes.  Eric Roberts takes time out of his obscenely busy schedule to put in a very good shift as Moroni and Michael Caine is always welcome as Alfred.  Nolan firmly roots The Dark Knight in its comic book source material and reality, moreso than Batman Begins.  The DNA of The Long Halloween is there, as are traces of Azzerello and Bermejo's work.  The initiated audience will probably oppose Two-Face's origins but Nolan wisely chooses not to give The Joker a false back story.

Batman struggles with balancing his power and desires when met by chaos and resorts to desperation to avoid the darkness and support his 'White Knight' only for the hope to be lost.  Dent's jawline is split like his personality and his Uncle Sam jingoism buried beneath the burns.  It still doesn't stop him lecturing on morality and chance.  Dent/Two-Face's story is rapidly condensed and Batman has to take ultimate action.  It's a waste of a character and Batman has to take the blame to save himself and Gotham.

Batman will return, but in what form?  Whatever the result hopefully he'll be without the achingly ethical dilemma.  If you want your superheroes with a healthy dose of casual bravado then you'll need to look at Marvel right now, which is handy as Iron Man 2 is in the offing.

Why Do We Fall?

The corpse of Schumacher's Batman had gone cold, nipples presumably still erect, the Millennium had come and gone and Warner Bros were, understandably, nervous of superheroes.  The Matrix had come and spawned inferior sequels whilst Fox had dalliances with The X Men and Daredevil. Quality and success was inconsistent. It was all a bit haphazard.  For every Spider-Man there was a Hulk and every Blade a Catwoman.  Disney was yet to establish and mine Marvel Studios and Time Warner seemed to view DC as an unwanted inheritance.  Undoubtedly, there was money to be made but there was no vision, no continuity.  There was something missing and it took an Englishman to find it.

Christopher Nolan and David S Goyer set out to humanise the Bruce Wayne/Batman axis and make us care about the whole package and not just the Batarang round the back of the Joker's head.  The rumoured development of Miller's Batman:Year One looms heavy over the story as does The Long Hallowe'en and it's ideas of corruption and organised crime running Gotham whilst a surprising serial killer stalks the streets.  Loeb and Sale effectively balanced villains' origins and a surprising twist, something Nolan surely took as inspiration.  Not only were the actual comics really being used as source material but the realism and darkness of 80's and 90's Batman was being taken from the page to the screen effectively.  Burton's cartoonish realism was being usurped by a Taxi Driver cityscape easily identifiable as the industrial Northeast of the US.

Nolan seemed like a safe pair of hands for a new crack at Batman.  Despite not having an extensive filmography his ace in hand was undoubtedly Memento.  Memento was one of those films that Hollywood studios like: cheap and successful both critically and commercially.  It cost $4.5 million and pulled in five times that on a release fuelled by word of mouth and viral marketing.  Viral marketing would become a core feature of The Dark Knight trilogy and the following Man of Steel. Cloverfield would have MySpace profiles and Japanese drinks but Batman would have 'I Believe In Harvey Dent' and mysterious chanting.

Nolan's character driven approach was to be a refreshing tonic for the franchise now twitching back to life.  Nolan and Goyer chose to do something not yet seen on film; they chose to fully explain how Bruce Wayne adopted the Batman persona.  Batman Begins was to truly be an origin story. Yeah, we all know kiddie Wayne went to the theatre and watched his parents get dispatched by a mugger, but was this mugger really a pre-sheep dip Joker?  No, that was just convenient artistic license.  Lifting Joe Chill from the comics was much more satisfying.  Indirectly, Chill creates the Batman and Chill's time in jail is used to accelerate the story.  An amazing ensemble cast is presented as Bruce Wayne grows up and disappears.  The double act of Michael Caine's Alfred and Morgan Freeman's Lucius Fox is a perfect antidote to Rutger Hauer's Earle and his boardroom schemes.  The corporate shenanigans are far removed from the brown slime, corruption and rain which threatens to swallow up the idealistic Lt. Gordon.  Gary Oldman has a knack of looking younger than he is but at the same time conveying huge amounts of weariness and wisdom as he stands alone against the old school Irish gangsters led by Tom Wilkinson.  He might have an Italian name but Falcone is more The Departed than The Godfather.

The time spent laying Gotham's roots parallels Bruce Wayne's training in Batman: Year One but this time Wayne is trained by the ominous League of Shadows.  But who is Bruce Wayne/Batman? Nolan chose Christian Bale and looking back there couldn't have been anyone else for the role.  Jake Gylenhaal would've been great for me but back then he was too young and inexperienced, his Donnie Darko days whored for a teen turn opposite Dennis Quaid.  Much has been made of Bale being ever so method, bulking up from Trevor Reznik a little too much and hating the suit they made him wear.  Bale is yet unleash his full tetchiness as McG will testify.  It was less The Machinist and more Equilibrium and American Psycho that made Bale the best choice, these films showed he had the physical and mental edge to compliment his undoubted ability.

Bale would need an enemy of suitable gravitas.  Despite his amazingly beautiful blue eyes Cillian Murphy wasn't quite enough.  It's clear Dr Crane was a secondary villain but who he was really working for comes as quite a surprise.  Murphy is excellent as Crane and his alter ego but Nolan and Goyer didn't make his character big enough, presumably the payback for this was to have Crane as an ever present in the trilogy.  Crane's weapon of choice inspires some excellent hallucinations and it's fitting that the action explodes in Arkham Asylum.  The hospital had become a comedy dumping ground under Schumacher but is restored to Victorian horror by Nolan.  The completion is augmented by the cameo of Mr Zsasz, a particularly nasty foe of Batman.

Batman Begins sees Bruce Wayne adopt technology and grow into the role of vigilante.  Aided by Fox we move from billionaire spelunker and adrenaline junkie to full blown vigilante.  Whilst the Tumbler is the most eye catching of the technological advancements it's not the most important.  Wayne's improvisation and eye for the theatrical leads him to delve into his am-dram days and come up with the costume.  The attention to detail is remarkable, whether deliberate or note the Batsuit is heavy and hot, yet flexible.  When Bale put the suit on he hated it, his bad mood channelled through the character to make Batman a figure of rage and vengeance.  Everything is explained from the electrically manipulated fabric to the trial and error cowls.  Fox is Bruce Wayne's Q and does provide some light relief.

The same cannot be said of Rachel Dawes.  I've flicked through comics, Selina Kyle, Vicki Vale, Leslie Thompkins, Silver St Cloud and Jezebel Jet.  All woman of various ages and connections to Wayne and Batman but no Rachel Dawes which probably explains why I find her character so irritating.

Nolan may not have been convinced he'd get another crack at Batman but Warner Bros went into marketing overdrive ensuring the critical success was matched at the box office.  Batman Begins wasn't the biggest film of 2005  (come on, there was a Star Wars and a Harry Potter that year) but it did beat Hitch and The Fantastic Four.  All of a sudden those calling cards in Gordon's evidence bag weren't just wishful thinking.

Batmania and the Burton Vindication

 

The mid '80s were a time of trickle-down travesties and trade union bashing.  It was all rather miserable and bleak and I was merely a child.  Despite the doom and gloom two things were happening in sunny Los Angeles: Jack Nicholson turned chewing scenery on screen into an art form and Tim Burton became attached to possible Batman movie.  Burton, an animator, had been faffed about by Disney and stumbled into success when Pee-Wee's Big Adventure inexplicably became a box office hit off a tiny budget. Further success came with the sublime Beetlejuice and Warner Bros decided to greenlight Batman with Burton at the helm.  Then the problems began.

One of the best graphic novels ever

Now, as we learnt from Superman a comic book movie can't have a smooth production.  The '80s had seen the rise of the graphic novel with Frank Miller and Alan Moore giving Batman a grittier, bleaker flavour, truly The Dark Knight.

When Michael Keaton was cast as Bruce Wayne/Batman it seemed that the new movie would be completely at odds with this.  Burton was known for cartoon colour whilst Michael Douglas changed his name to Keaton (after Buster) and shed the taxi cab for comedy.  Now think back to Batman's previous big screen outing in 1966.  Were Warner Bros making their version of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?  Unfounded omens didn't look good and Warner Bros responded by hiring Bob Kane as a consultant who approved of the project.

Burton bristled against the producers as he tried to cast Brad Dourif as The Joker whilst they had already approached Nicholson for the role amidst rumours of David Bowie and Willem Dafoe.  Who else but Jack could be The Joker?  Well on the way to legendary status and one of the few remaining hellraisers of Hollywood, Nicholson would bring Oscar laden credibility to the production.  He'd done big, hammy characters with The Witches of Eastwick and The Shining and long shouldered the burden of stardom from Five Easy Pieces onwards. Not that bagging Jack would be easy.  An incalculable fee that made the Guinness Book of Records and a contract that would make it easy to be louche were minimum requirements.  Let's face it Jack can do what he bloody well wants and we'll all approve at the smallest glint of that grin.  Factor in a horse riding accident and an oddly predictable writers' strike and cameras were almost ready to roll.  Filming at Pinewood was secret and such was the clamour building that police had to be called when footage went missing.

Batman was a changing beast.  It was changing from a superhero movie or a comic book film into a revolution.  The marketing alone changed the nature of the summer blockbuster.  Teaser posters were everywhere.  Spring sunshine was soaked up by black posters bearing only the symbol of the bat.  Merchandising became omnipresent, from the usual novel to the slightly unusual cereal.  I've still got my Mattel Batmobile knocking around.  It needs a lick of paint and those eBay prices make you faint.  Batman had two soundtrack albums with a Prince soundtrack cementing Batman's place in the zeitgeist.

Batman saw a change in the approach to traditional origin story telling.  The Wayne tragedy occurs in flashback and whilst there are a few liberties taken with the comics it's true enough, establishing just enough of Bruce Wayne's pathos without becoming cloying.  Unfortunately, we also have an origin for The Joker when the ambiguity and mystery of the comics make him all the more fearful by not giving him a definitive past.

Our opening scenes produce a neat and clever twist as comic book fans are invited into the Wayne's mugging only to be displaced.  This displacement is largely down to the film's tone and setting.  Our perceptions of time are being played with.  Burton's retro-futuristic Gotham is an homage to Fritz Lang yet it's populated by ageless automobiles and muggers taunt us with the very '80s American Express.  The '50s curves of the Batmobile caressed the ugliness of the city in a way Nolan's and Schumacher's never did. Amongst the seediness is an elegance and colour is supplied by Burton and exploited by The Joker.  Green and purple collide with newsprint and darkness throught the film.

Our main players are introduced and sub-plots established.  A jealous love triangle, police corruption and Mob betrayal give way to the chaos of The Joker as he attempts to eliminate Batman at the bicentennial parade.  There's a pace to the story that is hampered by the writers' strike as the middle section of the film becomes a number of set pieces loosely connected.  The Joker's mime act lacks build up and the unexplained disappearance of the Gotham City Police Department is jarring as is Batman's attack on Axis Chemicals.  It's a shame there hasn't been a director's cut to add some flesh to these bones.  There's plenty on show that is glorious, from the pure glee on Nicholson's face after joy buzzer deployment to the excellence of Keaton's performance of the fractured Bruce Wayne,  looks like Burton got that one spot on, from the model cathedral to the parade balloons leaking Smilex gas.  The juxtaposition of the manic Joker against Bruce Wayne/Batman's (probably more dangerous) pathology is as potent as it ever will be.

It'll be twenty years before an unnecessary argument over whose Joker is better: an argument that can't be settled by the way.

It'll be twenty years before the breaking of Bruce Wayne is explored again and Batman's position as a necessary but flawed hero is restored.

Before then there's some PVC, nipples and neon and too much pantomime but Batman will return.

Batman (1966) or POW! How to Kill an Acting Career

So, here we go with my first foray into the Marvel vs DC Movie Mashup and it's all the way back to 1966.  World Cups and Harold Wilson, Blonde on Blonde and an Everton FA Cup win. But none of that really matters.  Not when you're thinking about superheroes.

I'm a child of the '80s and I know two Batmans.  One is the Dark Knight: stoic, emotionally stunted and very, very serious.  The other is a camp cowboy in grey, unflattering cotton lycra mix with speech bubbles that come out of his hands.

Batman was born in 1939 and became a leading light of the Golden Age of comic books, he was a dark vengeful detective not a superhero; a man who had put his intelligence and money to use, the perfect foil to the alien Superman.  By the late 1950s superhero comics were waning,  the Comics Code of America, war and the nuclear age had taken their toll whilst the world was becoming freer as Baby Boomers grew up.  At the same time Batman comics were very sci-fi orientated, full of aliens and gadgets.  Just as the comics took a turn back into darkness ABC commissioned a Batman TV series.  Ironically, ABC's vision of Batman was Pop Art and drenched in camp comedy, practically a parody of Bob Kane's character.

The series ran for three seasons and sandwiched between seasons one and two was a hastily put together movie starring most of the TV cast.  Sadly, Julie Newmar missed out and Lee Meriwether was drafted in as Catwoman.  The villains are the real stars and there's a level of innocence and pure fun that makes Batman brilliant.  Four TV show regulars form United Underworld, I mean who

Just one villain? Nah, I'll take the lot.

makes a superhero movie with just one villain? 

Cesar Romero plays The Joker as a pure clown and it's this gay abandon that makes the character more dangerous than other incarnations.  He's so unpredictable which compliments the scheming of Burgess Meredith's Penguin.  Bouncing between the two is Frank Gorshin's manic Riddler, a performance aped by Jim Carrey in 1995, whilst Catwoman is essentially the groups pawn, used for bait and reconnaissance.

A simple plot is stretched over 105 minutes with a clever appreciation of the Cold War and several breaches of the fourth wall.  Ignore the huge lumps of ham in the form of Chief O'Hara and the irritant Aunt Harriett and enjoy the saturated colour of the dehydrated United World Organization's Security Council.

Ready for anything

We begin with a bit of high budget tomfoolery and an exploding shark. Yep, Peter Benchley is rapidly scribbling that one down.  The vanishing yacht and the imprisonment of Commodore Schmidlapp feel like they could be investigated by Steed and Mrs Peel, instead we are whisked away to downtown Gotham and Commissioner Gordon gets handy with some Polaroids and a slide projector.  The United Underworld are loosely headed up by The Penguin and romp around in a, frankly, ludicrous submarine.  A porpoise may foil a torpedoeing of the Dynamic Duo but no submerged mammal gets in the way of the kidnap of the Security Council.  The cheeky Schmidlapp had invented a funky Dyson which helps store people in their own, individual test tubes.  Chuck in a kidnap and an infiltration of the Batcave and The United Underworld are very busy indeed but there feels like there's something missing.  The TV series had been built on cliffhangers and set piece fights yet apart 'some days you just can't get rid of a bomb' the ridiculous peril of seeing Robin about to be drowned in a giant Slush Puppy or Batman being fed into the Human Key Duplicator is absent.  We're crying out for 'Same Bat-Time, same Bat-Channel' moment.  You'd have thought they could have found just one more abandoned candy warehouse in Gotham.  No matter, the brisk pace sees Batman come to an enjoyable end.  You won't see an ocean based ending again until Star Trek IV.  I'm not entirely sure if that's s good or bad thing.

After a spot of rehydration without Lucozade Sport Batman saves the day and quietly returns to the small screen.  He won't make it back to the cinema for over 20 years.

At least Batman endured, unlike Adam West and Burt Ward.  Once the series was cancelled both found work hard to come by having been so heavily identified with the thwocks and the pows.  Even a rumoured flirtation with Bond wasn't enough to keep West off the convention circuit before nostalgia saw Batman reappraised and a stint in Quahog.  The dodgy rumours of deviancy made it hard for Ward to shed his life in tights, maybe he should have taken that role in The Graduate.  Batman himself wouldn't be rid of the camp and colour until the mid 80s when Frank Miller and Alan Moore took the character back to black and a darker, dirtier Gotham.  Their work would be the template for Burton and Nolan.

Batman appeals to the kid in me, the colour, the nostalgia and the camp make it perfect easy viewing and it's unfair to compare it to the modern cinematic interpretation. 

One thing's for sure: Adam West was a better Batman than George Clooney and he didn't need nipples on his Batsuit

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