Two years as Batman (Robert Pattinson) and the fear in the hearts of criminals, Bruce Wayne saw the darkest face of Gotham City. With only a handful of trusted allies by his side – including Alfred Pennyworth (Andy Serkis) and Lt. James Gordon (Jeffrey Wright) – and against a streak of corrupt officials and celebrities, the lone avenger has become the city’s only defender of justice. An unknown assassin sadistic and calculating harass the Gotham elite. The world’s greatest detective, guided by encrypted messages, goes to the underworld. There, during her investigation, she meets characters such as Selina Kyle, known as Catwoman (Zoë Kravitz), Oswald Cobblepot, or Penguin (Colin Farrell), Carmine Falcone (John Turturro) and Edward Nashton, also known as the Riddler (Paul Dano). Finally, the evidence begins to materialize and the perpetrator’s intentions become clear. Batman is forced to find new allies to expose the culprit and end the abuse of power and corruption that has long plagued Gotham City.
When movie director Matt Reeves started working on Batman , he was excited to work with the story of a character so iconic who had lived in comics for over eight decades. The idea to give it a new life was to go back to its origins.
Batman started out as a detective so I wanted to find a way to come back to that, to push aside his superhero abilities but show him in his more human endeavors. I have always believed that finding something personal is extremely important when working on genre cinema, and I think Batman makes it possible. We wanted to show him as a man whose real power is his will to bring order. I wanted to start this story at a point when Batman is just beginning to fulfill his mission. This gives a lot of space for character development. So we put Batman to solve the mystery and made a movie that alludes to the mood of the first comics, but at the same time is not a direct adaptation of them. – explains the director
So although the script written with Peter Craig exists in isolation from previous Batman movies, it clearly refers to the origins of the hero’s stories known from comic books.
So Batman is not a flawless character here. Like every human being, it has its flaws and limitations. This approach fits deeply into the nature of Batman, who, as Reeves notes, has his outfit, car and all the gadgets that make him amazing, but in fact we see an ordinary person underneath all of this. True, he has a desire to rectify reality, which leads him to act heroically, but we also see that he is not doing all of this in a purely altruistic sense. This makes her an accessible character.
The creators wanted to show this human face of Batman in the deepest possible way. The film thus becomes a story about a man trying to unravel a series of killings, which makes it a psychological drama rather than a classic superhero movie. This psychological realism, which the creators sought, also gives Robert Pattinson, who impersonates the title Batman, the opportunity to present a wide emotional palette. As he says himself:
I’ve never been interested in starring in a superhero movie, but for some reason Batman has always stood out as a special character. So when I heard Matt Reeves was going to be shooting this movie, and when he showed me the first storyboards shortly after, I was instantly excited. There was something completely fresh about it, even in the form of Bruce Wayne himself, who is a lonely man here, acting under some kind of inner compulsion.
However, working on a title with such a long tradition and such a large group of fans is not only a huge opportunity, but also a huge risk, which is always associated with the desire to give a fresh look at the world that is so well known.
I’ve been making films for over 20 years, but still working on “Batman” was something completely new for me. There is something exciting about it, but there is also some fear of entering the world of a huge tradition. He is a character that we all know from childhood, which means that we had to approach it with great humility. We wanted our movie to be the best possible experience for the fans, so we constantly had to ask ourselves how it could fit into the canon of Batman stories. Are we able to show something that could not be seen before? – admits producer Dylan Clark.
80 years of tradition not only created Batman, but the whole world around him. Gotham City is home to some of the most iconic villains in comic book history, and is by itself perhaps the most beloved of the genre’s fans. After all, it is also a world that gives great opportunities to creators. Peter Craig recalls:
We wanted Gotham to be really alive, so that its corruption was really visible on every level. It was amazing for me to see this story take its physical shape. Standing with Batman on top of an unfinished skyscraper and looking at Gotham, we see it in the same way as he saw it – as a dangerous, broken place, but worth saving nonetheless.
The creators had a choice of a wealth of characters belonging to the canon of the Gotham world and they did not want to be stingy. So we can see Penguin (Colin Farrell), Carmine Falcone (John Turturro), the boss of the whole criminal world, or Selina Kyle known as Catwoman (Zoë Kravitz). Of course, the most faithful helpers of Batman were also present, i.e. Lieutenant James Gordon (Jeffrey Wright) and Alfred Pennyworth (Andy Serkis).
Ultimately, Reeves pits his hero against one of Gotham’s craziest minds – the Riddler. The Riddler, flawlessly played by Paul Dano, is not, however, a man dressed in a motley outfit dotted with question marks, and there is nothing funny in his riddles. As Reeves explains:
I wanted to build on the early stories compiled by Bob Kane and Bill Finger in which Batman acted as a detective and all the crimes he witnessed became a means of describing Gotham. So I had the idea to create a new interpretation of the Riddler as a serial killer who attacks the so-called pillars of society, and after each murder, leaves a trail in which he somehow reveals the truth about these people. In this way, the Batman story in this movie becomes a slow exploration of all the darkness of corrupt Gotham, and since all the riddles left by Riddler are addressed to him, the whole thing also becomes very personal. Ultimately, it’s not Batman with everything under control. This is Batman who has to constantly improvise.
Special supplement in DVD edition:
- Real icons
Over 2 Hours of Specials on Blu-ray Steelbook and 4K Ultra HD Steelbook Editions:
- This is how revenge was born – a document from the set with the participation of the creators
- Scenes removed with director’s commentary
- The anatomy of a car chase with the Batmobile
- Batman: Genesis
- Becoming Catwoman
- And more!