Robert Pattinson in 'The Batman.' Photo: Warner Bros. CHICAGO - With two notably cartoony exceptions, the last 30-some years of live-action Batman storytelling have been an experiment in increasing grimness.
Tim Burton brought gothic gravitas to a character best known for kitschy ‘60s excess. Christopher Nolan grounded Burton’s comic book aesthetic in a realistic world.
And Zack Snyder gave the character a grimdark ethos — even as spin-offs like "Suicide Squad" and "Joker" embraced their own respective brand of edgelord undertones. (Only Joel Schumacher’s two late ‘90s entries were bold enough to suggest that maybe a campy live-action Batman isn’t such a bad thing.)RELATED: The essential onscreen superheroes of 2021: Marvel's Spiderman, Loki, Black Widow and moreIn that sense, director Matt Reeves’ latest take on the Dark Knight is both something new and more of the same.
Live-action Batman movies have essentially become to our current era what Julia Roberts rom-coms were to the ‘90s. The pleasure and/or limitations of these films come from seeing familiar pieces rearranged in slightly new ways (a new British character actor as Alfred, a new design for the Batmobile) even as they head toward largely predictable endpoints.