Comic Book Movies

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

While there are similarities that you can draw between to the two movies, I think that Matt Reeves has made it pretty clear that this movie is in it's own independent Universe separate from any other DC projects.

Also, I watched the movie a second time and have had at least the weekend to process my feelings on it. I still stand by what I said that it doesn't top The Dark Knight or Mask of the Phantasm for me, but yeah, I can definitely say it's a really strong Batman movie. I wasn't sure how to feel about Pattinson's take on the Bruce Wayne side of the character as it was so different from what I was used to, but after accepting that this version of the character is a recluse billionaire that doesn't have much of a public presence (and something which I heavily suspect will be part of his character arc if Reeves gets to do his planned sequels), it worked for the kind of story that they were telling here. I do think that we could have had more scenes between him and Alfred, though, as it's clear that he is the only person who he has a meaningful relationship with as Bruce Wayne at this point.

Paul Dano's Riddler is, again, a complete reinterpretation that barely if at all resembles his comic book counterpart, but again it worked for this kind of movie. The opening scene in particular, aside from being beautifully shot, really cemented his menace just about as well as the opening to TDK did for the Joker. Speaking of which....

Spoiler

....I really could have done without that Joker cameo at the end. I get it, he's Batman's most iconic villain, but not every single Batman story has to reference back to him. We've seen so many interpretations of the character at this point that we would be just fine going through an entire Batman movie or two without any mention of him. You know how people rag on Marvel for sometimes going overboard with being a bit too fan-servicey and having to pop in unnecessary cameos in their movies? This felt like that to me. The movie really didn't need that scene between him and Riddler, IMO. It's interesting, because despite it's long run-time, most of the content in this movie felt pretty essential to the story being told. This is probably one of the few scenes which I think could have been cut.

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This really did come off more like a serial killer with incredibly intricate planning and a wealth of resources as opposed to a supervillain. You can clearly see the Fincher influences, here. I do still stand by my criticism of his actual plots being a bit too intricate to the point of occasional absurdity, but Dano's performance itself was flawless. Same props go to pretty much the rest of the cast, including Collin Farrell as Penguin and Jeffrey Wright as Gordon (I still consider Gary Oldman to be my personal favorite live-action take on the character, but Wright was still excellent).

I also dig how sloppy Batman's fighting was in this movie. It feels like how a highly-trained single person being weighed down by a loaded suit with tons of padding and armor would fight, and he clearly messes up a lot without coming off as feeling incompetent. Again, I suspect if we get a trilogy out of this that he will improve drastically throughout the course of the series, but this does feel like a Batman who's only in his second year of crime-fighting.

I also like how much detail was packed into this movie. Not just comic book references, but also story details, such as little nuances to Batman using his technology to profile the cops at the beginning which is more apparent on a re-watch once you know how his contacts work, to how clues are laid out about what's going on behind-the-scenes once you catch the context of certain off-handed remarks or visual imagery with knowledge of what will happen or be revealed later.

I really do look forward to seeing more from this take on the Bat-Universe.

[Dr. Insomniac]

The Batman got me to rewatch the 1989 Batman movie, and that movie's personally interesting in not for how much it influenced Batman media since like the Gotham atmosphere or the Elfman theme, but how much it deviates from everything else. Not just in making Joker the guy who killed Bruce's parents, but basically revealing aside from a couple eccentricities, Jack Napier and Joker are the same person and no one questions that. It's Joker without either the mystery or the tragedy in his character, and he's essentially a campy mobster here. Not to say Nicholson doesn't deliver a great performance though.

Same with the movie's portrayal of Bruce. Burton goes hard in making him a reclusive loner, but at the cost of making him weird in all the wrong places. Like when he gets Vicki drunk, has sex with her while she's too inebriated to say no, and then sleeps upside-down like a bat afterwards. There are some good reasons why when people go back and remember these films, they fondly recall Bruce and Selina's relationship far more than the one here. Even if that scene was cut out, there's zero chemistry going on between Basinger and Keaton. And that dampers this film when its emotional anchor is, bizarrely, a love triangle between them and Joker. Beyond that, this version of Bruce doesn't get much to do either compared to later versions like Bale's or even Affleck's. Even the Knox character had more of a character arc.

I think back to one of the common criticisms of Burton's Batman movies, that it's obvious he only read 1 or 2 Batman comics before working on these movies (calling The Killing Joke one of the first comics he ever loved when that book came out only a year before the 1989 film hit theaters didn't help). And while I don't agree with that criticism, Returns is one of my favorite Batman movies and that one doesn't care about accuracy in the slightest, I can sorta see it apply here.

[Avaitor]

I'm noticing that Twitter is trying to rehabilitate Batman Forever now, and I'll admit that I'm curious about it. Batman & Robin is much less competent but much more fun, but from what I recall, Forever is too dour to enjoy as camp, but also too dumb to take very seriously.

I could be wrong, though, so it may be time for a rewatch.

[Dr. Insomniac]

Yeah, I've seen one camp argue for Tim Burton's third Batman movie and another demand WB release a Schumacher Cut of Forever. Maybe Keaton coming back re-opened some old wounds for fans of that era of Batman, because I don't completely understand it.

As for the film itself, I can't imagine what it was like for audiences back then to go from Returns to Forever. Returns presents itself as a tribute to German expressionism, while Forever comes off as a big-budget Nickelodeon movie. And I hated Jim Carrey in this. He's just so annoying.

But since I mentioned Keaton,

Remember when we thought that DC was slumping compared to Marvel? While I'm still not convinced that Snyder is the visionary his fanbase claims him to be, they have been doing a good job of distinguishing their films from Marvel's, and letting them go in enjoyably weird directions. I feel like we couldn't have got this five years ago, or at least not nearly as well. We definitely couldn't have gotten Peacemaker.

I'm concerned the other Batman movie coming out this next year will reverse course, since the big selling point is "We've brought Michael Keaton back! In a Batman movie confusingly called The Flash! Don't forget he's in Batgirl too! We're making his Batman the mentor of the other DC movie heroes!" It's all very one step forward, two steps back.

[Dr. Insomniac]

Well, here's the confrontation they deleted from the final cut of The Batman.

[Dr. Insomniac]

Interesting choice to make Doctor Strange 2 a Wizard of Oz pastiche, but I'll take it. I assume the America Chavez comic from years ago burned them out on making the film character like her regular version, but I wish they gave her at least some of that personality.

Spoiler

It must be a rough year for Agents of SHIELD fans, having not only all the other shows ignore their show's existence or contradict it, but now this film had one of the Inhumans show up before any of their favorite characters. And yeah, I know it's a different Black Bolt, but it's still the same actor as the one on the show.

Meanwhile, though it's a little annoying that Wanda's mental health took a turn for the worse since her show ended and now she's willing to kill trillions just to achieve her dream of a domestic life with children (wondering why Vision was absent in the film), she was fun as the main villain.

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[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

The movie has it's issues, but I really enjoyed it on the whole.

Spoiler

I have to admit, after so much recent superhero media has followed the trend of having other heroes face gruesome deaths for cheap shock value, I've become mostly annoyed by the trope if not indifferent. That said, there is something kind of novel about seeing it in an MCU movie given how family-friendly they tend to try and be, even in their somewhat darker flicks like Infinity War.

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Anyways, I may be in the minority on this but I actually have a fondness for the first Doctor Strange despite how formulaic it is. I really liked this one, especially the stuff with Necro-Strange which was just pure Sam Raimi Evil Dead-esque goofiness in all of the right ways, but I do think that I slightly prefer the first movie as an overall story. This movie was fun but couldn't shake from feeling more like a middle chapter in a much bigger saga than a stand-alone story. That's really just a matter of personal preference, though.

[Dr. Insomniac]

Spoiler

Yeah, Wanda imploding Black Bolt's head was a little surprising. And at least it's not the most disposable Charles death on film.

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[Avaitor]

Yeah, that wasn't as tight as I was hoping it'd be, but it was nice to see Raimi have some fun in between Marvel's traditional world building.

... Was this really his first movie since Oz? I hope he gets to direct something else soon, ideally not a blockbuster.

[Dr. Insomniac]

Spoiler

I know they were never beloved by any means, but it's kinda funny those 00s Fantastic Four movies have been so memory-holed that MoM had more of an eye for a fancasting of Reed than bringing back the Reed from those films for a cameo. Unless Jim from The Office is going to be Reed for the long haul.

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[Dr. Insomniac]

So the eventual promo tour for The Flash movie's gonna be a nightmare for WB, right? I assume they'll have to release the film in theatres or else they'll have burned over $200 million for nothing, but the news going on with Ezra...

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

There's also the Amber Heard situation with Aquaman. She's been painted in a pretty bad light in the public eye after the trial with Johnny Depp, so I imagine WB will really scale back her appearances in the marketing and potentially try to write her out of any future movies.

Ezra is definitely a much worse case, of course. I imagine they'll just have to do their best to try and get the movie out as is and then immediately recast him after the film releases.

[Dr. Insomniac]

That or hire whoever runs Jared Leto's PR team. Those guys somehow confused the public enough to forget Leto runs a cult.

Another issue, much less serious but still interesting, is how many writers worked on the movie. What was going on in production? It's a Flash movie. It shouldn't require a bigger rotating door of directors and writers than the post-B&R Batman films had before they found Nolan.

[Dr. Insomniac]

Meanwhile in DC, Lady Gaga as Harley.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

So, it's been more than enough time by this point, but kind of curious what people's thoughts are on Phase Four of the MCU so far? For starters, while it is increasingly popular to trash the MCU these days, I want to make it clear that at least for me, I'm not one of those people who pretends like I was always against this franchise and that I champion only "true auteur filmmaking." You know, the people who want to seem smart and sophisticated so they go against anything made by a big corporation that's popular, ignoring that it's still made by many creative individuals and that even many classics from big-budget stuff like Lucas's Star Wars to Raimi's Spider-Man movies and even more mid-budget films going back to the 40's and 50's were made with creatives battling with big studio heads and their mandates.

That said, Phase Four has mostly been kind of "Eh" for me so far, upon reflection. I was pretty indifferent to Black Widow other than really enjoying Yelena as a character, I thought Shang-Chi was fun but ultimately too safe and nothing that I have ever felt compelled to go back to, and I personally didn't care for Eternals. I legitimately loved Spider-Man: No Way Home, and upon re-watch I still feel the same way about it, but that one kind of feels like an outlier to the normal MCU for obvious reasons since it's a shared Sony property. And then there's Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which I have only seen the one time in theaters and still hold the same thoughts on: It's fun but also a mess of a plot and has several key issues to it's story. That in itself is just the movies thought. This phase has really felt like it's more about the Disney + shows, and that actually is where I think more issues start to arise. I have gone on record and stated how much I was initially enjoying some of these shows, and I still stand by that. WandaVision has a great first two acts to it's season, but faltered off by the end. Falcon and the Winter Soldier was mostly so-so for me the whole way through with just a few stand-out scenes and moments. Loki started out great in it's first couple of episodes but kind of became a mess with it's plot by the end (which, considering that this is from the same writer as DSITMOM, that makes sense). Hawkeye legitimately disappointed me and really wasted it's opportunity to adapt one of the best Marvel comic book series that I have ever read. And Moon Knight, much like WandaVision and Loki, really had me intrigued at the start and kind of devolved into something disappointingly basic and not well thought-out by the end (though I really loved Oscar Isaac as the character and would actually like to see him return in a better project). Ms. Marvel has largely felt pretty standard so far. The stylistic touches are nice but only surface level and don't hide the very basic story-telling that the original comic book run executed much better, IMO (at least going by the show so far).

I don't hate any single project from Phase Four, but my enthusiasm for everything outside of Spider-Man has just not been there, despite me wanting to really by into these shows and movies. I don't feel that excitement for the next big team-up like I used to, and while there are still projects that I look forward to (Thor: Love and Thunder in just a few weeks is still one I'm really pumped for despite all of my complaints so far), I'm mostly just kind of following this franchise out of habit at this point, which is never a good sign. Phase One was a rough start if we're being honest, but it was novel for it's time and I legitimately love Iron Man, Captain America, and The Avengers. Phase Two was better overall, aside from Thor: The Dark World (and I'm still one of the few who genuinely likes Age of Ultron despite it admittedly being a hot mess of an editing nightmare). Phase Three is probably my overall favorite with a pretty well-balanced assortment of movies and benefited the most from building to a unified end-goal so there was a sense of momentum to everything. At the same time, each movie still managed to largely feel like it's own thing. I wasn't a big fan of either Ant-Man and the Wasp or Captain Marvel, but really strongly enjoyed every other movie from that phase, and I still do.

Phase Four has just strongly lacked that for me so far, and while I know this series was inevitably going to continue because why wouldn't it when it has several of the highest grossing-movies in film history, on a practical level I feel like they really could have benefited from taking decently long break after Endgame to at least give the franchise some sense of finality to it for at least some point, and to avoid the inevitable burnout that everyone is eventually bound to feel from delving way too much into a genre with so many titles in such a relatively short period of time. I guess I'm just not feeling it right now with the MCU, but that's just my take.