Rewatched The Dark Knight again. There was a time that I thought the film was damn near perfect, but, a few years on, especially after reading stuff like captainsolo’s excellent The Dark Knight review on Hi-Fi Celluloid, the flaws really do show. I still stand by The Dark Knight as a good film, if heavy-handed and bloated with no regard to pacing, but it’s portrayal of Batman is pretty rubbish.
I must say that the crucial problem I find with Nolan’s later two films, perhaps due to his brother Jonathan’s hand, is an emphasis on action and realism over motivation or psychological complexity (more the forte of Burton, particularly in Returns, where it bleeds overtly into the set design).
Observe the trilogy’s (over)fixation on Batman’s rule to not kill. It’s as if Batman can only be distinguished from his rogues (very few of whom are seen in the trilogy) if there exists a black-and-white quantifiable action (specifically, the inaction of taking a life). In the worldview of the movies, only actions seem to matter, with Batman’s psychological complexity (the altruism of his quest, the fact that it stems from survivor’s guilt) being ultimately disregarded as irrelevant.
And, this is why, Batman, as a character, seems to be largely forgettable in the latter two Nolan films. He is just an interchangeable vigilante, who happens to have a code; there’s no more bearing on the inciting incident that formed that code or how that continues to affect him to this day. This is unfortunate, as Batman has always been made most interesting by his psychology.
I’d go so far as to say, and this may be controversial with some folks: my favorite live-action portrayal of Batman is Ben Affleck! BVS, a movie which I am currently furiously fan-editing, is such a bizarre movie to me because it has the worst cinematic rendition of Superman but the best (IMHO) rendition of Batman.
While I do wish that Batman didn’t kill, a fact mitigated in my fanedit among others (shameless plug), the rest of Ben Affleck’s portrayal is so spot on. Batman’s a cynical ass with a sense of gallows humor, who 1) is actively haunted by the death of his parents, in dialogue and performance; 2) does actually detective-y things; and 3) will NEVER EVER give up in his quest, even if it means confronting a nigh-invincible alien! This Batman is enhanced by the baggage of the loss of a sidekick.
Though Michael Keaton and Val Kilmer acquitted themselves far more admirably than Bale, they never really completely felt like comic book Batman in the way that the current incarnation does. Both those two incarnations, I might add, also had the problem of wantonly killing people.
BVS was by no means a good movie, but, as Conroy has likely voiced the Caped Crusader for the final time with The Killing Joke, the future of live-action Batman has never looked brighter. I have a feeling that Ben Affleck will do remarkably in his solo outing, judging by his apparent understanding of the character; I credit him far more than I do Snyder, noting that out of the main three heroes in BVS, only Batman really leaped off the page to the silver screen to me.