Legends of the Dark Knight #5 | Batman directed by Tim Burton



These days, our years are littered with as many event movies as they are bank holidays. Scarcely a season passes without a new chapter in the Star Wars saga or the MCU offering the media – and the rest of us - a brief respite from the real-life sagas of Brexit and Trump. But, in the dying days of the 1980s, Tim Burton’s Batman was the first film to really make waves before so much as a single frame of footage had been released to the world. The Wall Street Journal gave Michael Keaton’s casting a front-page lambasting. Viewers packed cinemas with the express purpose of watching the Batman trailer, then left to let the main feature play to an empty house. Propelled by the mainstream praise lavished on Frank Miller’s epoch-making reimagining of the Dark Knight, audiences were hungry for a cinematic take on the Caped Crusader that reflected the tone of such works. Rampant doubts and fears only seemed to fuel the escalating publicity. Batman was going to be the biggest film ever - and, in most respects, it really was.

It’s often said that Tim Burton’s Batman was heavily inspired by Miller’s Year One, but in truth the movie’s long genesis pre-dates Batman’s post-Crisis reboot by the better part of a decade. Burton’s movie may certainly be a clear steer towards the darkness of the fan favourites of the late 1980s, but it’s a heightened, romantic sort of darkness – all mist, melody and melodrama. Even Sam Hamm and Warren Skaaren’s script is unique, taking great liberties with character and canon in order to tell a complete and satisfying story within the film’s runtime. Jim Gordon, the beating heart of Year One, is little more than an slow-on-the-uptake extra in the film, and the police force at his command is as bent as the force that the young lieutenant finds in print. Bruce Wayne isn’t a recent returnee to Gotham here, but a well-established pillar of the community – and, crucially, a much more conflicted one that the purposeful twenty-something envisaged by Miller. If anything, Tim Burton’s film is a noirish love letter to the earliest days of Batman in the old Bob Kane comic books – a lone detective behind the scenes, a silent spectre in the dark.

As a youngster, I never questioned the suitability of Michael Keaton for the role of Batman – to me he just was Batman, and that was that. However, looking back on the film now it’s easy to see why his casting provoked the furore that it did - standing at 5’ 7” and looking like he weighed 150lb soaking wet, at a glance he seemed to – quite literally – lack the weight required for the role. However, save for a few sequences that stretch the limits of disbelief just a little too far (the diminutive Batman effortlessly holding a large mugger over the edge of the building, for instance), Keaton utterly convinces beneath the cowl. His eyes blaze out through that rubber sculpted mask with a purpose yet to be matched by another actor, and Burton shoots the film’s action sequences in such a fashion as to render the actor’s stature all but immaterial.

“Nice outfit.”

Where Keaton really excels though is in his performance of Bruce Wayne. Often treated as a mask worn by Batman, as opposed to vice-versa, this movie dispels any pre-existing ideas about Batman and his alter ego, instead creating a plausible amalgam persona that the movie sets out to dramatically tear in half. Hamm and Skaaren’s storyline makes a tragic lover out of the pretend playboy, juxtaposing Bruce’s apparent desire for love and a normal life against the nocturnal lure of warring on criminals to satiate the ghost of his slain parents. The figures of Vicki Vale (Kim Basinger) and Jack Napier (Jack Nicholson) embody these two competing lures as Bruce falls head-over-heels for one while Batman fixates on ending the threat posed by the other.

“Another rooster in the henhouse...”

Despite its departure from previously inviolate lore, these opposing pulls on our tragic hero’s soul are heightened by how Hamm and Skaaren’s script builds up the two characters at each end of the rope. Kim Basinger’s Vicki Vale seems to so obviously be the love of Bruce’s life that even Michael Gough’s trusty old Alfred is quite willing to betray his master’s secret to her with scarcely a thought - all because he thinks that it will help to bring them together, which of course it does.

“Do I look like I’m joking?”

Jack Napier, meanwhile, is unmasked as the man who murdered Bruce’s parents all those years ago. For Batman, this discovery blurs the line between vigilante and avenger as his code takes a backseat to apparently murderous vengeance - a development that’s essentially anathema to the character. It’s utterly wrong, of course, which is why it works so beautifully as played out here. As Batman locks his sights on the Joker and unleashes every bullet and projectile that the Batwing has to offer, it’s a moral victory for the man out to prove that he and the Bat are one and the same; extensions and reflections of each other dancing together in the pale moonlight. “I made you, but you made me first.”

Batman would have us believe that Vicki and Jack are Bruce’s ultimate lover and ultimate nemesis and, if you buy into that conceit, then as a self-contained piece of entertainment Burton’s Batman is hard to beat. As soon as we enter the realm of sequels, though, the stakes are inevitably lessened - no love interest could live up to Vicki, and no threat could be as personal or as dangerous as that posed by the Joker. Batman is thus the cinematic equivalent of a perfect Elseworld one-shot – and, in my view, best enjoyed as such.

Of course, Batman is most famous for Jack Nicholson’s memorable turn as Jack Napier / the Joker, which really raised the bar for all future actors playing the part. As a child, I questioned how the movie could give top billing to its baddie, as opposed to its eponymous hero, but there is no question now that Nicholson is the obvious star of the piece. That’s no slight on Keaton – it’s just a basic truth ingrained in the very fabric of the film. Batman chronicles the Joker’s origin, rise and (actual!) fall, whereas the titular Caped Crusader begins and ends the movie as an established creature of the night. The Joker is front and centre here; Batman is the foil. This inversion of what would become the typical superhero movie format serves the picture well, though, building up the mystique of the Dark Knight while at the same time indulging the audience with just as many scenes from the Joker’s perspective as from Batman’s or Vicki’s. The torrent of quotable dialogue alone is worth the price of admission.

“Where does he get those wonderful toys…?”

Yet whilst Nicholson’s award-winning performance is nothing short of phenomenal, as much credit goes to the production team for crafting the first plausible take on Batman’s greatest enemy to be shown on screen. Hamm and Skaaren spend a significant amount of time with the cruel and psychotic Jack Napier before a ricocheting bullet sends him tumbling into that customary vat of chemicals, establishing him as a worthy adversary in his own right. Even pre-Joker, Jack’s fierce intelligence and intuition are matched only by his capacity for treachery and cruelty. When the Joker does emerge from the waters of Axis Chemicals, his skin bleached white and his smile permanently carved into his features (a particularly lovely touch), he does so with a much savvier and purposeful agenda than most previous iterations. 

“Wait ’til they get a load of me.”

Indeed, this Joker isn’t just in it for the laughs. Rather than burn it all down, he wants to take it all over. A few beautiful little moments peppered throughout the film make Jack’s feelings towards Grisham, the mobster running Gotham’s underworld, quite plain. Whilst Jack clearly loathes his boss, he still wants to be him. He wants his woman. He wants his power. He wants to be the one squeezing the shoulders of a disposable lieutenant, telling him that he’s his “main man”, as opposed to being that lieutenant himself. Before Axis Chemicals, though, Jack was seemingly content to just sit back and play cards. Afterwards, there was only one card that he could ever play.

 “Let’s broaden our minds. Prince!”

Another outstanding aspect of this movie is its zany, high-concept soundtrack. Injected into the gothic splendour of Gotham City is a colourful burst of late-1980s pop courtesy of Prince, who provided Warner Brothers with an entire album’s worth of tie-in material, much of which is used on screen. Joker’s bombastic assault on the art gallery stands out especially as an iconic moment in cinematic history – a bizarre fusion of darkness and colour that seems to encapsulate everything Joker. And woven in amidst the likes of “Partyman” is prolific composer Danny Elfman’s most stirring score, which includes a Batman theme that would prove to be every bit as enduring as the rest of the movie and finally lay the ghost of “Der, ner, ner, ner, ner, ner, ner, ner…” to rest. It’s so effective and rousing a composition that, shortly afterwards, it would be immortalised by Bruce Timm’s animated series, with which it would become synonymous, and later even memorably reprised in 2017’s Justice League movie.

Twenty years on from the adventures of the Camp Crusader, Tim Burton’s movie presented audiences with a version of Batman that would redefine his mainstream perception for decades to come. It brought us the definitive Batmobile. The definitive theme music. It even turned blue and grey black and yellow. If you’ve seen any of the LEGO Movies, then you’ll have noticed that the LEGO Batman is Michael Keaton’s, right down to the yellow logo on his chest and his insistence that he, “…only work in black.” Even after Chris Nolan’s epic, fan-pleasing trilogy and Zack Snyder’s contentious but popular rendition of an older Dark Knight, the incarnation that continues to resonate in the public consciousness is the one created by this movie. Spock is Star Trek. Tom Baker is Doctor Who. Michael Keaton is Batman. And deservedly so.

On 16th September a 4K UHD steelbook was released to tie in with Batman’s eightieth anniversary. A thing of quiet beauty, as moody and strong as the movie that it houses, it’s an offering that’s surprisingly - but tastefully - understated. As is often the case, the rear artwork is even more impressive than the more obvious front cover’s as it depicts Batman looking out over the city that he’s committed to protect, instantly conjuring the film’s brooding tone. Inside, the bullet-shaped Batmobile emerges from beneath the set’s two discs, only the movie-poster-style credits marring its slick finish.

Click to enlarge images.

 

The release includes both a 4K UHD disc and a Blu-ray, with the latter also housing all of the extensive bonus material previously released on DVD back in 2006. Whilst the bonus material hasn’t been upscaled even to high definition, the version of the movie presented on the Blu-ray appears to have been downscaled from the new 4K transfer – it’s clearly far superior to the version of the film that’s already available to buy on Blu-ray.

Click to enlarge images.

 

And the set’s centrepiece 4K UHD disc is almost as impressive as the Chris Nolan’s movies’, which remain my go-to demo discs. Whilst a twenty-year-old movie couldn’t hope to hold its own against the glorious IMAX sequences in The Dark Knight or The Dark Knight Rises, the overall presentation still comes very close as it almost fills up a 16:9 television’s screen throughout (as opposed to just during IMAX sequences), thus providing a much more consistent, if somewhat less dramatic, experience. Though the resolution is expectedly superb, the obvious selling point here is the HDR, which really lifts to the movie to new heights. Burton’s tale tells of a shadow-lit hunter in pursuit of a colourful criminal, and this release finally delivers his vision of vibrant purples and reds contrasted against every shade of shadow on a ubiquitous, burnt orange canvas. A full-on ATMOS soundtrack is the icing on the cake for audiophiles. All told, this release is a triumph – the perfect birthday gift for an octogenarian crimefighter looking to put his feet up for two hours. I’d highly recommend heading over to Zavvi without delay to get one ordered before the limited run sells out.