The twinning of the Joker with Batman makes sense as part of an effort to build an emotional connection between the two for a one-and-done blockbuster narrative rather than as an on-going antagonism. Batman’s casual brutality is much more in keeping with the aesthetic of late eighties action movies than his comic book counterpart. All of the changes to the source material were made in the process of adaptation, to structure a cinematic story within the narrative conventions of contemporary cinema. In hindsight, what is striking about Batman is how much it feels like a film of itself. Superman was announced at Comic Con by having Harry Lennix read a monologue from The Dark Knight Returns.) Often, as with releases like The Lion King, it seems that it does not matter whether adaptations are good, only faithful. These sorts of changes are surreal in an era where film and television adaptations of comic books go out of their way to stress their fidelity to the source material, staking a great deal of credibility on how closely they can recreate panels or quote lines of dialogue. How childish can you get?” It is notable that – in an era where cinematic adaptations had an outsized influence on the comics that spawned them – this was never adapted into the comic book mythology. This lends a sense of clumsy symmetry to Batman’s presence at the birth of the Joker, with the latter even acknowledging the cliché at the climax, “I say you made me, you say I made you. Perhaps the biggest change to the mythology is the reveal that the Joker (as Jack Napier) was responsible for murdering the Wayne family. Gotham is not a place that could ever really exist, outside of nightmares or idle day dreams. Gotham City does not so much resemble “Manhattan below Fourteenth street at eleven minutes past midnight on the coldest night in November” as a nightmare of German expressionist cinema brought to life. ![]() Batman is (at best) indifferent to any casualties that he might inflict. Vicki Vale was a blonde rather than a redhead. (Although, that said, writer Alan Moore had himself lifted that from an early fifties comic, The Man Behind the Red Hood!)īatman makes a variety of changes to the established character’s mythology, both large and small. Tim Burton cites The Killing Joke as a major creative influence, and it certainly informs aspects of Jack Napier’s transformation into the Joker most notably, the encounter with Batman at the chemical plant. The murder of the Wayne family is obviously drawn from Frank Miller’s portrayal of the crime in The Dark Knight Returns, right down to the shattered pearls. There are obvious comics influences on the film. It is largely disinterested in being a faithful translation of its comic book source material to the big screen. It has its own distinctive style, its own distinctive sensibility, one largely missing even from the more overtly stylised and auteur superhero films like Logan or Black Panther. From a modern perspective, particularly one shaped by trends in the superhero genre over the past decade, Batman doesn’t look or feel like a comic book adaptation. However, even judged on its own merits and without considering what followed, Tim Burton’s Batman is a strange beast. Taken together, they were responsible for killing not only that iteration of the cinematic Batman franchise, but also for effectively killing the superhero as a blockbuster genre until the triple whammy of Blade, X-Men and Spider-Man kick-started it again at the turn of the millennium. ![]() Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever and Batman and Robin count among the worst blockbusters of the nineties and the worst comic book movies ever made. ![]() To be fair, at least part of that is down to how the series ended. It leaves a complicated and underappreciated legacy. Tim Burton’s Batman is thirty years old this year, having opened in Irish cinemas thirty years ago this weekend.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |