Batman 1989

5.7/10. Someday, possibly in the near future, we’re going to get a gritty, documentary-style Batman film about a regular guy who dresses up like a bat and gets into ugly fist fights with criminals. And when that happens, we’ll turn around and laugh at how cheesy and unrealistic the Christopher Nolan Batman films seem now. Today’s cultural sensation is tomorrow’s hokey relic. So it goes.

But until that happens, it behooves us to look at Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman film, which comes off pretty corny and even rudimentary relative to the Dark Knight Trilogy, with some perspective. After the semi-grounded approach to the character in recent years, it seems odd that Burton’s film was praised for its serious approach to the source material. But contemporary critics were comparing it to William Dozer’s Batman ‘66 the overtly comedic, Adam West incarnation of the caped crusader. So while much of what Burton does in Batman feels broader and even goofier than the bat-stories people think of today, it’s important to keep it in the context of the wide spectrum of portrayals of the character and his world, whether on the page or the screen, that have taken place over the last eighty years.

Even with that thought in mind when approaching the film, it’s hard to reconcile it with the gut response to a film made almost three decades ago under very different standards and expectations for superhero films and blockbusters in general.

Some of what dates the film is easily forgivable. The effects are not up to today’s standards – CGI or no – with models or miniatures standing out fairly clearly, and even details as minor as Batman’s costume contribute to the “just playing dress up” vibe. Between the two-piece cowl, or the curtain drapery bit the Dark Knight does with his cape in an attempt to create an intimidating silhouette for the criminals he’s attacking, the entire enterprise feels chintzier than the polished (even overly polished) visuals of today.

And yet, that contributes to the feel of the film. If there’s one thing about the film that feels both entirely appropriate to the source material and yet also makes it harder for a modern day viewer to connect with the film, it’s the overall atmosphere of Batman. Burton embraces the cartoony, four-color roots of the genre in the visuals and overall tenor of the film, even when it includes more intense elements like gangland hits and dead parents.

Part of that comes from the film’s setting, which takes place in an interesting amalgam of the 1940s and the then-contemporary Reagan era. Certain elements of the film – like the cops and robbers motif and the production design as a whole place Batman in an old version of New York City that seemed to only exist on the silver screen in the first place. But things like Vicky Vale’s glasses or the breaks in the action for the Joker and his goons to dance to Prince songs, or even the particular energy of the Alexander Knox character, root the picture squarely in the late-eighties. It’s a blend that serves to make the film very specific, timeless, and dated all at once.

The set design contributes to that sense as well. It feels like Burton literally shot a movie with oversized play sets. Everything in Batman feels larger than life. The world of Gotham is a fantasy land, a theme park, that captures the unreality of Batman’s comic roots while also putting it at a remove from the audience. In effect, these choices make Burton’s Batman feels truest to those roots among the various Batman-related films, even as he departs from standard continuity and characterization. Even though Keaton’s Batman doesn’t feel pulled from the pages of Detective Comics, there’s a real sense of Burton taking the toys out of the toy box, moving them around his elegantly constructed play set, with all the bombast and silliness that goes with it.

The problem, then, is that little of it has any weight. Not every superhero movie needs to be a mediation on hope or morality or vigilantism, but Burton’s Batman comes out feeling like empty calories, with really only The Bat himself the only character who offers any sort of inner life. There’s fun to be had here – giant balloons and cartoony gadgets. But it doesn’t quite capture the pure sense of joy or investment that can come up in the lighter Marvel films of recent vintage. Burton’s Batman, instead, feels appropriately enough like a Saturday morning cartoon come to life, with the same commitment to whiz-bang action but also lack of depth.

The irony is that the actual Saturday morning cartoon inspired by Burton’s work on the screen, Batman: The Animated Series distills the character and his world down to a much more coherent and compelling version of the same ideas present here. It’s rare that the characters in Burton’s Batman feel like real people rather than four-color abstractions and broadly-sketched archetypes.

The peak of this is Jack Nicholson’s Joker. There are hints here and there at a unique conception of the Clown Prince of Crime. The most promising of them is the idea of Joker as a conceptual artist whose medium is homicide. It’s appropriately out there for the character, and accounts for the theatrical flair in his capers. But Burton’s Joker has little true motivation in the film beyond some quickly completed revenge. There’s reason to give Burton the benefit of the doubt, and take his Joker as the result of when someone with little empathy or control to begin with goes insane – unpredictable, almost random cruelty – but the bumpers of the film’s exaggerated atmosphere keep that idea from landing with any force.

That leaves Batman with a semi-incoherent antagonist, with a rushed origin story, and only Jack Nicholson’s charisma to save things. Nicholson doesn’t just chew the scenery here; he gnaws on it like a dog with a bone. That leads to some enjoyable line reads (“where does he get those wonderful toys” is still a nicely arch bit from Nicholson) and some amusing dances from the three-time Oscar winner, but mostly leads to the character feeling as though it lacks an anchor or a purpose beyond dutifully moving the conflict along and giving Nicholson the space to do a handful of off-the-wall, unconnected comic sketches. Nicholson’s Joker is over the top, as he should be, but also rudderless and showy, undercutting any menace or threat he’s supposed to pose.

That extends to the film’s biggest break with the source material – making the Joker, as a young Jack Napier, the one who killed Bruce Wayne’s parents. It creates a certain poetry and connects the hero and the villain in the way that so many stories, superhero or otherwise, like to. (See also: the first season of Netflix’s Luke Cage show.) But it doesn’t amount to much, beyond turning Batman from a crusader for justice into a bog-standard seeker of revenge.

It’s a shame because Keaton’s Batman, while hamstrung by some of the movie’s shortcomings, makes for an intriguing version of the character. He doesn’t brood exactly, but he seems quietly tortured nonetheless. It’s a choice keeps Keaton’s Batman from the taciturn glumness that overly dark modern adaptations have taken too far, but still portrays him as a man who doesn’t quite feels comfortable with who or what he is, shutting people out and working through his problems by skulking through the night and protecting other little boys whose parents wander into the wrong alley. Beyond the “wanna get nuts” interlude, it’s a nicely unshowy take on the character that succeeds in ways even the Nolan films struggled with at times.

It also gives the film its only real bit of emotional weight, especially Bruce/Batman’s relationship with Vicky Vale. Kim Basinger’s Vale is a thin, if noble for the time to put a female lead with some oomph into the narrative. She shows some modicum of cleverness and resourcefulness during the film, but still devolves into standard damsel-in-distress tropes that make her feel more like a prop than a vital part of the story. Still, the film never feels more human and real than in the moments when Bruce and Vicky are flirting, or worrying about one another, or shutting each other out. The film goes back and forth, but in their scenes set in and around Wayne Manor in particular, there’s a chemistry there that buoys the film, and gives another layer to Keaton’s performance as his Batman is only willing to let someone so far into his life.

There are other smaller elements that make the film enjoyable. Danny Elfman’s score is, to borrow the title of the film’s aborted sequel, thrillingly triumphant, with an operatic bombast that perfectly matches the tone of the film. On the other side of the coin, Michael Gough brings warmth and kindness to his portrayal of Bruce’s butler and confidant, Alfred Pennyworth, that helps give the movie what little emotional grounding it has. In between is the film’s palette, which is garish and at times even lurid appropriate to the newsprint origins, balancing the darkness of the setting with an exaggerated color scheme.

Still, Burton’s Batman can’t help but feel like a half-measure to the modern eye. Halfway between the tongue-in-cheek cheekiness of Dozier’s Batman ‘66 and the pot-boiling grit of Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy, Burton’s Batman can’t quite manage the balance of weight and whimsy that the animated series he inadvertently spawned nearly perfected. Instead, the film is a muddle of Batman’s sensibilities and Burton’s, presenting yet another one of Burton’s troubled loners, amid the painted cardboard world and cartoony figures, that leave the sense of a fingers-crossed adventure where everyone’s just playacting.

Batman is not quite a lark, not quite a thrill, and not quite an achievement. It’s a curiosity, an evolutionary step for the caped crusader on the silver screen, having not fully shed its previous form, and not yet worked out what the character might be. The film is a toy box come to life, with all the good and all the bad that the description conjures.

The film that taught me "C'mon you gruesome son of a b****, come to me!" in kindergarten, and obviously caused multiple parent-teacher conferences.

There's no doubt that Tim Burton's "Batman" gave a whole new dignity to the character, and that all subsequent incarnations owe something to this film. But, at the same time, we can't really say it aged well. It was one of the first attempts to create something between a comic strip and something a little gloomier, but the writing is all over the place, and the direction is so clunky it hurts. While it’s definitely a must-watch if you are looking into the history of the character, I doubt it will have anything to offer to casual viewers.

However, the trench coat and wide-brimmed hat film noir atmosphere is perfect for Gotham City. In retrospect, it may lead you to believe that the clumsy staging and stiff acting were intended to channel the classic film noir vibes. Kim Basinger could have been the femme fatale, but other than crossing her legs in her first scene, she is the average superhero flick damsel in distress who yells and falls from various buildings.

Jack Nicholson's performance is the most confident, and he is indeed carrying the whole film. There are times he ends up being as campy as the Joker from Adam West TV show, but he is not the only one to blame. His performance works when Burton had managed to build tension around his character, but especially in the second half, he ends up being as quirky as he is harmless. His motivations are unclear, but that’s part of his anarchic and chaotic charm. In the end, it all resolves into a bizarre love triangle between him, Batman, and Vale.

The Caped Crusader is quite absent, and it’s clear that Burton didn’t care much about the original character. The fact that he purposedly kills already says it all. However, I liked how clumsy and out of place Bruce Waye feels while acting like a billionaire playboy. Burton suggests that Batman is just as much of a freak as Joker is, and the fact that the two characters caused the birth of each other’s second identities is not a coincidence. A concept that Burton was probably planning to expand in further movies, but that in this case gets only roughly sketched.

While Elfman’s score is still regarded as the best and most representative in the franchise, Prince’s original songs are atrocious…

This might be hard to connect with if you can only look at Batman through the lens of the Bale, Affleck and Pattinson interpretations. It’s certainly more stylized and unapologetically comicbook-y, but to me that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Like, I don’t think it’s dated at all, it’s still pretty easy to get into if you have an appreciation for the pulpier side of Batman and Burton’s aesthetic. Sure, the action can be a little stiff occasionally, but there’s truly a timeless quality to the filmmaking and storytelling here. It perfectly captures the essence of the characters and the world, and because it isn’t afraid of the origins of the source material it does so in a way that still feels unique. For example, I love how this Joker is interpreted as a cartoonish version of a Scorsese mobster, and how exaggerated the world feels. Both Keaton and Nicholson deliver very entertaining performances (Nicholson has so many iconic moments in this), Burton is the perfect fit for this character (gothic worldbuilding; visual character development; the dark, atmospheric lighting hides the sillier attributes of the Batman costume) and Danny Elfman delivers an ear grabbing score. The Prince songs all suck, but they’re not really brought to the foreground at any point. I also don’t really care for the romance subplot, and the writing could’ve taken a little more risk, but overall this hasn’t lost much of its charm.

7/10

Old films are tough. Do you judge them based on modern standards, or do you attempt to judge them retroactively based on the standards of an era that you may not have even been alive during? I choose the former for two reasons: (1) the latter is basically just guesswork; and (2) I want my reviews to be helpful to a modern audience, so saying something akin to "this movie is really good (as long as you watched it back in 1989)", doesn't really fit the bill. So, with all of that said, how does Tim Burton's original Batman stack up in 2023? Well... it was better than Ant-Man Quantumania, so there's that.

But in all seriousness, this film is a mixed bag. The performances and story hold up surprisingly well, but the extremely dated special effects really drag down the more ambitious spectacle moments. In particular, everything with the bat wing was pretty rough, and even the scenes with the bat mobile were barely okay. I'd also point to several of the ambitious Gotham settings that look to be created through some combination of miniature or painted backdrop. I could be wrong on that, but whatever technology was used, it doesn't exactly hold up (though still better than some of Quantummania's CGI fest backdrops). Because the finale rested on a lot of this spectacle, the movie really didn't stick the landing for me. Luckily, the smaller scale production design and special effects don't suffer nearly as much from their age. I would also criticize the romance aspect of the film as underdeveloped and forced.

On the positive side, we've got Jack Nicholson, who brings this version of Joker to life in a way that really carries the movie. Michael Keaton is solid, though I feel like he isn't given nearly as much to work with.

Tim Burton, Jack Nicholson and Michael Keaton team up to revive the caped crusader after two decades of "bam, pow, sock" oversaturation. It often feels like a great, big batch of irrelevant ideas tossed into the same pot, but more than a few of those notions are good ones. Its bonafides check out, at least, and the film's tone is daring enough to effectively shift the conversation away from that campy Adam West TV series. Burton cites The Killing Joke as an influence, while Keaton studied The Dark Knight Returns before filming, both strikingly fresh renditions of the character at the time, which still remain well-regarded thirty years later.

Nicholson's Joker is polished and refined, steeped in fine art and literature, but also gleefully chaotic and wildly unpredictable. Jack's enthusiasm for the part is clear, and appropriately so, as he gets almost all the memorable lines (there are quite a few) and is given plenty of liberty to make the role his own. Batman himself is almost a secondary character, amidst all the police corruption, overnight love connections and puzzling machinations by his nemesis.

The scenes which actually feel like Tim Burton are the most interesting, as the director's strange visual sensibilities serve as a wonderful partner for the Joker's increasing lunacy, but most of the time I had the sense that he was on a leash. Whether that was at the mandate of Warner Brothers or something more self-imposed is anyone's guess. It was his first major studio effort, after all, and there was a lot on the line. Indecisive at times, uncertain at others, it's a rather shallow story that rides high on its loud fashion choices, brooding nature and raw, energetic spirit, not to mention a few irresistible performances. Fascinating as a statement, perhaps less so as a complete motion picture. It’s very much a product of the times.