Rating:  -
Despite the sequels and the fanfare of the reboot, this remains my favorite Batman movie.
I admittedly had initial concerns over Michael Keaton in the role, but I quickly warmed up to the actor as Bruce Wayne, and once the suit went on, his performance was spot on. Nicholson as the Joker was solid casting, and he gave a brilliant performance.
This movie was just fun, and a completely different feel from "The Dark Knight". Whereas Dark Knight was endlessly gritty and tense, "Batman" was both dramatic and fun. There were plenty of light moments to break the tension of the Joker's murder and mayhem. In Dark Knight, there were no tension breakers at all. I'm a tremendous Batman fan (the comic character) and during Dark Knight I felt like I was sitting through an endurance contest rather than something I'd assumed would be entertainment. Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking Dark Knight ... it was a tremendous achievement. But the mood was very different than the original "Batman", and I just find that I preferred the mood of the original. The moode was a bit better with Batman Begins, and the origin story was very interesting. However, I felt that as the movie progressed, tbey were a bit stingy with actual Batman shots.
As for the DVD, its a solid product. Images and sound are top notch
Rating:  -
Probably everyone knows the story of Tim Burton's mental breakdown during and after the filming of BATMAN. For those who don't: Burton was a modest, small-fry director and Warner Brothers approaches him with what was to be the biggest action-superhero movie of all time. Remember the year. Burton didn't know if he was doing the right thing half the time, yet look at the result!
Sure, the dialogue is stupidly performed. So what? Half of Cary Grant's films are like that. The storyline is solid, the look is all Frank Miller, although Bob Kane was directly hands-on with this film, and he did not like Miller at all. Not a shock: Kane invented the Miller style, only to be told it was too much for readers back then. So make no mistake: Burton married his nightmares to Kane's genius vision.
I want to make an aside about the soundtrack, composed and much performed by Danny Elfman (when it wasn't the big orchestra). I never get to write a thing about Elfman, and I'm a HUGE fan since his Mystic Knights of the Oingo-Boingo days. What a tour-de-force he achieved here. He'd never hit this level again, though he's still second only to John Williams.
Choosing Nicholson as the Joker was probably a bad move, but that is what Burton wanted. In a way, he fits really well. Compare him to Heath Ledger and decide. The biggest whack on the chin was selecting Michael Keaton to play the Dark Knight. Burton got death threats for that. In his own words, he did not want a "square-jawed, Arnold Schwarzenegger-type."
One star was lost because I hate Kim Basinger. She can't act. Sorry.
Other than this movie being in so many ways far ahead of its time, I think the casting of Keaton deserves additional comment. For those who were not there on premiere day, as I was, there were people in the theater dressed in Batman costumes. This was due to Keaton. His performance was hailed by all critics, even though part of the public hated the choice. Everyone was saying, "MR. MOM as Batman?!"
What is unfair is that Keaton set the standard for the portrayal of Batman and Bruce Wayne. He's been copied faithfully ever since he did this, and Keaton himself seems to have lost his entire career after walking away from the 2nd sequel. Today we tend to forget him and his work here.
I recall talking with my martial arts colleagues about it. We said, well, we know masters and great fighters who are puny-looking and weak-chinned, just like Keaton. We knew Keaton had tremendous potential: indeed, the Batman performances post-Keaton are pale imitations of him. Burton selected Keaton because of his mad eyes and expressive brow--someone to square off against the equally mad Nicholson. And it worked. Try to imagine someone else doing that...oh, wait, let's see, Val Kilmer did it, George Clooney (who played Batman as gay), Christian Bale and I am waiting to see if they break out some pimply-faced 16-year-old for the next installment.
CRAP ALARM!!--no one holds a candle to this golden original, and there's no one like Keaton to play Batman. I've heard rumors for years that Keaton will play him again, but I think those rumors were about the Bale film and not about Keaton. Still, I wonder if he'd do it again, just to make us all happy again. BATMAN made me happy. I loved that a good guy, albeit it a billionaire, was doing truly good things. I loved that he dressed up just to scare the pants of the criminals. I like the fact that he saved rather than killed them, as Kane originally had him doing in the first comic adventure.
I love that Burton and not some other screw-head directed this, and I love Elfman's rousing score (the overture has been compared to Beethoven, so listen up for it). And I love that the 1980s went out with this summer blockbusting BANG!!
For all that, this is not only one of my favorite Deeply Personals, it is a ground-breaking film that has, as you all readily know, absolutely NO peer.
Rating: -
The 1989 Tim Burton-directed version of the classic DC Comics superhero is as exciting and thrilling as well as dark, brooding and disturbing. Jack Nicholson has done a great job as the Joker(whose real name is not Jack Napier), and Michael Keaton is at his best as The Batman. The music score by Danny Elfman and the songs by Prince were the best components of the movie. The DVD also features a background story of how the film came to be. This will go down as one of the greatest DC Comics movies ever made.
Rating:  -
It's a shame something more memorable doesn't happen there. "Batman" is a triumph of design over story, style over substance - a great-looking movie with a plot you can't care much about. All of the big moments in the movie are pounded home with ear-shattering sound effects and a jackhammer cutting style, but that just serves to underline the movie's problem, which is a curious lack of suspense and intrinsic interest.
"Batman" discards the recent cultural history of the Batman character - the camp 1960s TV series, the in-joke comic books - and returns to the mood of the 1940s, the decade of film noir and fascism.
The movie is set at the present moment, more or less, but looks as if little has happened in architecture or city planning since the classic DC comic books created that architectural style you could call Comic Book Moderne. The streets of Gotham City are lined with bizarre skyscrapers that climb cancerously toward the sky, held up (or apart) by sky bridges and stresswork that look like webs against the night sky.
At street level, gray and anonymous people scurry fearfully through the shadows, and the city cancels its 200th anniversary celebration because the streets are not safe enough to hold it. Gotham is in the midst of a wave of crime and murder orchestrated by The Joker (Jack Nicholson), and civilization is defended only by Batman (Michael Keaton). The screenplay takes a bow in the direction of the origin of the Batman story (young Bruce Wayne saw his parents murdered by a thug and vowed to use their fortune to dedicate his life to crime-fighting), and it also explains how The Joker got his fearsome grimace. Then it turns into a gloomy showdown between the two bizarre characters.
Nicholson's Joker is really the most important character in the movie - in impact and screen time - and Keaton's Batman and Bruce Wayne characters are so monosyllabic and impenetrable that we have to remind ourselves to cheer for them. Kim Basinger strides in as Vicky Vale, a famous photographer assigned to the Gotham City crime wave, but although she and Wayne carry on a courtship and Batman rescues her from certain death more than once, there's no chemistry and little eroticism. The strangest scene in the movie may be the one where Vicky is brought into the Batcave by Alfred, the faithful valet, and realizes for the first time that Bruce Wayne and Batman are the same person. How does she react? She doesn't react. The movie forgets to allow her to be astonished.
Remembering the movie, I find that the visuals remain strong in my mind, but I have trouble caring about what happened in front of them. I remember an astonishing special effects shot that travels up, up to the penthouse of a towering, ugly skyscraper, and I remember the armor slamming shut on the Batmobile as if it were a hightech armadillo. I remember The Joker grinning beneath a hideous giant balloon as he dispenses free cash in his own travesty of the Macy's parade, and I remember a really vile scene in which he defaces art masterpieces in the local museum before Batman crashes in through the skylight.
But did I care about the relationship between these two caricatures? Did either one have the depth of even a comic book character? Not really. And there was something off-putting about the anger beneath the movie's violence. This is a hostile, mean-spirited movie about ugly, evil people, and it doesn't generate the liberating euphoria of the Superman or Indiana Jones pictures. It's classified PG-13, but it's not for kids.
Should it be seen, anyway? Probably. Director Tim Burton and his special effects team have created a visual place that has some of the same strength as Fritz Lang's Metropolis or Ridley Scott's futuristic Los Angeles in "Blade Runner." The gloominess of the visuals has a haunting power. Nicholson has one or two of his patented moments of inspiration, although not as many as I would have expected. And the music by Prince, intercut with classics, is effectively joined in the images. The movie's problem is that no one seemed to have any fun making it, and it's hard to have much fun watching it. It's a depressing experience. Is the opposite of comic book "tragic book"?
Rating: -
Michael Keaton is a really good Batman. One of the best Jokers is in it. He is Jack Nichelson. Kim Basinger and Pat Hingle are also in it. This is a relly good Batman movie.
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