Watch: The Batman

Surprisingly incredible. I normally don’t like superhero movies but this was actually good. It was a lot grittier, more rooted in reality, not as fantastical and had the right sort of tone and pace. The music worked really well too, had good musical cues and wasn’t overpowering. Funnily enough, there were times when it reminded me of Star Wars, I think it’s the Emperor’s theme, which played with dark and mysterious overtones.

What appealed to me most about this movie was that everything wasn’t framed around the absolutes of morally right and wrong. Most superhero movies seem to do that and it bothers me so much because it’s just so unrealistic. They also seem to forcefully inject humor into random moments, to break up the pacing for the viewer I’m guessing, but it always makes me pull away because it feels disingenuous. In this movie, there were moments where I found myself naturally laughing at organically funny situations. Moreover, the characters were all quite interesting and had a weight to them, which not only anchored them in the context of that world but also made them easier to understand and related to. You could feel the conflict in each of them and could empathize with their struggle to understand their place in the world, and coming having to terms with it.

I can say without a doubt The Batman is by far my favorite superhero movie yet. This is more the regular run-of-the-mill superhero movie that gets released semi-annually; this is more of a dark detective story about a vigilante trying to fix the broken world corrupted with villains instead of trying to fix himself. In a lot of ways, this iteration of The Batman character reminded of Sarte’s line ‘Hell is other people’. And, in some ways, at least for me, Hell is another Marvel movie.