Wait, what? Oh we're not doing Superman yet? Well, what are we doing? Non-DC/Marvel comic book movies? Nahh, what else you got? Oh, Batman? Yeah, I guess we can rank Batman.
I mean, why not? Batman has been played so diversely over the course of his fifty-plus year motion picture career. Adam West, Michael Keaton, Val Kilmer, George Clooney, Christian Bale and most recently Ben Affleck ("Batfleck, if you will) have all had their go at the character with mixed results. However, we're not ranking the Batmen themselves, we're ranking the movies they've provided us. So, since we have ten movies to get through, let's go ahead and get it started.
#10 - Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) & #9 - Batman & Robin (1997)
So let's start out with the obvious choice of Batman and Rob--, wait a minute. Batman v Superman? I mean, I know it's gotten lambasted in the media but it's not worse than the worst Batman movie of all time, is it? Well, from a storytelling standpoint, it kind of is.
To start off with, again, we're not judging the Batmen themselves. If we were, Affleck blows Clooney out of the water. Period, end of story. We're judging the movies they were in, and I gotta tell you, I sort of prefer Batman & Robin to Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. That's right, I goddamn jolly-well went there. I'm the one, people, and I'll tell you why.
Without going into detail yet, we all know that both movies fail across the board in their own fields. BvS fails miserably in story, directing, and originality, whilst Batman & Robin obviously fails in dialogue, acting, and art-direction. They both have their pitfalls that make them the bottom-tier Batflicks, but slice out of all of the bad junk for a minute. Pretend BvS isn't just a rip-off of The Dark Knight Returns and that Batman & Robin wasn't shot in the spare room of a neon night-club with an eighth grade drama class troupe. Take a step back and compare the two now.
Still not convinced? Even after pretending BvS isn't a ripoff of the Dark Knight Rises which essentially cripples the Bat-half of the movie? Alright, let's try something else then. Let's restate my credo. What is the single most important aspect of making a movie? The setting? Not quite. The characters? Close; I'd say they're about the second-most important thing. No, if you've been following my posts, you'll know that has a movie-goer, I value story first and foremost over everything. A good, clean story, start to finish, is the most essential part of a movie and is the foundation on which to build everything else. Acting, dialogue, sets, costumes, props, and musical score all integral pieces you supply once your foundation has been erected.
Look at Batman v Superman. It has a half-assed story that begs the question if a script was really needed. Sure there are some points in the movie that didn't happen in other forms of Batman media, but even if there were events that didn't directly happen verbatim in the comics or TV series', they've happened so many times in different forms of dialogue and settings that it almost feels like a carbon copy. Bruce being sly and coy at a gala event? That's never been done before. Bruce angrily discussing stuff with Alfred. That's never been done before. In fact, the only thing that was sort of original was Jeremy Irons' portrayal of Alfred.
One of the biggest and most glaring problems with Batman v Superman is that it was over-stuffed. It was over-stuffed with so much story and build-up materials for future DC movies that the story suffered. It has no room to breathe. You get all of this stuff in just two-and-a-half hours that made you crazy. It's not like it was hard to follow, but it certainly felt like cramming for a final exam by reading nine chapters out of your textbook all in one night. The amount of shit that you're expected to just digest and accept is baffling. Once you take all of the build-up plot points and necessary character introductions and witty banter that points to future DCEU movies that you won't care about, you're left with a fan-fiction re-edit of The Dark Knight Returns, just with some stupid recycled Superman story thrown in. Oh what's that? Superman is a God-like being who some of the Earth is thankful to have but others of Earth feel anxious around? Haven't heard that notion in any of the comic books before...
Now, against your wishes, I'm going to ask you to look back at Batman & Robin. Sure the acting sucks something awful to the point where the only time George Clooney ever visited a Comic-Con, he took time out to visit the Batman panel and publicly apologize for the film's outcome. Sure the dialogue is so horrifically cheesy and stupid that it ruined Joel Schumacher's career as a director. Yeah...that bad. Sure the art direction consisting of the sets, costumes, and props made everything feel like a brightly-lit night club where everybody's doing blow and dancing wildly in sequin-laced nightwear. But, look at the story. Look underneath all of the shitty aspects of the movie. The story is a clean, albeit ridiculous, story told as a beginning, middle, and end. It's a standalone story with no build-up jibber-jabber referring to future sequels, no hasty dialogue attempting to establish in one movie what Marvel did in four, and certainly no crappy, sidetracking banter between Batfleck and Wonder Woman.
While Batman & Robin is loads goofier, stupider, cheesier, more ridiculous, more colorful and far more outrageous than the overly dark, lackluster, attention-losing snooze fest of Batman v Superman, it managed to take the same amount of major characters and make them all, at the very least, entertaining to look at or to listen to. Arnold Schwarzenegger may have made a God-awful Mr. Freeze, but at least you look at him with some sort of entertainment value because his Austrian accent makes all of the freeze puns quotable lines of hilarity. Everybody laughs at George Clooney's lazy portrayal of Batman, but he still gets credit because everyone remembers it for that reason alone. Uma Thurman's portrayal of Poison Ivy was so ridiculous it was actually kind of good in the sense that you couldn't tell if her acting was shit or gold. Robin was whiney and prissy and Batgirl was more punk. You remember them because they got the roles reversed. Because of all of this, the five main characters in Batman & Robin are far-more memorable with different attributes, while the five main characters in Batman v Superman are pretty much portrayed the same way. Batman, Superman, Lois, Alfred, and Lex Luthor. No one character has any defining traits. The only two that come close to being unique are Alfred and Lex Luthor. Luthor is like Mr. Freeze in that he's over-the-top stupid, but whereas Mr. Freeze is cool because he's Arnold fuckin' Schwarzenegger, Jesse Eisenberg comes off as just flat-out annoying. He'd be like if you took Arnold's Austrian accent away and gave him a whiney nerd voice. Superman is too stoic and monotone. Sure Superman is supposed to be a monolithic figure of conveyance, but at the very least emote sometimes that don't involve your mother being captured. Amy Adams, bless her soul, tried her damnedest to act alongside everyone, but the movie dragged her down and washed her out, filming most of it in a greyish hue that makes everything feel drab and depressing. Batman is the only redeeming quality of the movie, but not even the Caped Crusader can carry this ass-fest on his own.
I'm not saying Batman & Robin blows Batman v Superman out of the water because of this. It's really more of the neck-and-neck scenario. I consider Batman & Robin to only be slightly superior. Believe me; they're both horrible movies in their own right. But if you're still not convinced. If you're still trying to convince yourself that Batman v Superman was worth the wait and that Batman & Robin is still the worst, one last nugget of factual data may surprise you.
In terms of second-weekend drop-off, that is the decrease of money made between opening weekend and the second weekend of movie theater runs, Batman v Superman saw a record-setting of horrible that was a 68% drop-off. Batman & Robin? Only a 63% profit loss.
Case closed. Catch me next time for #8, Batman (1966).
No comments:
Post a Comment