Matt Reeves, the writer and director of The Batman, is not an untalented man: The film is a visual masterpiece even if its grey and dark tones make it harder on the eyes than The Dark Knight. However, the movie lacks a consistent theme, characterization, coherent scene transitions, and a full understanding of the mystery genre it is trying to participate in.
The original Batman comics feature as much detective work as they do action: Indeed, before Batman became its own comic, Batman was a regular character in DC’s Detective Comics: So, the idea of returning Batman to his detective roots is a clever one. That said, despite framing itself as a mystery, Batman never actually solves anything. Instead of making Batman think, the film conveniently has an expository device show up: The Penguin conveniently explains how Batman misunderstood the difference between la and el, a recording of a murder shows up on someone’s phone, a video appears with a grand revelation about Thomas Wayne from the film’s main villain. A proper detective story requires the detective solve some pieces of the puzzle on his own, yet—apart from solving some of the riddles—Batman never puts any of the major pieces of the puzzle together. The film needed to be rewritten so that Batman puts more of the puzzle together himself.
[Spoilers. Skip to the final paragraph is you wish to avoid them]
The film ends with Riddler, after having gotten Batman to uncover Falcon, carrying out an act of terrorism that floods the city; however, up to that point in the film, the Riddler had been acting as a kind of misguided version of Batman himself. This transition from justice seeker who resents the powerful to mass murderer is not explained. It seems that Matt Reeves simply thought “it would be cool if Riddler, like, flooded the city, and like, Batman couldn’t stop it.” It simply doesn’t make sense. The Riddler was seeking justice, and uses the word justice over and over again; he could not start killing innocent people willy-nilly; when he attempts to present his justification for switching from vigilantism to terrorism, he comes off as the Dark Knight’s Joker’s emotionally immature, autistic cousin: It is clear the writer Matt Reeves simply gave up on trying to find a coherent resolution to the plot. Similarly, Batman’s character arch is shoehorned into the film’s final monologue rather than occurring throughout the film.
Along these same lines, the movie lacks a coherent theme: It jumps around from seeking vengeance is bad to rich white people are bad to dispossessed white men are bad. The Dark Knight, on the other hand, kept to its themes about the basic decency of people, the necessity of the noble lie, and evil being a form of psychological perversion throughout: Even if I disagree with its view of the world, it stayed on point.
The Batman wears its influences on its sleeves, but it would be a much stronger film if it attempted to hide them: You can see the plot and stylistic vestiges of Silence of the Lambs, Seven, The Dark Knight, and Saw all over this picture: And it really detracts from the feeling that you are experiencing a new and coherent work of art.
The film also lacks logical coherence: For example, after Batman gets caught in an explosion, he wakes up in a police interrogation room. Of course, anyone who got caught in an explosion, no matter how much the police want to interrogate him, would be taken to a hospital where his mask and other clothing would be removed. The writer simply couldn’t bring himself to care about this real world fact.
While some of the performances were quite strong, esp. John Tuturro as Carmine Falcon and Collin Farrel as the Penguin, Robert Patterson’s brooding Bruce Wayne just doesn’t quite work: He is quite good as Batman, but him is simply too immature to be Bruce.
The individual scenes in this film are often brilliant, but the different pieces do not cohere. When you add to that just how much less charming Patterson’s performance is than Bales—and how much less interesting Riddler is than Joker—you realize that the Batman, while an interesting idea, is simply inferior both to the Dark Knight and Tim Burton’s original film. The script needed more work.