The comic strip film that changes the situation of Tim Burton puts shame on the shame of modern superheroes

When Tim Burton was approached to direct a Batman The film, the most omnipresent image of the Caped Crusader in pop culture was the glorious television show of Adam West from the 1960s. But by then, comics like The black knight returns And The joke of killing had rejected this colorful and light representation of the character and returned to the dark and grainy roots of the original vision of Bob Kane and Bill Finger. Burton decided to inject part of this Frank Miller / Alan Moore in the character without sacrificing pleasure, and he could not have done a better job.
As soon as Batman Immersed in theaters in 1989, West’s wacky turn while the bat was defeated by cultural conscience and Michael Keaton took his place. Keaton has captured all the universal truths on this character: his tortured soul, its effortless freshness, its intrepidity in the face of the challenges of life or death, and above all, the fact that the Bruce Wayne billionaire Playboy is the real mask it puts, not the black hood.
Keaton’s performance is full of small moments that perfectly encapsulate Bruce as a characterJust like the final turn of Christopher Reeve as Clark Kent. When Bruce dines with Vicki Vale in an elegant dining room in her sumptuous mansion, he said to her: “I don’t think I have already been in this room before.“This line tells us everything we need to know about the character: he is earth-to-earth, he is refreshing and he does not care about the frills of his riches.
Tim Burton injects a heavy dose of darkness in the comic strip camp of the Adam West Batman series
Burton reuses the Dutch angles, but borrows the visuals of German expressionism
Burton does not fully abandon the comic strip camp in the Adam West series – the sequence of the art gallery established for the prince’s “party” is a perfect example – but he injected a large dose of darkness. He reused the wacky Dutch angles of the series, but used them more to disrupt the public than to increase reality. With detectives in trenches and gangsters in the Fedoras, the costumes are torn directly from an old -fashioned black. But the visual style of Burton also borrows strongly from German expressionism, with dark figures, a dark color palette, an extravagant design and a Gothic and almost steampunk vision of the city of Gotham.
Jack Nicholson has fun with the mixture of sadism and jker buffoonery, playing it essentially as Jack Torrance in clown makeup. He strikes the perfect child’s field between the vaudevillian theatricality of Caquette de Cesar Romero and Mark Hamill, and the authentic threat of Heath Ledger. The transformation scene, in which Jack Napier sees for the first time his disfigured face in a mirror and laughs hysterically, is a pure nightmarish fuel.
Jack Nicholson has fun with the mixture of sadism and jker buffoonery, playing it essentially as Jack Torrance in clown makeup.
Danny Elfman’s theme is Also synonymous with the bat as well as the superman theme of John Williams is with the steel man; He so perfectly captures the character’s atmosphere that he has been reused from all, Batman: the animated series At Lego Batman Video games in Batman the trip to six flags.
Batman ’89 is not quite a perfect movie
But defects are easy to neglect
It is not quite a flawless film. I understand why Prince is on the soundtrack – at the height of the artist’s popularity, if you could have him contributed to a song, you made him contribute to a song – but his music feels in his place in the film. Prince’s songs interrupt the brooding rating of Elfman, the theatrical score for some ballads of poppy. In addition, the touch of coincidence that the Joker is the one that murdered Bruce’s parents is almost as artificial as James Bond being a long lost brother of Blofeld.
Batman is streaming on HBO Max.
But other than that, This is a perfect cinematographic adaptation of one of the most emblematic superheroes in the world. The dark tone, the Gothic visual style, Moody’s music from Elfman and the cool but tortured performance of Keaton all come together to create Batman’s film par excellence. Christopher Nolan and Matt Reeves found their own beloved sockets on the black knight, but they are all standing on the shoulders of Burton Batman.

Batman
- Release date
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June 23, 1989
- Execution time
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126 minutes
- The visuals inspired by Tim Burton, inspired by the expressionist, give life to Gotham City
- Michael Keaton gives a performance par excellence as a charismatic but deeply tortured Bruce Wayne
- Danny Elfman’s brooding partition perfectly captures the essence of Batman
- The tone skillfully mixes Adam West’s comic strip camp with the darkness of Frank Miller
- Prince’s songs feel a little moved to the soundtrack
- The torsion that the Joker killed Bruce’s parents is a bit artificial