As a brooding nocturnal vigilante who witnessed the murder of his own parents, and then subsequently used that trauma and combined it with the thing he was most afraid of to inform an entire life dedicated to dressing up as a flying mammal, prowling the streets and rooftops of his hometown beating criminals to a pulp, there’s plenty going on under Bruce Wayne’s cape and cowl.
He’s a complex fellow, to say the least, and that’s something Matt Reeves is hoping to use to his advantage in The Batman. There’s a recurring line of thought that most of the actors to have played the role over the decades tend to be much better at embodying one side of the title hero’s personality than the other, or neither if you’re George Clooney.
Ben Affleck and Christian Bale were great as Batman, but most folks would probably agree that nobody brought the eccentric billionaire head of Wayne Enterprises to life better than Michael Keaton. It’s a tough balancing act, but in a new promo video screened at CinemaCon, Reeves explained how his reboot is set to take a different approach to the Caped Crusader.
“I felt that we’ve seen lots of origin stories. It seems things go further and further into fantasy, and I thought, well, one place we haven’t been is grounding it in the way that Year One does, to come right in to a young Batman, not being an origin tale, but referring to his origins and shaking him to his core. You can have it be very practical, but I also thought it could be the most emotional Batman movie ever made.”
The Batman is in an interesting position narratively, in that it’s not an origin story, but Robert Pattinson is still a rookie with just one year of experience under his belt. That hopefully means we don’t have to see Thomas and Martha Wayne gunned down for the umpteenth time, but it also gives the leading man a relatively blank slate on which to craft his take on the crimefighter from the ground up.
We can’t be too far away from seeing a brand new trailer with the blockbuster less than seven months away from release, and when it arrives we’ll be able to get a much better handle on how Reeves is putting his plan in motion.