Basically every Batman movie has seen the Dark Knight don a new version of the Batsuit. After all, it works both in and out of the universe. On the one hand, it makes sense that Bruce Wayne would keep upgrading his crime-fighting gear, while on the other, Warner Bros. have to sell some new toys. And sure enough, for Justice League, the second proper appearance of Ben Affleck’s Caped Crusader, he wore a completely new costume.
Dubbed the Nite Owl look, the most notable addition of Batman’s Justice League armor was a pair of goggles, which resembled those worn by Dan Dreiberg in DC’s Watchmen. Seeing as Zack Snyder directed both of those movies, the similarity probably wasn’t an accident. Though we haven’t heard from the man himself on the connection between the two vigilantes, Snyder did take to Vero recently to clear up what Batsy’s goggles actually do.
When one fan asked him for the goggles’ function, the filmmaker replied: “They allow heads-up, real-time information. Thermal night vision, you know, all that shenanigans.” That’s pretty much what we could have guessed. After all, Batman always gets himself the latest gadgets and the highest tech. Christian Bale’s Bat even used similar vision-enhancing lenses in The Dark Knight.
The goggle suit is used in Justice League as an enhanced suit the billionaire wears when the team face off against Steppenwolf and his legion of Parademons. Presumably, the goggles helped deal with the flying monstrosities. They certainly seemed to anyways, as regular ol’ Batman was able to handle these fearsome aliens from Apokolips just as easily as a demi-goddess, the king of the sea and a metahuman.
Batman’s new suit was one of the elements of the movie that was all Snyder’s, then, as opposed to the work of his replacement Joss Whedon. Maybe the goggles even got some more use in the fabled “Snyder cut” of Justice League, which either exists somewhere out there in WB’s vaults or just in the imaginations of DC fanboys – depending on who you ask.