It feels as if Batman is everywhere now but there was a time when he’d been all but forgotten by the mainstream, his eternal development limited to the comic book fraternity. In 1989 however Warner Bros revived the character and started us on a road that arguably has led to the superhero movie era in which we now live. So I thought I’d take a look back at the quartet of Batman movies made in the late Eighties and Nineties. Often forgotten since the Chrstopher Nolan trilogy these four films offered some interesting takes on the legend.
Batman (1989) started it all off, a pivotal movie in changing our perspective on comic book adaptations. Before it was released the character of Batman was viewed differently depending on your media of choice. For comic strip fans the character had been reinvented with darker themes by the likes of The Dark Knight Returns and The Killing Joke yet for the wider public perception was rooted in the camp Sixties tv series with its colourful aesthetic and over the top POW! WHAM! dialogue. In a lot of ways Tim Burton’s 1989 film never quite reconciles these two approaches. Its literally and thematically dark- so much so that the action is sometimes obscured by shadows and smoke – yet it also contains some larger than life performances and a certain garishness associated with the Joker. The most popular theme of more recent iterations- the duality between Bruce Wayne and Batman – is not really explored here. We see Bruce brooding in his bat cave of course but Michael Keaton’s performance is lighter in touch than the sort of Bruce Wayne we’re more familiar with nowadays.
