My thoughts on Rob Pattinson's Batman

Hello everyone I am posting this blog after a long time since this is the first time in Germany I sat in a dark movie hall for three hours controlling my urges to answer nature's call as I watch Matt Reeves' take on the very popular vigilante. And most importantly Rob Pattinson's take on the hero. 

For my generation of girls, Pattinson has had his major teen girl Twihard fan-following while I had the unpopular opinion that he looked mostly constipated throughout the whole franchise. For me, he redeemed himself as an actor in the Netflix movie The King and also his recent role in Nolan's Tenet. But apart from all the jokes going around on the internet about Robert Pattinson finally evolving from a vampire to a bat, I enjoyed the movie and also going against all my prejudices enjoyed his acting in the role. 

The best part of the movie was that it does not try to be any of its predecessors but has the bravery to stand on its own merits. Although I found the landscape of Gotham very much similar to Tim Burton's conceptualisation, that is where the similarities end. It's also a bit different from Nolan's Batman- even though we see the corruption around Gotham very much like any other Batman story, Reeves dives more into the darker aspects of the privileges of being a stinking rich white orphan in a corrupt city like Gotham. Especially issues like how Bruce is more privileged than the other orphans when the Gotham Orphanage closed with the lack of funds after the death of Bruce's parents. Unlike Nolan's Batman where we see a troubled Bruce dealing with his issues with more prominence on Bruce as a character, Reeves focuses more on the troubled vigilante (more as a detective than a thug beater) than giving a maskless Bruce more screentime. The moments that Rob Pattinson did appear as his billionaire character Bruce, I appreciated his improvement in the portrayal of an emo kid from his Twilight days. And simultaneously also felt an OCD urge kick in to remove the hair constantly falling on his face. I enjoyed Bernard from Westworld (Jeffrey Wright) and also Zoë Kravitz plays a fairly well Catwoman. I think that Reeves gave more time to explore her character than Nolan did for Anne Hathaway.

Some major highlights for me from this movie would include:

1. the car chase scene between The Batman and the Penguin

2. the church funeral scene where we see Bruce's interaction with the world outside from his butler along with the empathy he felt for the dead mayoral candidate's son 

3. the club action sequence in the dark.

 The background score felt somewhat like the incomplete version of John William's Imperial March from Star Wars. My other criticism of the movie is that we do not see why and how Detective Gordon has such a good partnership with a vigilante and the backstory for that would have been interesting. 

As a viewer, it's hard not to compare this movie with the other Batman movies in the past (with The Dark Knight Rises being my favourite of all time and having more rewatch-value because of the philosophy and morals the viewers walk away with, in the end). But all in all, did I enjoy this movie? Yes. Was it worth the 3 hours? Yes. Will I recommend other people to watch it? Yes