Matt Reeves and Robert Pattinson deliver the finest Batman movie about the Batman

I watched The Batman on Friday, and I wanted to let it stew in my mind for a couple of days to eliminate or at least minimise the recency bias I tend to have with Bat-movies. Nope, I still genuinely believe this is the finest Batman movie about Batman, instead of a film that just happens to have him in it.

A dark, beautiful, visceral detective thriller with noirish style, imagery, and influences, The Batman is as much a superhero movie as The Green Mile was a prison movie — which is to say, not very much. Its hero does not have any special abilities beyond money, gadgets and expertise at physical combat. The main ‘supervillain’, a new version of the often cartoonish Riddler (played by Paul Dano), is essentially a serial killer in the vein of the Zodiac Killer, similarly confounding his pursuers with clues, ciphers and puzzles.

which began with Keaton’s Batman, has reached its logical culmination. Gotham City in The Batman is a living, breathing character in itself. A dingy, rain-soaked, , decaying metropolis, grotesque in an almost Lovecraftian way, has been depicted by cinematographer Grieg Fraser (who wowed us in Dune not long ago) in stunning, stark colours — lurid orange on black, for instance. It’s lovely with a grim beauty of its own, but is also also daunting. A place you would wish to know more about, but from a safe distance. The film does not show Arkham Asylum, but it is likely a haunted house with gibbering demons as its demons.

Although pretty stylised, Gotham feels real and lived-in. It is easy to accept the claim that the law enforcement exists merely on paper, and cops are either helpless or paid off by the underworld. Thugs have infested its street and it’s essentially ruled by mobsters.

The criminal elements of Gotham are, however, afraid to go out at night, because the Batman also operates in the dark. The way Reeves and Fraser introduce Battinson is more akin to a boogeyman in a full-fledged horror movie than a hero.

More than most who have tackled the character, Reeves knows exactly what makes him so terrifying to criminals. We know he is just a man who dresses up as a bat, but for the more nefarious residents of Gotham, he is a myth, a phantom lurking in the dark, a symbol of a city that has had enough and is fighting back with a vengeance. Even his Batmobile emerges out of the shadows like an elemental monster, leading to one of the most riveting car chase scenes since The Dark Knight

Robert Pattinson earned his spurs by playing psychologically complex, driven characters in indie movies, cementing his status as a versatile, all round brilliant actor. It’s like throughout his career he’s been working towards the Batman. Because in the cape and cowl, he is absolutely tremendous, vanishing completely into the role and giving a version of the character that is both familiar and unique. His physicality, mannerisms, and even using his fearsome appearance to quietly intimidate people is, well, classic Batman.

But without the costume, Bruce Wayne appears to be a haunted, tortured man on the verge of psychological collapse, his eyes every now and then betraying the bottled-up rage inside him. With mask removed and eye-makeup visible, he looks like a racoon, his vulnerability palpable. Unlike the Bruce we know from say, the Dark Knight trilogy, with all his charm and faux frivolous playboy persona, this one is dishevelled with untidy hair, mirroring the grungy quality of his city.

A clear dichotomy between the two public personas — Batman and Bruce Wayne — is missing, and might bother the purists, but this is a very personal portrayal of the character. It can be explained by the fact that this is still a Batman-in-training, and would in future develop a public persona for Bruce Wayne — or Gothamites will put two and two together and figure out his secret identity.

Batman’s most reliable ally, James Gordon, a lieutenant at this point, is played by with uncharacteristic composure by Jeffrey Wright, who should really narrate a few audiobooks in free time. The portrayal is both compelling and distinct from Gary Oldman’s always-on-edge Gordon in Nolan movies. He is also not intimidated by Batman, and amusingly, calls him ‘man’ (as in ‘whatever you want, man’), as though the superhero were his unruly partner.

Zoe Kravitz makes for an excellent Catwoman, with just the right combination of sass, wit, and vulnerability. Her fighting style is suitably feline and thankfully not over the top, and the relationship that she and Batman develop across the course of the movie is organic and has both physical attraction and scepticism we are familiar with in the comics.

It is a perennial problem in even great superhero movies that the heroes are overshadowed by their villains. The Dark Knight is possibly the greatest movie based on comic-book characters, but it is more of a Joker movie than a Batman one. Here, in The Batman, the superhero has three foes to face, each bring their own flavour to the story. John Torturro as crime boss Carmine Falcone is clearly having the time of his life. He is a joy in every scene So is Colin Farrell as the Penguin, as many have noted, is slathered with layers of makeup, prosthetics, and a fat-suit, and bring a few little moments of levity to a mostly gloomy story.

But it is the Riddle, eerily believable as a disturbed-loner-turned-serial-killer who is the Big Bad, playing Batman and Gordon like a fiddle. He and Batman cancel each other out for are two sides of the same coin. Both use varying degrees of violence against the corrupt to achieve their goals — only the Riddler has no qualms killing. When he and Batman finally end up in the same room, their uneasy chemistry gives the payoff for all those procedural scenes that came before. The superhero completes his arc from an angsty seeker of vengeance to a symbol of hope and the protector of Gotham City.