Batman Returns

This is what it’s like when, after nearly three decades, you look back at a film that made an impression on you in your early teens and you find it surprisingly bizarre, deranged, perverse, oversexed, unique and beautiful. In today’s era of thoroughly planned-out blockbusters that are meticulously controlled for the sake of corporate image despite being marketed as tremendously innovative and original, Burton’s second Batman comes across as a magnificently anti-system achievement. It’s not only that Burton ignores the comic-book canon obsessively guarded by fans, which he quite consciously doesn’t care about. Equipped with a generous budget and creative control, he spins a romantically sick and sleazily beautiful antithesis of various American myths, from the political system to superheroes to Christmas. Batman Returns is like a snowman turned upside down, its bottom revealing the hidden ugly underbelly of the kitschy idyll. With almost operatic sweep, Burton conducts phantasmagorically stylized scenes combining gothic monumentality with the deviance of expressionism. In this world, he lets the circus freaks run riot, as the heroes and villains differ only in that, for various reasons, they cannot give vent to their inner desires.  Spandex has been replaced with latex and the masks and costumes do not look like tough armour, but rather like fetishistic outfits in which the characters vainly try to hide their childhood traumas and adult perversions, obsessions and dreams of boundless power from the outside world. However, Burton’s Batman movie isn’t pompously dark and serious like those of the new millennium. In his grotesque vision, bleakness is just as essential as the classic comic-book unseriousness of the slapstick dimension. Like the world depicted in the film, its logic, violence and the antiheroes themselves are cunning, theatrical and childishly spiteful, but also full of grief, pain and a naïve longing for something better. Like all good Christmas movies, this one is about family, belonging and resting in the arms of loved ones. But with the  difference that the heroes here can only dream about that. (27/12/2022)

A Batman movie? Only this one. That’s because a celebration of fascist aesthetics, cut with art deco perfection, is a union of love. This is refined filmmaking with an admiration for the perfection of sculpture. This is the story of Catwoman and The Penguin. In the early 1990s, Hollywood was refreshed by a very interesting wave that drew inspiration from the 1930s, and as kindly as the remakes were with their return to the roots of Universal's classic monsters, Burton's team understood where to get the true delights. If they needed something comic for the decadent world of New Expressionism, they chose the Ice Queen, inspired by 1940s clowns such as Betty Grable. They clearly defined the beginning of bad taste and the end of goodness. I love Michelle Pfeiffer for her ambivalent Selina and Danny De Vito for the bird-like Oswald. Michael Keaton definitely entertained here more than he did in the first film. If you have a soft spot for Batman Returns, feel free to pick up the 2 DVD release. (03/02/2009)

If you want to make an adaptation of classic comic books, the biggest problem is how you want to deal with the fact that it was consumable material for the working class, basically commercial junk. They were naive stories with superheroes and villains, who look highly inappropriate in today's setting. Even though the action aspect is great in Nolan's trilogy, it seems out of place with its pathos and serious image. The vast majority of comic book adaptations suffer from schematism and an attempt to please the teenage audience. They try to impress, and they rely on effects. Burton's Batman is playful, visually polished, has a unique style and unmistakable poetics, and it is original and perfected to the last detail. Most comic movies have a problem with overkill, whereas this Batman is irresistibly ironic, evidently not taking itself too seriously. I don't think it's just the best Batman film, but also one of the best comic movies overall. Overall impression: 90%. (24/02/2019)

Unlike the movie "Batman," this one seems quite scary to me, which is probably due to the character of the Penguin and other twisted inhabitants of the Gotham sewer system. It is more Burtonesque, more eccentric, which is also reflected in the interesting portrayal of Catwoman. I still enjoy this and although Michael Keaton is a very peculiar Batman, I still love him. (21/05/2014)

A traditional Burton film for sight and Elfman for sound. The spice of the second Batman is definitely the atmosphere of Christmas, in which Tim Burton recalls his memories of his legendary godson The Nightmare Before Christmas. Dazzling cynicism, destruction of symbols and especially a yellow duck in the service of evil, this time with huge proportions... Magnificent, cynical, extraordinarily watchable. But looking at the scenery alone is not enough, so there are two key characters - Penguin and Catwoman. Both are much more prominent title heroes, which is not really a bad thing, because rather than the heroic deeds of Batman, the film is about the double-edged nature of these two characters. Batman Returns is able to make do without straightforwardness and in places, unfortunately, without storytelling flair. Burton tells the story incredibly colorfully and easily, but a few times I caught myself thinking: What about, actually? In short, I would expect a little more emotion and experience, but maybe it was just messed up for me by bad dubbing and a bad translation. Otherwise, this a good Burton film with everything it should have. Even with a filling that smells intoxicatingly of German expression. (23/07/2006)