In Batman, solitary billionaire Bruce Wayne (Michael Keaton – Birdman) was inspired to become the famous vigilante crime-fighter after the unavenged death of his parents. After terrorising the criminal underworld, he ended up dropping their killer, Jack Napier (Jack Nicholson – A Few Good Men) into a vat of chemicals. The Joker was born along with a new type of villain. The super villain. Eventually he was defeated (AKA killed), and a relative peace returned to Gotham City.
It’s nearly four years since I took an in-depth look at all the bastards and badassery of 1989 mega-hit Batman. Beyond making household names out of Michael Keaton and Tim Burton, it demonstrated that darker, edgier, sexier super-hero flicks could hang with the square-jawed, frothy wholesomeness of Superman. A sequel, nay a harem of sequels, was inevitable. And so was this review.
It’s Batman Month, so we’ve been looking at all the individual Bat-movies over the last 25 years. This series of articles will focus on the Bastards, the bad-guys and the scumbags of each film, and today we’ll be looking at Tim Burton’s Batman.
As I explained last week, the landscape for superhero films (particularly Batman) was non-existent in the 70’s and 80’s. Well, I mean serious superhero films. Beyond Superman, the only other alternatives were dreck like Kiss Meets The Phantom Of The Park, or the woeful first Captain America film in 1979 . Comics were still far from mainstream, and no one in Hollywood had any inkling as to the dark, anti-hero renaisance that was occurring in the halls of DC and Marvel.
Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman changed all that.
One of the more surprising details of Tim Burton’s 1989 game-changer Batman is that Robin was originally meant to turn up half way through the film. Now thanks to the vocal talents of the legendary Animated Series cast, you can watch the whole scrapped sequence via a cool little animatic.
The Movie Bastards 