Recently I re-watched all eight live-action Batman films. (I’m excluding the 1966 Adam West movie because that’s not a Batman film, it’s a sketch from some demented precursor to Saturday Night Live.) I started from Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, and then, since it’s been years since I saw the Tim Burton films, went back and watched those. The DVD set I bought also included the Schumacher films, so I watched them as well.
I like serious Batman. My first exposure to the character was the 1990’s animated series, which, even when it was unrealistic, was solemn and respected the characters as people. Even ludicrous villains like Clayface and the Mad Hatter had interesting backstories, and the animated series’s backstory for Mr. Freeze was so good that he became a breakout character and got his own direct-to-video film, Batman and Mr. Freeze: Sub-Zero. His popularity in the animated series is probably also why Mr. Freeze was chosen as a villain for Batman and Robin, which proceeded to make him into exactly the kind of cartoonish joke he’d never been in the animated series.
I’m telling you this because I’ve found out that there are people who defend the Adam West and Joel Schumacher material, which can only mean they value completely different things about the Batman characters and mythos than I do. If you happen to be one of those people, I’m acknowledging that you exist so I can warn you that I cordially despise the Adam West and Joel Schumacher interpretations of Batman, and the subject of this entire essay will be how Schumacher’s era was a dark day for the Dark Knight, and how we can partially blame Burton for bringing it to pass. You are thus free to stop reading.
The Burton films
The two Burton films, Batman and Batman Returns, are pretty good movies. Ultimately, I prefer the Nolan films, but I have no problem with the Burton movies as Batman films. They inspired the animated series, which I do think went on to be much more interesting than these two films, but the tone and visual style are similar. (I’ll also mention that I like Danny Elfman’s soundtrack to the Burton movies best of all the Batman films.)
Opinion seems to be split on the better of the two. Personally, I prefer Batman, mainly for the tone and writing. It’s more grounded and serious than Batman Returns, and Bruce Wayne gets some good character development in before Jack Nicholson’s Joker starts to steal the film towards the middle. Neither film has very good action sequences. The bat suit in these movies barely lets the actor move, so martial arts action is limited. Michael Keaton can’t even turn his head, so he does a lot of awkward bobbing and ducking to turn himself around. Batman mainly defeats enemies in these movies with gadgets and mysterious super strength that lets him pick them up and throw them around like crash dummies. (On a related note, Michael Keaton’s Batman is around as kill-happy as Ben Affleck’s Batman in Batman v Superman; he seems perfectly willing to mow down his adversaries with machine guns when it’s convenient, and Batman ends with him dropping the Joker to his death.)
The thing about Batman Returns is that it’s not really a Batman movie; it’s a Tim Burton movie about Batman characters. Batman Returns has a very distinctive tone and visual style, in many ways closer to Beetlejuice or Edward Scissorhands than to Batman. The villains, Danny DeVito’s Penguin and Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman, both unleash a constant stream of themed puns and sexual innuendo. Although their interests conflict, they eventually team up to execute a grandiose, convoluted plan for unclear reasons. Fantasy elements are tossed in without comment: we have no idea why Selina Kyle came back to life after cats licked her, or why she was insane when she came back, or how she got the ability to do backflips and survive being shot or falling from the tenth floor of a building. Other elements feel cartoonish, like Penguin’s army of penguins with missiles on their backs, or his thematically appropriate hideout in the Arctic exhibit of the abandoned Gotham City zoo.
But Batman Returns does still work, for the same reason the animated series works: as crazy and bizarre as it gets, it’s still anchored by its characters’ motivations and backstories. Penguin wants to find out who his parents were, and later wants to join the high society he would have been part of if they hadn’t abandoned him. And Selina is motivated by her desire for revenge against her boss, Christopher Walken’s Max Shreck, who pushed her out a window when she discovered his plan to steal electricity from Gotham and sell it back to them by constructing a fake power plant. But in the background for both villains is a sense of insecurity, Penguin over his grotesque appearance, and Catwoman over her previous life as a doormat; both villains are at least partially overcompensating, lashing out at the world because of personal feelings of inadequacy. As over the top as these characters are, their motives are complex yet understandable and are developed well over the course of the story.
Like Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands, the movie is kept from being cartoonish by its cynicism and ghoulish sense of humor. When Selina’s boss, corrupt businessman Max Shreck, finds out that she knows about his plan, he kills her with barely a second thought, cracking jokes as he pushes her out the window, then tries to play it off when she comes in to work in the middle of a meeting with Bruce Wayne. Later in the movie, Shreck conceives a plot to recall the current mayor and get the Penguin elected by deploying Penguin’s thugs to sow fear and distrust in the people of Gotham and then playing on the popularity the Penguin gained from a faked rescue of the Mayor’s baby and the subsequent news coverage of his search for his parents’ identities. They nearly succeed until Batman hacks the loudspeakers at a rally and plays back a tape of the Penguin insulting the people of Gotham. (Though we saw in the presidential election of 2016 that that wouldn’t actually work in real life; put it down to a plot contrivance.) In a small way this is actually darker than The Dark Knight; the people of Gotham in Batman Returns are corrupt, stupid, and easily manipulated, whereas The Dark Knight shows two shiploads of people decide independently that they’d rather all die than sacrifice the people on the other ship.
The Schumacher movies
Unfortunately, Batman Returns was too dark and weird for McDonald’s to do Happy Meal toys, so Warner Bros. decided to go in a lighter direction for the next Batman movie. They stuck Joel Schumacher on it, and we ended up with Batman Forever.
The odd thing about Batman Forever is that Schumacher and whoever was writing it didn’t choose to go back to the light and dippy tone of the Adam West show and the older TV cartoons, or even back to the serious but more conventional feel of Burton’s first film. Instead, Batman Forever and Batman and Robin both copy the formula of Batman Returns almost beat for beat, including the bizarre visual style, the sexual innuendo, and even a few dabs of the cynicism, you know, that stuff that Schumacher was supposed to get rid of. They replace Tim Burton’s unique visual style with Joel Schumacher’s unique visual style, replete with neon paint, garish costumes, and architecture inspired by carnival haunted houses, and they get rid of all the character development and backstory that made Batman Returns watchable in spite of how ludicrous some elements of it were.
The Schumacher movies play out like parodies of Batman Returns. Both of them have two major villains, Jim Carrey’s Riddler and Tommy Lee Jones’s Two-Face in Batman Forever, and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Mr. Freeze and Uma Thurman’s Poison Ivy in Batman and Robin. In both movies one of the villains (Riddler in Forever and Mr. Freeze in and Robin) have ridiculous, over the top, barely sensible schemes planned to accomplish some foggy goal, and end up working with the other villain to accomplish it. All four villains become cartoonishly insane after some trauma, take on a theme, and change their dialogue to a stream of themed puns, similar to Penguin and Catwoman, but without the insecurity or motives that made them kind of believable.
Both movies mimic the chaotic, overstuffed story structure of Batman Returns as well. Batman Forever sort of tries to have a plot, and it almost succeeds; it at least seems like one event proceeds to the next in a sensible way. The worst part about Batman Forever is Nicole Kidman’s character, Dr. Chase Meridian, a terribly written character who shows up in Gotham already determined to bone Batman, starts a romance with Bruce Wayne after an encounter at her office full of terrible one-liners and second-rate James Bond innuendos, and decides she really wants Bruce instead of Batman before discovering that they’re the same person. Her entire subplot could pretty much have been excised from the movie with no ill effect. It might have even made things better, because all her dialogue was painful to listen to. The second-worst thing about Batman Forever is definitely the scenes between the Riddler and Two-Face. The Riddler is kind of a silly character already, so they could have just barely made him work if they’d stuck to a normal Riddler plot instead of the “TV steals your brain” plot that feels like something out of the 1960s Superfriends cartoon. (In another “homage” to Batman Forever, Edward Nygma kills his supervisor by pushing him out a window, in a near exact copy of the scene where Shreck pushes Selina out the window.) But Two-Face as the ridiculous purple caricature this film makes him doesn’t work in any sense. In fact, the only subplot of Batman Forever that does kind of work is the Robin subplot. Incorporating Robin’s origin into the main story by having his family die in an attempt by Two-Face to make Batman come forward was a good move to keep the plot from getting even more overstuffed, and it worked well. Bruce’s motive for bringing Dick into his house also made sense. I believed in Chris O’Donnell’s performance as the rebellious teenager Robin is supposed to be in this film, and he gets a full, if predictable, character arc when he decides not to get his revenge on Two-Face at the end.
The less said about the plot of Batman and Robin, the better. Utterly nothing it tries to do works. It’s just as overstuffed and overcomplicated as Batman Returns and Batman Forever, but all the subplots are at or below the level of the Chase Meridian plot in Batman Forever. Of all the films, it most closely mirrors the Adam West TV series, but retains the sexual innuendo-laden dialogue of Batman Returns and includes a few dark moments like the human experimentation that produces its version of Bane. Once created, though, there’s nothing dark about Bane himself. He’s just a big dumb Frankenstein creature who works for Poison Ivy. If you dig a little below the surface, Batman and Robin actually has some rather ugly politics. Poison Ivy is a right-wing caricature of an environmental activist, willing to let millions die in her mission to save the plants, and even before she goes insane and becomes a villain she’s running dubious experiments to create hybrid GMO plants with fangs and venom, supposedly to allow them to defend themselves. And while Batman films are hardly known for being feminist, the Schumacher films are even worse in their depiction of women than the Burton or Nolan films. Of course, the whole film is so cartoonishly idiotic that I can’t believe it was actually trying to make a serious political point, so it’s not really worth digging too deep into any of this.
Why did the Schumacher films copy Batman Returns?
Beats me. But I have a theory.
Apparently, Schumacher actually wanted to do a story based on Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One, but the studio summarily rejected that idea and dictated to him what the tone and content of the movie should be. You know what other movie is largely based on Batman: Year One? Batman Begins. And it’s incredible. Eh, it’s probably for the best that the studio denied Schumacher.
Then, as now, the studio wanted to maximize profits by marketing to children and producing toys, lunch boxes, and Happy Meal tie-ins. So Year One was out and live-action cartoon was in. (But not a live-action version of The Animated Series.) Once this decision was made, it was up to Schumacher to figure out how to make the movie fit the marketing. Batman Returns, though, had almost worked in this capacity until people started pointing how cynical and full of sexual double entendres it was, so the studio and Schumacher probably went back to Batman Returns and tried to copy its formula and the attendant merchandising potential while excising all the tight-fitting cat suits, evil businessmen, wanton murders by hero and villain alike, and references to the female stimulation potential of Penguin’s flippers.
So why not go back to Batman, which was also a merchandising machine? Because to some people, Batman Returns was actually lighter in tone. Tim Burton is quoted in the Den of Geek article as saying this:
One person would come in and go, ‘This is so much lighter than the first movie.’ And then the next person would come in and go, ‘Oh, this is so much darker than the first movie.’ And it’s like, light and dark are opposites! But it was 50 percent passionately one way and 50 percent the other.”
Both groups of people are right, in a sense. Batman Returns is darker than Batman the same way it’s darker than The Dark Knight: its outlook on the Batman character, society, and people in general is dimmer and much more cynical. But Batman Returns is also lighter than Batman because of cartoonish flourishes like themed puns, duck boats, and an army of penguins with missiles strapped to their backs. Where Batman is closer to the noir roots of the comics, Batman Returns has a silliness to it that becames grotesque under the ugliness of the situation.
So if you want to make a live-action cartoon without straying too far from what’s been proven to attract audiences in the past, it makes sense to copy Batman Returns. There was no guarantee that audiences would actually turn out for a remake of the Adam West TV show. And Batman and Robin, which does hew closer to the Adam West side, tanked at the box office, which finally convinced the Warner Brothers executives to give up on Batman until Nolan came along. (Though they keep on making the same mistakes with the DC properties: see Catwoman, Green Lantern, Suicide Squad.)
In that sense, we have Tim Burton to blame for Batman Forever and Batman and Robin. He provided the formula, the inspiration for how to make the Batman films into a live-action cartoon. Of course, with the mediocre run of films he’s had ever since 2001’s Planet of the Apes, culminating with 2016’s Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children and Alice Through the Looking Glass, and to my knowledge broken only by Sweeney Todd and Big Eyes, perhaps we don’t need to heap any extra blame on Tim Burton.
