Into the Woods

If it weren’t for the occasional blockbuster, woods-dweller that I am, I’d know next to nothing about popular culture. The super-hero genre wasn’t really my thing even when I was eleven years old. But I did love comic books. Batman and Uncle Scrooge were two of my favorites. The new Batman movie will require two hours and forty-five minutes of your time. Is it worth it? I vote yes.

It’s visually spectacular, though often the detail of the spectacle is half-obscured in darkness. Even when a scene is lit by sunlight, there is a heavy overcast, fog, and often rain. The scenes of Gotham City at night are reminiscent of the city scenes in Bladerunner — bright lights, squalor, and rain, rain, rain. The soundtrack and music are superb. This must have been an easy role for Robert Pattinson, with his face masked most of the time and always the same wooden expression. What an unhappy life Pattinson’s Batman must have had.

The plot is complicated, and I’m not sure that I followed every detail of it. The theme is corruption and the fragility of the good. Batman may be dark and eccentric, but he is 100 percent morally sane. Just in case the message of bravery in the face of corruption and wickedness is insufficiently clear, the screenwriters give Batman a soliloquy, which surprised me since otherwise his lines were few. With luck, Generation Z will get the message, as some of us did many years ago when we were eleven.

Batman can be streamed from HBO Max.