I just wanted to say how much I freaking love this movie. Other than the fact that it's big, loud, dumb, entertaining, fun as hell and basically a huge budgeted update of Batman '66, it kept me going while I was in the hospital as a young kid and the first thing I did when I got out was to go see it. It was also the first Batman movie that I obsessively followed until it came out.
Furthermore, I also believe it to be the best of the first four Bat films. The guys over at comic alliance have helped me a great deal to articulate why.
Basically, I believe Batman '89 and Batman Returns to be utter messes in every conceivable way besides music and set design. While I acknowledge the importance Of B89 as an iconic piece of pop culture, it's a horrendous movie for a whole slew of reasons. Batman Returns takes everything B89 got wrong and amplifies it a billion times over.
But the biggest problem I have with the bashing Batman and Robin gets is that it's over the top silliness gets called out while the all of the ridiculousness of Burton's unbearable works gets ignored, and instead, hailed as dark and serious.
As CA's review of B89 says: "Let's be honest here: if you reshot this entire script with a silly cloth Batsuit, Cesar Romero and scenes that actually take place in daylight, nobody would know the difference. Like, a movie is not dark just because you have to squint to make out what's going on. A movie is dark when its subject matter is dark."
Also, "But there are a ton of people, even today, who thought that this was a huge departure from that silliness, because they apparently missed the part where the Joker's poison gas parade balloons are dealt with by Batman flying a bat-shaped airplane with a giant pair of scissors that comes out from between its bat-ears."
Batman Returns is simply a ridiculously silly movie where we have:
1) A penguin baby raised by penguins in a sewer who ends up running an almost becoming mayor of a major metropolitan city.
2) A secretary gets resurrected by cats after being pushed out of a window and actually becomes a cat person herself with nine lives
3) Batman gets outsmarted by a poodle and framed for kidnapping
4) rocket penguins. rocket penguins, people.
As far as Penguin running for mayor goes, that in fact was the plot of an episode of the 60s Batman show.
The point here is that because Burton's films look really dark and serious, people automatically refer to the subject matter of his films as dark and serious, but they simply aren't. They are inherently campy and silly movies, but don't embrace the campiness and silliness, instead trying at the same time to be dark and thematically 'mature.' Any attempt at seriousness in either film, no matter how tepid or underdeveloped they are, is completely undermined by all of the silliness. My point here is basically that both movies would have been better if they had chosen one or the other. Commit to the silliness or to the seriousness. What ends up happening by attempting both is that they each come off as half assed.
Batman and Robin, for it's many flaws, knows exactly what kind of movie it is, and instead of trying to masquerade as a deeper movie than it is, embraces it's ridiculousness and rides it as far as it can, providing a much more coherent movie than any of the two Burton films and a more coherent and true to form portrayal of Bruce Wayne/Batman. Instead of seriousness and silliness being constantly juxtaposed with and doing damage to each other, the only thing being juxtaposed in Batman and Robin is the really silly and the unbelievably silly, and that's perfectly okay to me. People like to forget that Batman for YEARS was a ridiculous character involved in ridiculous and over the top situations. It's unfair to praise B89 and Returns for allegedly embracing the more serious side of the character and then complain about B&R for embracing the other, and completely legitimate, silly side of the character. Sorry people, but Year One and The Killing Joke aren't the only two Batman stories ever written.
Anyone who doesn't smile throughout the entire opening museum fight in B&R either takes Batman way too seriously or can't have any fun at all.
