See, I can understand people claiming Burton's sense of storytelling is more visual than literary. But why is that a bad thing? Is a story told visually
less of a story than one told with words and deeply-wrought plotpoints? That would mean silent movies
HAVE no story. Or at least very shallow ones. And that's BS. It's no coincidence Burton often cites silent films as a big inspiration. A lot can be told with the way a camera moves, the way a person acts or looks, the way the room he's standing in says something about him.
If you want to call that expressionistic babble to justify style over substance, fine, but don't say it HAS no story to speak of. It does, just not a very literal one that completely oozed from the script.
Otherwise, why are we even spending money making and watching movies? We could just stay home and read screenplays!
Also, I agree that the story may be nonsensical and not very thought through, but one thing it DOES have is character development. It's almost nothing BUT character development. What, Batman isn't developed cause he doesn't go on and on and on with his inner monologue like he does in the little blue boxes in the comics? Most of what Burton has to say about Batman as a character is how he portrays Gotham City, Catwoman, Max Shreck and the Penguin.
Again, is that literal? No. Does he spell it out for us? No. Is that "DEEP AND MEANINGFUL"? I don't know. Probably not. But can you point me to one comic book movie or one comic book that's
more meaningful? Even the greats like Alan Moore write Batman as this silent guy about whom we learn more by proxy than through himself. The way the Joker acts in TKJ says more about who Batman is (or isn't) than it does about the Joker.
If you didn't get that, you probably didn't get Returns either. And I'm in no way saying it's some great feat to "get" it either...
A good story or a good movie isn't built up from how many "themes" you can count or exactly how many revealing lines characters say. I'd rather have Batman standing by silently, perhaps inactive, than him going
"It's not who I am underneath, it's what I doooooo that defines me"
because no matter how much I loved Begins, that is a by-the-book corny movie script line I really could have done without...