With the highly anticipated release of The Batman, Matt Reeves has ed a long line of filmmakers who have brought the Caped Crusader to the big screen in a live-action solo project. Just about everything about The Batman has been lauded by critics – the neo-noir visuals, the dazzling action sequences, Robert Pattinson’s turn as Bruce Wayne – except for the three-hour runtime, which has been the source of a lot of criticism. As far as Bat-filmmakers go, Reeves ranks pretty highly.
Some Batman directors have been universally praised for their groundbreaking movies, like Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan, while others have been panned for striking an unusual tone, like Joel Schumacher and Zack Snyder. The reviews for Reeves’ work are settled somewhere in the middle: The Batman doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it’s a slick, solidly made Gotham noir.
Leslie H. Martinson
The first feature-length movie to star the Dark Knight arrived in theaters in 1966. Based on Batman: The Movie was helmed by Leslie H. Martinson, who previously directed a couple of episodes of the series. Somehow, the movie managed to be even more cartoonish than the TV show. The West series was never particularly concerned with realism, but Batman: The Movie goes overboard in asking the audience to suspend their disbelief.
It’s a fun comic book adventure with a delightfully ridiculous plot involving a shark attack, a bowling ball-shaped bomb with a fuse, and just about every iconic villain from the Bat’s rogues’ gallery. But in the half-century since it hit multiplexes as a glorified season finale, Batman: The Movie has been topped by gems like the 1989 movie and The Dark Knight trilogy.
Joel Schumacher
When Tim Burton decided to step down from making a third Batman & Robin with George Clooney. Schumacher did a tonal 180 from the Burton films. He harked back to the unabashedly camp tone of the Adam West series after Burton’s groundbreaking blockbusters tore it down and introduced some much-needed darkness.
A big-budget take on the camp tone of the ‘60s series was a fun idea in theory – and a refreshing change of pace – but in Batman Forever and even more so in Batman & Robin, it rarely landed. From the Bat-Credit Card to the nipples on the Batsuit to countless silly one-liners, these movies struggled to make that tone work. In Batman Forever, Tommy Lee Jones is too busy trying to top the eccentricity of Jim Carrey’s Riddler to dig into the nuance of Two-Face.
Zack Snyder
Zack Snyder provided a perfect introduction for his version of Bruce Wayne in Man of Steel, Bruce runs toward the danger to help out any way he can. But in the bloated, overlong movie that follows, Snyder takes a heavy-handed approach to the character. Snyder’s shotgun-toting Batman who kills without remorse breaks both of the Bat’s core beliefs: no guns and no murder.
Still, Snyder helmed some of the Caped Crusader’s all-time best fight scenes. He shot brutal hand-to-hand combat emphasizing uncompromising brute force over graceful agility. Ben Affleck was a great casting choice for Bruce; he captured the rage simmering under the surface.
Matt Reeves
Aside from digging into the Bat’s rarely-seen talents as a detective with a neo-noir mystery storyline, Matt Reeves’ work on the long-awaited The Batman isn’t quite as groundbreaking as Burton or Nolan’s movies. Reeves doesn’t so much reinvent Batman as he does collate all the best versions of Batman.
Instead of coming up with a radical new take on the character like Burton and Nolan did, Reeves finds a great middle-ground between the two. The Batman is both as grounded as Nolan’s movies and as stylized as Burton’s movies.
Tim Burton
Arriving midway between Richard Donner’s Michael Keaton was a controversial casting choice for the Dark Knight, but he turned out to be perfect for the role. Keaton brought a dry sense of humor that humanized the billionaire vigilante.
Burton’s gloomy, expressionist visuals brought a gloriously stylized Gotham City to the screen. His Batman movies featured three spot-on portrayals of iconic villains: Jack Nicholson’s Joker, Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman, and Danny DeVito’s Penguin. Batman Returns is even darker than the first one, occasionally veering into full-blown gothic horror, which polarized critics.
Christopher Nolan
Christopher Nolan didn’t just reinvent the Batman franchise; he reinvented the entire superhero genre. The gritty realism of Batman Begins kicks off Nolan’s trilogy with a pitch-perfect origin story that explores Bruce’s past in more depth than any previous movie adaptation.
The Batman franchise reached new levels of praise with Nolan’s first sequel, The Dark Knight, a slickly constructed post-9/11 neo-noir about the fear of terrorism. These themes are captured through the anarchist reign of Heath Ledger’s Oscar-winning Joker. The movie is framed like Michael Mann’s The Dark Knight Rises, couldn’t quite stick the landing. Expectations for the threequel were too high. It becomes too big for its own good as it stages the French Revolution on the streets of Gotham. But, on the whole, despite The Dark Knight Rises’ slight missteps, Nolan is still the most renowned and revered Batman director.
