Planet of the Apes (1968) vs. Planet of the Apes (2001)

For Spectrum Culture's Re-Make/Re-Model series, I have tried to discuss remakes with artistic credibility in their own right, to show that not every retread is simply a lazy cash-in on an established property. I wanted to find any such merit in Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes, which I had not seen since its release when I was 12. But man, was it worth all the disdain I had for the movie even as a tween. Where the original film combines several major subtexts (white slavery panic, nuclear holocaust fears) into solid, simple high-concept film, Burton's has no central point to make, content to just monkey around, as it were. It's a shame, as the production design and prosthetic work are so wonderful that, stylistically, this blows the recent reboot Rise of the Planet of the Apes out of the water. But even that inconsistently plotted movie comes off as a classic next to Burton's movie.

My full piece is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Dark Shadows (Tim Burton, 2012)

On paper, Dark Shadows should be a stirring return to form for Tim Burton. Like Beetlejuice, its focus on one main set limits Burton's arty leanings even as it allows him to pour all of his expressionistic flair into his chosen location, maximizing his moody design instead of diluting it across too big an area. And like Edward Scissorhands, it then drags that isolated, anachronistic, black-and-white setting into a candy-colored "normal" world, having fun with the juxtaposition. After the fine but flat Sweeney Todd and the out-of-control Alice in Wonderland, this could have been just what Burton needed to get back on track.

Instead, it marks a low point for a career that already includes the 2001 remake of Planet of the Apes and the aforementioned take on Lewis Carroll. Based on the late-'60s soap opera of the same name, Dark Shadows concerns one Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp, obviously), the heir to a fortune and family legacy until a witch whose love he spurned (Eva Green) took everything from him, turned him into a vampire and buried him alive for eternal torment. Accidentally unearthed in 1972, Barnabas must restore his cursed descendants to the rightful Collins legacy while acclimating to a changed world.

Batman Returns

Tim Burton's Batman, for its numerous flaws, continues to stand out today for creating the first superhero movie with an identifiable auterial streak. One year before Sam Raimi made his Darkman (and another decade before he would be handed the reins to an established character, Spider-Man), Burton applied his love of Gothic aesthetics to an Art Deco vision of Gotham. Yet Burton, as is his wont, clearly cared more for the sets than anything else, leading to an ultra-hammy performance from Jack Nicholson and whatever it is that Robert Wuhl thinks is acting.

Impossibly, Batman Returns displays an even wilder look, filled with gigantic rubber duckies, a gang of criminals dressed up as mad carnival performers, a rotating ball fashioned on a cartoon cat that rests on top of the headquarters of a serious and a set of Bat signal reflectors on Wayne Manor that no one ever notices or comments upon. This is a movie where Christopher Walken must hiss menacing lines whilst wearing a party hat. This is a film that uses the premise of Catwoman to make so many cat-related innuendos that a counter tallying them all should have been place in the bottom corner of the screen. This is a movie that ends with a penguin army armed with rocket launchers taking to the streets of Gotham.

Yet somehow, Returns is a marked improvement over its predecessor, and in some ways even stacks up favorably to Christopher Nolan's rebooted franchise. Left to his own devices after the runaway success of the first Batman, Burton used his unaccountability to dive into his auterist tendencies (such a massive display of his favorite visual tricks and pet themes would not be seen until Big Fish). Where the Gothic styling of the first film informed only the mise-en-scène, Returns casts a pall over its script, crafting a dark version of the Caped Crusader that rivals the bleakness of The Dark Knight.

Opening in flashback on a pristine yet chilly and antiquated manor, Returns shows a wealthy man waiting as his wife gives birth. The midwife and doctor run from the bedroom, but the aristocrat does not heed them as he hears his new son crying, and the last thing we hear is the man's own screams. Saddled with a deformed child that would bring social shame, the rich couple sneak their baby to Gotham Zoo in Christmastime and callously dump the baby into the icy sewer. We come to understand that the child grows up to become the Penguin (Danny DeVito), raised by the aquatic birds that inhabit the abandoned zoo, and Burton aligns the character with his cast of warped characters whose physical quirks are at least partially attributable to his loony take on Spielbergian father issues.

Burton makes the focal point of the Penguin's character his resentment over his abandonment, and thus he fleshes out Bruce Wayne more than he did with the first film by casting Oswald Cobblepot as Bruce's foil. Both, after all, lost their parents, one from their murder and the other from their abandonment, and their losses inform every moral action the two make. Burton, not a particularly avid comic reader, did not infuse the first Batman with an incisive and studied reading of the character, but an interview he gave regarding this sequel demonstrates a surprising understanding of the character. On the subject of the Joker dominating attention in the first film and the villains also getting the most screen time in this film, Burton notes that Batman prefers to stay in the shadows. That's not quite true -- Nolan has done a fine job focusing on the Bruce Wayne side of Batman with his films -- but Burton is right to place the focus on Batman's villains, as they bring out the distinct traits of the hero in clearest terms. Stacked against Penguin, Batman must confront his own abandonment issues, and the first emotion Wayne feels for Cobblepot when he emerges from the sewer to seek out his family is sympathy. Once the Penguin's true motives are revealed, however, Wayne acts to stop him, yet beneath his heroism is the darker implication that Wayne's trauma isn't quite so bad as he might think; at least his parents didn't choose to cast him into the world alone.

Max Shreck, a character invented for the film, rounds out Bruce by offering a contrast for Wayne's business side. Where Bruce uses his inherited position to fuel social programs and other charities in the hopes of improving the standard of living so that the poor would not feel compelled to steal and kill to survive, Shreck sits at the top of his garish corporate headquarters, making sexist comments to his secretary/assistant, dumping toxic waste down drains instead of paying to dispose it safely and even killing a business partner who fell out of favor (luckily for the Penguin, he discovered all of this to use as handy blackmail material). Of the three villains, Shreck is both the least spectacular and the most truly evil, unburdened by the psychological issues that burden Cobblepot or Selina Kyle and left to use his wealth to purchase political power to achieve his greedy ends. When Penguin abducts Max, he mentions, "You and I are both perceived as monsters. But, somehow, you're a well-respected monster and I am, to date, not." One of the more amusing aspects of Batman Returns is its spotlight on how easy it is to win public support, and Max helps Cobblepot stage a hilariously transparent rescue that turns him into a hero that takes no effort because Max has clearly done this sort of thing before.

That angle also informs the darker side of the film, as the villains conspire to destroy Batman by tearing down his public image. They stage a grand murder that frames Batman and turns him instantly from Gotham's savior to its possessing demon, even sabotaging the Batmobilie to careen through the streets running over everything and everyone in its path. Just as seeing Cobblepot emerge from the sewer holding the mayor's baby turned him into a hero, so to does seeing the Dark Knight near the scene of a crime make him into a terror. As much as the fickle nature of the public is funny in a cosmic sense, their inability to parse out any information from single moments make them a dangerous mob.

Perhaps the truest mark of Returns' complexity, however, is the character of Selina Kyle. Initially such a weak-willed, nondescript character that her every line is stilted and awkward. Burton's vision of Catwoman's origin is odd, involving Shreck tossing Kyle out a window for exposing one of his illegal plans, only for alley cats to swarm her body and somehow revive her, completely changing the character. Yet Michelle Pfeiffer takes to the shift marvelously, forging Catwoman into a dynamo of empowered sexuality, not using her wiles to seduce men, as Poison Ivy does, but as an uncontrollable expression of her liberation. Every man who runs into her condescends to her, including even Batman when he immediately apologizes for punching her, and Catwoman trounces every one of them to prove that she's no longer the docile secretary fulfilling an outdated gender role. Kyle's relationship with Bruce does not detract from this aspect of Kyle/Catwoman's personality, and the way that each sees the other as a means of controlling their uncontrollable id makes for the most convincing and bittersweet of all the Batman romances.

These characters provide a sturdy anchor for Burton's aesthetic explorations. There is a greater emphasis on the acting and character in this film, which is to say that there is any at all, yet the director still clearly wants to play in his gigantic sandbox. Before CGI allowed Burton to truly lose his mind, Batman Returns marked Burton's first chance to let his imagination run wild without worrying to much about budgetary concerns. So, he places a gang in mangled carnival costumes, including an organ grinder cranking a Gatling and men dressed as mad skeletal clowns on motorcycles wreaking havoc in Gotham. Frankly, some of the film's visuals overload, yet there is a logic to Burton throwing crap at the wall and seeing what sticks. The first Batman was informed by the few Batman comics Burton read before taking the job, namely Alan Moore's The Killing Joke, thus it blended the surreality of Brian Bolland's artwork and Moore's dark prose into a singular mise-en-scène. Here, however, he, whether he intends it or not, finds an uneasy but fascinating balance between the two extremities of Batman comics: the cartoony, silly books of the post-Wertham era and the darker styles of the character's roots and his '80s revival.

Yes, some parts of the film simply don't work. Batman goes against his moral history by seemingly killing two henchman at different points without compunction, setting one on fire and driving away and sticking dynamite to another. Later, Wayne brings down Cobblepot in the eyes of Gotham by playing recorded messages of Oswald's plotting, and a carelessness is shown when Wayne starts scratching with a CD to give the audience a laugh, which is impossible. That oversight defines a number of plot holes, such as Penguin and his henchmen somehow making an accurate set of blueprints of the Batmobile that they use to sabotage the vehicle. At the end, Batman and Alfred manage to halt the advance of the penguin army by knowing which frequency will override the transmitters on the birds' heads and how to direct those birds back to destroy the Penguin's lair. At least Burton acknowledges how silly he makes some of the film when the crowd turns on Cobblepot upon hearing his recorded, Nixonian rants, a group of loyalists suddenly armed with tomatoes and cabbages. It's so ridiculous even Penguin has to comment on it, asking why someone always brings tomatoes and eggs.

Still, these moments of levity, be they actually funny or simplistic, do not taint the ultimate tragedy of the story. The Dark Knight pulled its punches at the end, finally making Batman shoulder the social responsibility of his actions while also suggesting that his actions, including blatantly immoral ones, were justified. But Burton allows the two major villains to meet their end on almost poetic levels. The Penguin, rejected by his family and now the rest of mankind, retreats to his lair, only for his penguins -- the closest thing he has to kin -- to launch their rockets on his home. So, the Penguin dies feeling completely alone, "betrayed" by the only creatures he feels close to; who would have guessed that a mock funeral procession of penguins sliding his corpse into their icy pool could be so moving? Catwoman, meanwhile, discovers Batman's identity and considers heading off with Bruce so that they might rebuild each other, but she cannot deny her revenge and appears to kill herself to take out Max. The Bruce Wayne at the end of this film has nothing, having seen three people who disturbingly reflect parts of him die horribly, and the (unnecessary) final shot of Catwoman appearing to emerge alive in the distance does little to alleviate the sense of pain that informs the final moments.

Compared to the smash success of the first film, Batman Returns was just too weird, too different in tone and too unexpected of a franchise sequel to enjoy a proper evaluation. Some critics nailed it for loose structure, an odd point of contention considering how much tighter the film is than the first, which sagged in the middle. Others, still under the impression that all comics and comic movies were meant for children, said the film was too dark, while others still pegged it as too light. The tepid reception spelled Burton's end at the helm, which was likely the right decision: he needed to get back to telling whatever story caught his fancy and getting trapped forever on a franchise would just make hims stagnate (just look at his work now that he can secure a sizable budget for any project). Yet I cannot help but feel that Returns is one of the most underrated blockbusters of its day, and if Burton could have refined this further, he could have taken Batman to some wild places. He certainly couldn't have fucked up as badly as Joel Schumacher, now could he?

Alice in Wonderland (2010)

Tim Burton's detractors may find themselves supporting Alice in Wonderland, if only because it makes their case against him so simple. It contains nearly all of Burton's usual thematic and stylistic flourishes, but to no end. Had I not walked out of the theater with several short pages filled with notes, I might have assumed that, like Alice, I'd merely drifted off in a nebulous dream/reality world for two hours and left again. Vincent Canby once compared Heaven's Gate to a "forced four-hour walking tour of one's own living room." Alice is like a forced tour of the living room of the protagonist in one of Burton's better movies: it's weird, yes, but it seems drab and uninteresting. In a way, I sympathize with Burton: by this point, so many adaptations, homages, and re-imaginings of Lewis Carroll's novel exist across various artistic media that one must doubt whether any wonder remains in Alice at all.

Alice starts promisingly, revealing an older protagonist than the pre-teen Alice of the original story who openly disdains the social mores that bind her. She does not wear a corset and considers refusing the hand of a sniveling young lord who throws an engagement party for himself before asking her to marry him. This Alice remembers familiar images from a recurring dream -- a smiling cat, a rabbit with a clock, a blue caterpillar -- and receives a shock when she begins to see some of these creatures walking about in the real world. Naturally, she follows the rabbit to its hole, falls in and, well, you know.

Supposedly Burton envisioned his Alice as a re-imagining of the original story, so he takes elements from both Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its loose sequel, Through the Looking Glass and invents new ones to make a sort of Return to Oz for Wonderland. But that infamously dark slab of nominal kiddie fare, or at least that appears to have been the plan.

For Alice in Wonderland is a film of buts. Alice is returning to Wonderland, but she doesn't remember the last time so she largely follows the same path she took upon her visit. The Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) has taken over and subjugated the landscape, but Wonderland still has a light mood about it. Yes, it looks like a Burton film, with tree limbs twisted into the shapes of gnarled hands and straight lines broken into odd angles, but none of it makes in impression. Burton seems to have used his storyline as an excuse to make the place dull, not twisted and evil, but spare and uninteresting. Perhaps that's the point, that a Wonderland without any sense of wonder at all is more inherently unsettling than an astonishing Wonderland that conveys a sense of corruption and mutilation, but the fact remains that Burton made more memorable worlds out of the idyllic estate in Beetlejuice and the suburbs of Edward Scissorhands than he does with a world often likened to a severe drug trip.

Most of the actors appear to have caught wise to the listlessness of the film even as they stood in front of green screens and acted out the disjointed, lethargic script. Matt Lucas (Tweedle Dee and Dum) and Anne Hathaway (the White Queen, who looks like she set aside time to appear in the film between touring with Evanescence) are only memorable because of their costuming and rendering, and, though everyone speaks with a British accent, the truly British actors get relegated to the completely CGI characters (and what is the point of casting Stephen Fry and then giving him maybe 10 lines?). Bonham Carter proves a notable exception, a Brit allowed to appear in person, more or less, who offers the only consistently emotional characterization in the film. Watch the isolation in her eyes, wavering between spoiled egomania and loneliness, or the way her lip quivers when she considers if perhaps she went too far in her quest for power and questions whether it really is better to be feared than loved.

Compare Carter to Depp, who hasn't looked so bored since the Pirates sequels. One can understand why his performance of the Mad Hatter would be all over the place, but playing an oddball does not entitle an actor to carte blanche, and Depp's wildly inconsistent performance undercuts any laughs with too-random asides and questionable attempts at sincerity. Why does Depp slip in and out of a Scottish accent? Why does he think he can get away with hamming it up all over the place and suddenly inspire pity and connection by lowering his voice for a minute? And how could Burton put both Depp, so capable with mad characters, and Crispin Glover, who may actually be insane, not only in the same film but some of the same scenes and draw absolutely no energy from them?

The one bright light of the film -- and this is nothing to scoff at -- is Alice. Mia Wasikowska receives few opportunities to make a fully-formed person out of her character, but she deftly succeeds at hitting the right mood. Wasikowska is at once waifish and fragile in the Victorian fashion yet strong-willed and capable, and her Alice is easily one of the most feminist heroines to appear in any Disney production. The narrative suffers from the speed with which Alice accepts what's happening to her and moves through most of the film simply trusting that she is in a dream, but that confidence at least reflects well on the character and it provides a strong foothold for Wasikowska to break out as a true leading lady, one who genuinely leads; it's hard to repress a "right on" when she ignores a prophecy that dictates her actions in Wonderland and definitively states "I make the path."

Yet Burton neglects his adept starlet, focusing instead on visuals that lack a shred of the creativity, making a drab steppe out of a world ripe for his demented, (occasionally) endearing big-kid sensibility. The entire third act is a complete wash -- even compared to the rest of this bore -- devolving into a slack faux-epic battle that bypasses Alice for The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings and even sucks the spark out of Carter's formerly enjoyable performance. Burton cannot even summon any imagination for the Jabberwocky, simply transplanting John Tenniel's original visual conception of the dragon-like creature without adding a single facet of his own design. And the refreshing feminism of the film finds an odd conclusion, with Alice back in the real world asserting herself in a manner befitting her inner strength even as the film suggests she will spend her adulthood subjugating and pillaging China in the name of mercantilism. How's that for a happy ending?

Alice demonstrates the pitfalls that come with Burton's increasing laziness as a screenwriter, eschewing original stories such as Edward Scissorhands and Big Fish for derivative re-imaginings of other stories that simply lay a template of half-hearted auterial concerns -- outcasts, Gothic aesthetics and daddy issues, which are largely and mercifully absent in this film, at least in the protagonist. I'm at an utter loss to explain how the film can be at once so cluttered, as slapdash as Depp's performance, and so loose, desolate and unappealing. Some films fail because they don't make any sense; the chief flaw of this one is that it makes too much. We're meant to believe, I think, that Wonderland brings out the champion dormant in Alice, giving her that last ounce of self-confidence needed to face the real world, but as I left the theater all I could think about was how much she towered above the land she saved even when she wasn't nibbling on size-altering scones.

The Nightmare Before Christmas

Nobody, and I mean nobody, does stop-motion like Henry Selick. I would not go so far as to proclaim the greatest in the field -- I'd likely place him third behind Wallace & Gromit creator/animator Nick Park and the king, Ray Harryhausen -- but Selick made three of the greatest children's films of all time with his stop-motion prowess. All of them, by the way, are totally and gloriously unsuited to children. Coraline continues to grow on me now that I can marvel over its gorgeous 2-D flawlessly transferred to Blu-Ray (though I maintain that its 3-D version is the best I've ever seen the format offer), while James and the Giant Peach is one of the finest book adaptations a fan could ask for. The Nightmare Before Christmas, however, still stands as the pinnacle of his career.

An easy explanation for its lasting relevance and entertainment factor is the benefit of one of the greatest like-minded collaborations of the last 20 years. Selick directed the film based on Tim Burton's story and sketches, and together they craft the most perfect Expressionist world ever captured on film. Freed from the confines of reality, of using real sets (no matter how strangely designed), Selick and Burton design an entire world unlike anything you've ever seen: trees branch into jagged claws. Characters can stretch and dismember themselves and return to, well, not normal but whatever passes for it in this world. Even the fences are bent and craggy. The only straight lines in this film seem to be the ones of Jack Skellington's suit.

At a scant 76 minutes, The Nightmare Before Christmas plays like an extended, animated episode of The Twilight Zone, in which each holiday has its own special town filled with creatures who spend all year planning for their holiday. That does not hurt the film, though; no, if anything it helps. Burton and Selick know that they're making a gimmick, so they get in and out of there before you're tempted to ask any questions.

Most of the film occurs within Halloween Town, a garish, terrific display of graveyards, ghosts, goblins and zombies. Skellington, the most popular chap in town, reins as the Pumpkin King. His genial, giving nature stands in humorous contrast to his ability to frighten more effectively than anyone else. After a particularly successful Halloween, Jack goes for a walk in the woods and stumbles through door in one of the trees that leads to the portals to the other holiday towns. He finds himself in the Christmas world and is struck by its beauty. So, he decides to give "Sandy Claws" the year off and plan his own Christmas.

It must be said: even at 76 minutes, Burton cannot keep a narrative together. The main plot is sound, but an aside involving a romance between Jack and Sally, an animated rag doll created by Dr. Finklestein (a clear take on Rotwang and all the other mad scientists of Expressionism and old horror films), goes nowhere. Likewise, Jack's showdown with Oogie Boogie is too much of a left turn, even if it's totally worth it for Oogie's demented casino lair.

Nevertheless, the film works because of its stunning design, seamless animation and a heaping slice of self-awareness that takes pressure off a number of its flaws. Halloween Town is run by a literally two-faced mayor, and Jack's misinterpretation of Santa and his subsequent description of the jolly fat man as a fearsome tyrant is hysterical. It also rings true for me -- there is a large, rather embarrassing photo somewhere in my parents' house of a 2-year-old me bawling on the lap of a mall Santa in terror. The creatures of Halloween Town fall behind Jack and his Christmas plans with vigor, but they're so used to creating frightening pranks that they have no idea how to make a Christmas present.

Danny Elfman's lyrics also contain a wonderful wit, and the songs boost The Nightmare Before Christmas from a technical marvel to a technical marvel that'll make you sing along with glee. Coraline may one day overtake this in my estimation with its superior writing and flawless plotting, but I still profess a soft spot for this movie. Beautiful as Coraline is, it doesn't strike me the way this film does, or even as it did as a child, a decade before I'd even heard of the names Lang and Murnau. As with anything involving Burton (save Ed Wood), it's all about style over substance, but few films contain such an abundance of style, and I'll always love the movie for it.

1989 Rewind: Batman

Perhaps it's fate that I've always loved Batman. Growing up, I never read comics but I watched this movie religiously, tuned in for the legendary Batman: The Animated Series whenever it was on, and my bedroom was decorated with all things Batman: Batman wallpaper, Batman bedspreads, Batman toys. And I was born only a few weeks after Batman premiered, so I like to think that the ubiquitous advertising imprinted my fetal brain. In fact, considering how my mom always waits two weeks to see every new film anyway, I'm convinced that I was so excited to see the film for myself that, soon after she left the theater, I decided it was time. And then the stork came to deliver me because that's the only way this theory can be more absurd.

Regardless, Batman is likely the single biggest icon of my youth, which makes it all the stranger that I have not revisited this film in, oh dear, nearly six years. I hadn't sat down with it since before Batman Begins came out, so I spent a good 10 minutes in the store holding the Blu-Ray in my hands wondering if I should shell out the cash. How would Burton's film stack up now that the frame of reference included Christopher Nolan's superb installments and not just Joel Schumacher's travesties? I finally caved and timidly loaded the disc into my player.

To my great surprise, Batman holds up, albeit in ways I could have never expected. As a Batman film, it's almost laughable: it retcons the backstories of both Batman and the Joker to entwine their fates at the expense of any plausibility. The Joker's backstory as a whole grates; clearly Burton, openly averse to comics, based it on the backstory given in Alan Moore's seminal book The Killing Joke, but what he and writer Sam Hamm failed to take into account is that the book openly reveals that past to be a figment of the Joker's mad imagination, and he's a character who should never be explained. Hamm pleads innocent, however, to the Joker being tied into the murder of Bruce Wayne's parents and cites a writers' strike for him not being able to stop this nonsense from happening.

Batman also suffers from some weak supporting characters. Kim Basinger works well within an extremely narrow range, but Meryl Streep couldn't have given Vicki Vale enough of a personality to hang a hat on. Women have long been fabricated in Batman movies expressly to provide a love interest to a man who is too absorbed in his own pathos to ever hold down a steady relationship -- not even Nolan handled this aspect well, though at least he found a way to make Rachel important to the story -- but Vale just sucks the life out of scenes. Even worse is Robert Wuhl's Knox, a snobbish reporter who smacks of the clinging third wheel Albert Brooks played to Cybill Shepherd in Taxi Driver, only not nearly as funny.

Nonetheless, the film succeeds, and it succeeds brilliantly. Not as a Batman or even a comic book movie, mind you, but as a demented slice of neo-noir. Burton's Gotham City is neither a realistic city nor a comic book city; instead, it is a glorious hybrid of German expressionism, Gothic architecture and Art Deco. As with Taxi Driver, colored steam hisses out of vents and manholes at all times, the streets are wet with fetid, stagnant water and the city as a whole almost feels like a criminal.

Michael Keaton's casting caused a great deal of controversy at the time, but he proves to be a great Batman, the best of the entire series, in fact. He can alter his voice and body language between Bruce Wayne and the Bat without lapsing into death metal growls (sorry, Christian), and this comedic actor brings serious intimidation to the part. He's such a natural in the role that he almost overcomes the complete lack of writing on the Bruce Wayne side of the character. The film's chief flaw, Bruce isn't so much mild-mannered as downright milquetoast.

I'd wager that's because Burton put all of his energy into capturing the Joker. He never nails down what makes the character so interesting -- that he reflects the sort of person Batman has to struggle daily to prevent himself from being -- and the closest he comes is a simplistic equation of the two as "freaks." But Jack Nicholson is the reason remember the film: of all the roles in which Jack Nicholson plays Jack Nicholson, none benefits as much as the Joker. A synecdoche of the film proper, he straddles the line between the campy, over-the-top nature of the old serial (which bears more similarities to the film than any of the makers would care to admit) and a more serious tone that Burton and everyone else involved with the project. While I find Keaton's performance far more of a revelation than Nicholson's, his Joker leaps off the screen with his gleeful, prankster insanity.

Burton obviously designed the film around his set pieces, but that makes for a visually resplendent noir, one that you can't help but love. Audiences in 1989 certainly did, as Batman was the biggest phenomenon ever, even bigger than Star Wars. Where movies like Star Wars or The Exorcist became mass hits through word of mouth and saturation booking, Batman became the first film to make a spectacle out of the marketing itself. A retrospective documentary of the entire first run of Batman films, broken up over the four movies, discusses the marketing, and images of fans buying merchandise months before release, of vandals stealing posters from bus stops and entire walls plastered with that simple, effective logo are staggering.

I wasn't there -- well, I guess I kind of was, but it's impossible to fondly recollect fetal memories -- but Batman is as much a nostalgic experience for me as it must be for all those who worked themselves into a frenzy for this movie. As such, perhaps my opinion is weighted by fond remembrances of my childhood. I do see the flaws, however, and they are glaring. I simply don't think they detract enough from the experience of walking through Tim Burton's world. It's actually better than I remember, because now I don't feel the need to hold it to rigid continuity (as if comic books only follow one set timeline anyway). While Basinger and Wuhl take away from the film, the two leads as well as strong actors such as Michael Gough, Pat Hingle, William Hootkins and Jack Palance keep you paying attention to them, which is impressive considering how tempting it is to simply sit back and admire the sets. Not even Prince's dated, ill-fitting soundtrack ruins it thanks to it playing second fiddle to Danny Elfman's excellent score (and that theme...oh, that theme). While it's nowhere near the best of 1989 I've seen, it remains a personal favorite and a film I'd care to re-watch just as many times as I would Nolan's franchise.