Do Tim Burton’s Batman Movies Hold Up?

30 years ago, a superhero movie was not a guaranteed blockbuster. The last time Batman had been exposed to mass audiences, he had quipped around with Robin and danced the Batusi. But the beginning of a new era of superhero movies—dark, violent, and self-serious—began in 1989, when Tim Burton’s Batman hit theaters. Now that superheroes routinely dominate the box-office—and since the whole Batman franchise is on Netflix—I thought it would be interesting to revisit these prototypical superhero blockbusters to see how they hold up today.

The star of the first two Batman movies is Michael Keaton, and damn, does he kill it. Keaton’s casting was controversial enough to inspire 50,000 angry letters to Warner Bros. from fans. It’s hard to imagine Keaton being anyone’s first choice for the role—except Tim Burton, who had previously worked with Keaton in Beetlejuice.

It’s an eccentric but brilliant choice. Keaton is probably the best Batman ever, and he’s definitely the best Bruce Wayne ever. On screen, Keaton reliably comes off as very weird and very smart—the exact qualities Bruce Wayne should exude. And this is a different take on Bruce Wayne than the movies that would follow. Here, he’s a weird, rich recluse, and he’s not particularly famous—his parents’ murder has been long forgotten. Today, you’d be hard-pressed to find anybody who didn’t know Batman’s origin story—but Batman casts the whole thing as a mystery to be solved by journalist/love interest Vicky Vale (Kim Basinger), and it works surprisingly well.

Batman’s big villain is the Joker, played by Jack Nicholson—such a casting coup that Nicholson is actually billed ahead of Michael Keaton in the opening credits. In 2018, the Joker is a horrendously overexposed character, so it’s almost preferable that Nicholson’s Joker barely resembles the character most fans are familiar with today. First introduced as a sleazy gangster named Jack Napier—who, in a controversial deviation from the comics, turns out to have murdered Bruce Wayne’s parents—Napier is reborn as the Joker, complete with an unnerving rictus, after he falls into a chemical vat.

Nicholson’s Joker has since been eclipsed by Heath Ledger’s Oscar-winning performance in The Dark Knight, but there’s still plenty to admire about it. The best interpretations of the Joker find him dancing on the line between scary and funny, and Batman often hits that mark. We spend a lot of time with Joker, and he’s always pulling some kind of gag: cheerfully vandalizing a museum full of priceless works of art, or using a nerve compound to make a newscaster literally laugh herself to death. If you were ranking Joker performances on a scale from Leto to Ledger, Nicholson definitely lands closer to the Ledger side of the equation.

But as good as Nicholson is, Michael Keaton is better. He’s the first actor, and still the only actor, to capture just how weird you’d need to be to respond to a childhood trauma by putting on a costume and beating up criminals. Whenever Bruce sees the Joker, it’s like he goes into a fugue state. It’s not just recognizing the dude who killed his parents; it’s recognizing his own psychosis, manifesting on the other side of the law in a horrifying but fascinating way.

Batman is smart enough to set up conflicts between both Batman and the Joker and Bruce Wayne and the Joker. In the best scene in the movie, Bruce responds to the Joker invading his house by grabbing a fire poker and screaming, "YOU WANNA GET NUTS? LET’S GET NUTS." You can imagine a version of Batman that doesn’t include Batman at all—just a weird, old, rich guy squaring off against the gangster-turned-clown who killed his parents.

The climax, inevitably, brings Batman back into the mix, and is less interesting for it. The Joker’s reign of terror concludes on a rooftop—the most visually stunning flourish of all in a film that’s characterized by stylized, German expressionist-esque production design. It doesn’t really make sense that the Joker drags Vicky up to the roof of a cathedral, but it leads to an appropriately Gothic climax, as Batman and the Joker square off in a battle that ultimately results in the Joker falling to his death. The movie ends with the introduction of the Bat Signal, promising more adventures to come.

And they did, because Batman was huge. Even more importantly, it was omnipresent—a cultural force that stretched beyond cinemas and into record stores and fast-food restaurants. A sequel was inevitable, though everyone involved needed to be convinced a sequel was a good idea. Burton only agreed to return when sequel-y elements like Vicky Vale were dropped; Keaton only returned when he scored a massive $10 million raise.

The resulting film, Batman Returns, is Tim Burton at his Burton-iest, right down to opening with a cameo from Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure star Paul Reubens. Batman Returns was actually better-reviewed than Batman, but it doesn’t hold up as well today. That’s largely due to the primary villain, the Penguin (Danny DeVito). In theory, the Penguin is an ideal villain for Burton to tackle, because Burton’s career has essentially been defined by his capacity to empathize with misfits. But his take on the Penguin is way off the mark. This Penguin is a grotesque and irredeemable monster from birth. He’s introduced as a baby, grabbing (and presumably devouring) the family cat. His wealthy and disgusted parents decide to abandon him, putting him in a carriage and floating him down the river (just like Moses!), where he’s discovered by a bunch of penguins (not as much like Moses!).

Cut to 33 years later, when the Penguin emerges from the sewers with a gang of circus clowns to wreak havoc on Gotham City. After "saving" the mayor’s baby from the gang—a crime he personally orchestrated—the Penguin becomes an unlikely candidate to replace the mayor. As he marches along the campaign trail, DeVito turns in an almost perversely committed performance: biting people with his rotted teeth, spitting black bile everywhere, and lashing out with his flippers as he tries to grab Catwoman by the… well, you know.

Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman dominated the marketing campaign for Batman Returns, and for good reason—she’s easily the best thing in it. We meet the pre-Catwoman Selina Kyle as a meek secretary employed by Max Shreck (Chistopher Walken), a scummy businessman who wants to control Gotham City. When Selina stumbles onto one of Shreck’s schemes, he pushes her out of a window. She survives, stumbles back to her apartment, and violently smashes all the vestiges of her old life, and also the patriarchy. (Using a frying pan to smash a mirror is a particularly satisfying touch.) It’s a thrillingly feminist self-reinvention, and Pfeiffer is very, very good in it. You can see why Warner Bros. was so eager to give Catwoman her own spinoff.

But Batman Returns is also a surprisingly thorough interrogation of the psychosis that would drive people to these extremes in the first place. Selina Kyle is clearly, actually mentally ill; so is Bruce Wayne. Their mutual seduction, which is only exacerbated by the fact that they both spend a lot of time running around in black leather bondage gear, is a warped and sexy vein of storytelling, and most of Batman Returns’s best moments come when they’re either talking or punching each other, which always feels like it might suddenly turn into sex.

It’s great! And then the Penguin pops in again, snorting and wheezing and ruining everything. In a scene that plays like a wishful fantasy today, Batman successfully derails the Penguin’s political ambitions by interrupting a rally to play a tape in which the Penguin brags about how he "played this city like a stinking harp from hell." Imagine—a creepy politician losing the loyalty of his followers after a single awful speech!

Thwarted, the Penguin decides he’ll get revenge by kidnapping all the first-born children of Gotham City. Batman stops the Penguin and chases him back to his lair, where a bunch of nondescript scuffling ends with the Penguin dead and Catwoman missing in action. In a weirdly moving scene, a bunch of actual penguins give the Penguin a burial at sea. Batman returns to protecting Gotham City, and the movie ends on a shot of Catwoman staring up at the Bat Signal.

It’s a clear setup for a sequel—but after Batman Returns sparked controversy for being too weird and dark for kids (and grossed $150 million less than the original Batman), Warners Bros. got spooked. They decided to give the Batman franchise a soft reboot with Joel Schumacher’s goofier, more kid-friendly Batman Forever, setting the stage for the Bat-crash that eventually necessitated a full reboot with 2005’s Batman Begins.

It’s a shame, because it certainly feels like Burton and Keaton had at least one more Batman story to tell. Catwoman is too compelling a character to be dispensed with in a single movie, and Harvey Dent was still out there somewhere, just waiting to get half his face scarred. Last year, we got a small glimpse of what that might have looked like when Billy Dee Williams voiced Harvey Dent in The LEGO Batman Movie. It was enough to make you wish that the crew behind these strange, early efforts at the superhero blockbuster might see a Bat Signal in the sky and go back to work one last time.

Do they hold up?
Batman is still great, and Batman Returns is too fascinatingly weird to be ignored. Who could resist a movie with a climax that hinges on an army of missile-toting penguins?