Batman Bond

Rating: 4/10 (20 January 2007)

In future releases, we may finally know why Daffy Duck is mean, learn of the dysfunctional family of Charlie Brown or discover the psychological traumas suffered by Olive Oyl during her youth, thanks to some filmmakers' urge to turn icons of popular culture (as comic book heroes/heroines) into cinematic "human beings" (resembling old movies more than real life), and eventually into myths of an apocryphal North American saga. Many Batman's fans were pleased with this incursion into the rules of the 19th century novel, declared it a masterpiece and the final word on the darker aspects of Bob Kane's creation. To me what Christopher Nolan, David S. Goyer and Christian Bale successfully achieved is taking Kane's universe out of the world of dreams and turning it into a melodramatic and fascist action movie of the latter days of American imperialism, without the previous films' campiness, high aesthetics or humour. Now we have a masochist psycho as the winged hero, a Batmobile of the globalization era, a gun supplier a la James Bond's "Q", and a sect of terrorists who babble Buddhist ideas but reject compassion. Although the terrorists want to destroy New York (here called Gotham City...) because they have made corrupt empires fall since the good old days of Constantinople, they look like today's Masons deciding the future of the world's economy in a secret room of their loggia. All this flirting with today's world affairs, more than pleased audiences, moreover because as an action movie it's above the standard. As a Batman product, though, in my case I prefer Tim Burton's superior diptych.