A film for people who actually read comic books!

Rating: 7/10 (7 October 2019)

Enjoyable reimagination of the Batman origin story. It's hard to escape the heavy nod that Todd Phillips tips to Scorcese's "King of Comedy" and a healthy homage to Wally Pfister's cinematography in Nolan's Trilogy. This is a fun way to handle this type of material. Reinvent rather than retread. It demonstrates a similar type of maturity that began filtering into comic books themselves during the silver age of comic storytelling... when the art form began to take bigger and bigger chances, introducing politics and philosophy as ways for the stories to shine lights on the ills and troubles plaguing society at their respective times. If all art is communication, then the development of art is an aim towards becoming commentary that breaks through - a discourse rising above expected platitudes and transcending pure aesthetics. Mr. Phillips, I won't say that you've gotten any better as a director, but you remain provocative and a bit depraved, and you know who your subjects are and what makes them interesting. You've come a long way since "Hated", but luckily not TOO far.