"Alfred [...] you were right about Batman. you've always been right. You were right when you said he had to mean something. And then you were right when you said he had to mean something good. [...] but what I want you to see...what I understand now, at the end, is that maybe there's something in that. Maybe that's what Batman is about. Not winning. But failing, and getting back up. Knowing he'll fail, fail a thousand times, but still won't give up. And I know what you'd say to this. Fighting a battle you know you can't win, a battle you know you'll lose. It's madness. But all I can hope is that, like you said yourself, maybe...maybe it's the kind of madness this city rewards"- Batman, Zero Year by Scott Snyder.
"A vigilante is just a man lost in the scramble for his own gratification. He can be destroyed or locked up. But if you make yourself more than just a man, if you devote yourself to an ideal, and if they can't stop you, then you become something else entirely....Legend."- R'as Al Ghul, Batman Begins
The Batman is not the first Batman movie to concern itself with the psychology of Bruce Wayne. All of them to some extent or another have asked why a man would do this, what illness does he has that Batman is the cure? The Batman, however, is the first to truly devote itself to this question and come to a pretty good answer in my opinion. The Bruce we meet in this movie is still early in his career, he's hit on the concept of Batman and its usefulness as a tool for waging war on the criminal element. What he hasn't grasped yet is if he's making a difference, and if that's even what Batman is for.
I must admit for as much hooting and hollering as there was when the "I am vengeance" scene was first released to hype people up for this movie, I had a great deal of trepidation. If Matt Reeves had decided that Batman's goal was vengeance alone he'd hardly be alone. Frank Miller's Batman is an obsessed psychotic, barely even on the side of the angels, waging a never-ending war on criminals out of an intense need for vengeance. "I am vengeance, I am the night, I am Batman" is Kevin Conroy's most famous line delivery and understandably so. The Batman, however, gives us a Bruce who sees himself as vengeance and comes to realize in a city as angry and broken as Gotham that's not good enough.
Now, mind you, Christopher Nolan's Batman also went through this journey, he just went through it before putting on the costume. This is the Bruce who nearly kills Joe Chill in Begins. Only this Bruce does not know his parent's killer, he's never been apprehended, and so there is no one convenient target for his vengeance. He's out there every night imagining every face he sees is that face, meting out punishment one by one. What he comes to realize, however, is that a city like Gotham and the cruel systems that sustain it create a lot of victims, and a lot of people with an understandable need for vengeance, and that desire will ultimately consume them all.
I find it interesting some have criticized this final act and say it feels out of place, I found it to be the lynchpin of the entire movie, the whole point of Bruce's arc. The preceding acts show Gotham needs more than vengeance. It needs a champion. Someone to fight for those no one else will fight for, someone who is capable of bringing justice to an unjust system. It needs a hero, and the movie shows Bruce's transformation from dark avenger of the night to caped crusader quite well.
There's more to love about this movie than just getting this particular iteration of Batman and his motivation right, though. Every shot is beautiful, Gotham is wonderfully rendered as a city of steam and rivets and rain and shadow, a nice balance between the pure Gothic dreamscape of the Burton mvoies and the stark realism of Nolan's alt-Chicago. The performances from everyone are fantastic, although I am most partial to Zoe Kravitz as Selina and Collin Farrell's acerbic Penguin. The fight scenes are exciting and appropriately physical, and the Batmobile scene is perhaps my favorite one yet.
Ultimately this movie really worked for me because despite the grim n gritty aesthetic and the "I am vengeance" set up it's truly a film about rejecting the selfish desire for revenge in favor of the desire to save others and work for something better. There've been a lot of takes lately that Batman's not actually a hero, mostly by applying what to me is a far too serious and literal application of real world politics to a fictional setting. The Batman understands this, and it was nice to have a movie understand and explore that there is a selfish reason to become the Batman, but also show that he can grow beyond that and become something more.
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