With cinematographer Greig Fraser ("Dune"), Reeves' "The Batman" has a unique aesthetic - a rain-soaked black and red palate with pops of neon. The genre-play is a welcome refresher, while the detective work is an evolution from merely banging up the clownish petty criminals of Gotham."
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"In practice, it's Batman by way of 'The Godfather' and 'Zodiac,' a serial killer mystery mashed up with a mobster movie. "On paper, 'The Batman' is a standard Batman story: he's fighting crime in Gotham, facing off with the Riddler and Penguin and tangling with Catwoman," wrote Katie Walsh in her review of the film for Tribune News Service. "Now, we have to try and figure out how the hero differs from the villain - and so too does Batman." "Reeves shoots Batman's pursuit of his targets with the same psychotic, heavy-breathing, point-of-view aesthetic with which he shoots the Riddler's," he said.
The film also reframes the typical superhero trope of subtle similarities between the good guy and the bad guy. ".Pattinson is a tall, handsome, strapping fellow, but he plays Bruce Wayne with such broken, mournful despair that his body is practically concave when it's not in a batsuit." "Robert Pattinson's Batman walks so gingerly, so quietly into most of his scenes in Matt Reeves's 'The Batman' that at times you wonder if he's meant to be more ghost than superhero," Ebiri wrote. Here, the billionaire is a brooding recluse who rarely makes public appearances, unlike other adaptions which have portrayed him as a playboy or gregarious businessman. The film doesn't spend much time on Bruce's struggle with leading a double life.