Review: Learning to Love Tim Burton's BATMAN (1989)

For Movie of the Week #3, I grapple with a flawed classic

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Tim Burton’s Batman is a movie I’ve grappled with all my life. I was born in 1992, a few years after it came out, but the film’s footprint remained enormous throughout the 1990s and early 2000s; I grew up with the VHS tape in the house, and I had a toy version of the film’s Batmobile we picked up from a garage sale, and I would always come back to this movie when new interpretations of Batman came around. And for all these years, I’ve continually found myself vacillating on it in multiple directions, sometimes enjoying it, sometimes being bored by it; always loving Michael Keaton, but sometimes feeling like he wasn’t used to his full potential; sometimes being struck by the iconography of and around the Joker, but often feeling underwhelmed by Jack Nicholson’s performance; always loving Danny Elfman’s epochally great score and the film’s phenomenally great production design, but sometimes feeling detached from the story being told around those aesthetics. The most recent time I revisited the film was in 2020 on The Weekly Stuff Podcast, where co-host Sean Chapman and I both agreed the film was full of fantastic elements, but ultimately less than the sum of its parts. I thought I had finally nailed down my feelings on the film and fully articulated them there, and that I could maybe put my long, fraught relationship with it to rest. I was wrong. Four years later, it’s called to me again, in part because I’ve been on a Prince kick recently and found myself newly enthralled by the weird and wonderful soundtrack he wrote for (or, perhaps more accurately, wrote about) the film. But I am also perpetually fascinated by movies I do not have an easy relationship with, movies that play noticeably differently every time I go back with a few years more life experience. Burton’s Batman, whatever else I might say about it, is undeniably one of those movies.

This 2024 viewing is easily the most I have ever enjoyed the film; no doubt this was partially due to having picked up the 4K Blu-ray in a recent sale, which is an imperfect but still absolutely stunning restoration that restores a broader range of colors and a much greater sense of depth and dimensionality to an image that is, unquestionably, one of the most accomplished and ambitious Hollywood productions of the last half-century. This is a film that looks incredible on any format; on 4K, with a resolution that allows one to see every detail of those evocative sets, gorgeous matte paintings, and detailed models, and an HDR color grade that makes the film’s dynamic interplay between light and shadow more compelling than it has ever been on home video, it looks more incredible than ever.