Like probably everyone on the planet who has seen The Batman, I, too, am obsessed with both Robert Pattinson and Batman/Bruce Wayne. It seems that whether you are a huge fan of Robert Pattinson or you are a huge Batman fan(or both), everyone loves hit portrayal. And it’s not unreasonable, Robert Pattinson is a great and underrated actor, so it’s not a shock that people loved his performance as Batman and Bruce Wayne, but why exactly do so many people love his portrayal of the Dark Knight so much?
I have been fan of comics and superheroes for a while and a DC Comics fan for longer. I have watched almost every cartoon, show, and movie that DC has put out, as well as some comics and graphic novels too. I’ve researched a ton of characters from DC Comics and Batman is one of my favorite DC characters, the other one being Wonder Woman. And with this I say, that one of the big reasons why people love the new Batman portrayal is because it is completely different than how we have seen Batman/Bruce Wayne portrayed in live action movies. In other Batman movies, Bruce Wayne has this billionaire playboy persona that he’s crafted to protect his identity from being revealed. However, in this movie, Pattison’s Bruce Wayne is a reclusive emo who has not moved on from the death of his parents. He hasn’t been seen in public in five plus years.
With Pattinson’s Batman, there is a clear distinction between Batman and Bruce Wayne. In other Batman movies, Bruce Wayne and Batman are separate personas but they also mesh into each other sometimes. There’s really no drastic difference like there is with Pattinson’s Batman. His Batman is confident, brutal, and ruthless, however, his Bruce Wayne is drastically different. He’s shy, awkward, antisocial, and he doesn’t care for being Bruce Wayne or anything that has to do with Wayne Enterprises. All of this makes sense considering that in the timeline for The Batman, Bruce has only been Batman for two years so he’s still figuring everything out, which means he hasn’t yet built the billionaire playboy Bruce Wayne persona that we all know and (sometimes) love.
Pattinson’s portrayal is also messy, but not in a bad way. The Batman and Bruce Wayne we see in this movie is unkempt; when we see him out of costume he still has the smudged remants of his black eye makeup that he uses while wearing the cowl and his hair is greasy and long. He’s unhinged and instead of working through the trauma of the death of his parents, he decides to dress up as a bat and beat up criminals within an inch of their life. In other words, he’s not the hero of Gotham that everyone knows him as in other pieces of media, he’s something that the city fears and he’s doing more harm than good. The movie itself does a great job of recognizing this too, almost every character besides Jim Gordon, thinks that it’s really weird that there is a man dressed a bat helping the police solve crimes. And whenever he does have to go out or encounter sunlight during the day he winces and puts sunglasses on. This Batman is emo and not just because he listens to Nirvana.
Comic book fans can be ruthless when it comes to movies about their favorite characters, but it seems like many Batman and comic book fans have really loved The Batman, and that might be because Pattinson’s portrayal and the movies itself do the comics and character of the Batman justice. It is well known that DC Comics and Batman specifically have darker story lines than that of Marvel, but I don’t think a lot of people understand how dark. Many people have dubbed this Batman as ‘Emo Batman’ because of how Bruce Wayne looks and the overall tone of the movie, while that is hilarious, it is more accurate than what most think. The Batman is inspired by many comic runs, most notably Batman: Year One and Two, as well as The Long Halloween, these comics are dark, so it makes sense that since the source material is dark, the tone would be just as dark. Unlike some of the other Batman movies, The Batman finally lets Batman be the “World’s Greatest Detective”, a title he’s had forever, but not many in the mainstream know him as because the movies never really explore that side of him. However, now we get not only amazing fight scenes, but we also get the Batman finally doing what he’s best at: solving mysteries.
Over the years, in almost every piece of Batman media (or Batmedia), the portrayals of Batman and Bruce Wayne have all been the same and while most if not all of these pieces of media are fantastic, people start to want to see something different. I remember when the plans for The Batman started coming out and I heard a lot of people, myself included, talking about how every time there’s a Batman movie, they always do his origin story and how he became Batman and people just wanted something different. And we certainly got that with this movie. Pattinson’s Batman/Bruce Wayne is something that everyone has been wanting for a while, which is a different kind of Batman than what we have seen for a million times. This Batman is gritty and emotional, but it doesn’t try so hard to be, it comes naturally. This Batman doesn’t have it all together and frankly he’s kind of a mess, he’s not the polished crime fighter that we’ve previously seen. The Batman and Pattinson’s portrayal is something refreshing for both comic fans and the mainstream audience, so it’s no wonder that everyone is just as obsessed with him as the Riddler is.