It also does that trope where it has the revolutionary "villain" fighting to expose the systemic corruption be/act so unhinged and do evil things as to give justification that their critiques are wrong. It's a really well made, entertaining movie, but it's themes are just such weak centrist bs that I couldn't ignore it.

I wrote about it more in-depth here if you're interested: https://letterboxd.com/peytobrock/film/the-batman/

EDIT: this is a write-up by a critic I really like that's even better than what I wrote: https://www.patreon.com/posts/63389248

  • penguin_von_doom [she/her]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Yeah, but also the ‘there-is-a-bad-change-and-I-must-stop-it’ thing has been consciously used to bash any kind of radical change. It is not just about the return to the status quo, although this is a part of it (and we can have a return to the status quo of a socialist world hero, where the world is mostly just and good). The movie/comic book thrope is more about lumping things that are obviously good together with something bad and making them look bad and scare. It is also making the current liberal free-market rule-based whatever it is world be the one that seems just and good and everything that isnt incremental snail paced change a horrible evil. And you can see this is really internalized by people, because it then manifests not just in politics, but also in personal life, work, etc. People love to talk about changing things, but never really want to do the big changes, exactly because of this conditioning.