No spoilers below, not that you should care because the movie sucks.
Watched the new Batman movie. Was so bad I walked out 2/3rds of the way through. Would have done so earlier if I wasn't with someone who wanted to stay longer.
It's like they found a list of tips on how to make a movie interesting and suspenseful and decided to specifically not do any of that. There are no establishing shots or scenes, half of the plot points are advanced by a character telling Batman something happened offscreen, all the fight scenes are boring because it's too dark to see much of it, there is almost no forshadowing or hints that anything might happen, everything just happens out of nowhere.
All the acting is terrible, like every character is trying to be an edgelord that doesn't care about anything. There is not a single scene in the entire movie where anyone seems to care about another onscreen character and displays genuine affection or comradery or anything. Nobody is friendly with anyone, they are all cold and aloof dicks. Every single character.
Every scene in the movie being insanely dark didn't detract from it as much as you would think. Some of the character designs looked cool and I wish I could have gotten a better look at them. There are also no establishing shots of things with more light on them so you have a better idea of what you are looking at, making it worse than it should have been. When the Batmobile showed up it was hard to tell what it even was for a painfully long amount of time.
Potentially a movie could be shot that way and it could be interesting and good, but this movie blew the opportunity. Tons of wasted opportunities, like showing Catwoman and Batman riding their motorcycles together. There were only a few very short scenes of that, they could have made it more of a thing and it would have been cool as hell. Also would have liked to see more of Batman in anonymous civilian mode.
To add to this, I think the central conceit, leading to the villain's actions, is absolutely insane:
spoiler
So the entire city's institutions are completely corrupted and mobbed up - the mayor, the DA, the police commissioner, members of the police, basically everyone with any power and influence is on a mobster's payroll. It's so dirty that the DA is openly doing drugs in a club filled with important people and staffed by off duty cops. Even so, this is apparently such a well kept secret that Batman - who has the ability to go anywhere in the city and command the attention of people at the highest levels - has to uncover this throughout the movie. And not through an actual investigation, but just by stumbling into the information piece by piece while following the Riddler's seriously surface level clues.
The Riddler, meanwhile, is appalled by the corruption he uncovers and recognizes that the approved approach to punish these people wouldn't make a difference. So he assassinates the top level people (which largely wouldn't change much in a corrupted system since they'd just be replaced by another stooge and is of course a level of violence I condemn). But punishing corrupt officials doesn't quite make him a villain, so in the third act he initiates his plan to cause a devastating city-wide flood that undoubtedly kills hundreds of innocent civilians. So the guy who previously focused on directed force against a handful of people he had evidence of being full on criminals suddenly heel-turns into mass murder. Just complete dumbshit writing.
And what does The Batman learn from this? Nothing about taking on corruption head on and rebuilding institutions to fix the actual needs of people in the community. No, he learns that he must "become a symbol for hope" in defending the status quo, as opposed to the fear he imposed on petty criminals in the beginning. I already detested Batman as a character, but sitting through three hours of this shit reminded me that the entire genre is poisoned by liberal brainworms to the point of being unwatchable.
when did Gotham become New Orleans anyway? has it ever been portrayed as below sea level in any medium before
That's another part of what I mean by there being no establishing of the setting it forshadowing. If they had played with the idea, mentioned that the city was below/at sea level and made it a theme or even just had some scenes showing the seawalls before they got exploded, it would have been a lot more satisfying. But no, just out of nowhere they are like "btw the city is vulnerable to flooding and we are bombing the things that are stopping it."
Most of the plot was advanced in that out-of-nowhere, deeply unsatisfying way.
I was curious and searched for it and some nerds pointed out that this is inspired from a flood storyline in 2013's Zero Year comics. Gotham being a fictional city has given writers the ability to take liberties with its exact layout, as opposed to Marvel comics largely having to use real locations.
yeah, I'm aware Gotham's geography varies largely on whatever the writer needs it to be, but wasn't familiar with any similar storylines. I was no longer reading comics by then so that explains it