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.
I wonder how you would do a more to the left of liberal power fantasy, not socialist necessarily - could you imagine Eisenstein's Batman, lol. You could have Wayne be a modern Kropotkin, a princeling from a wealthy family only with hegemonic liberal ideology preventing him from becoming an anarchist/socialist and his choice to be a recluse and not visit the modern version of Siberian peasants. He could start being a more apolitical more conservative reactionary that does the individualist beating up poor people, he could be as uninterested in his family's wealth and high level systemic corruption as Pattinson's batman (which ended up biting him in the ass and was actively helping his enemies). But by the end of the movie he'd have to give up being a vigilante and embrace collective action, you couldn't make this thing a franchise lol because by the end he wouldn't be batman anymore. Because Batman IS a right wing power fantasy at its core of cores and if you don't tear that down ruthlessly within the movie, it will always be at odds with itself or become the Dark Knight Returns with some libertarian thug as batman.
Left of liberal Batman film? Easy:
You put a focus on the actual causes on the collapse of Gotham at the level of the people actually living through it, any Batman stuff is the backdrop to the people of Gotham not the other way around. Instead of showing a Gotham that has always been at the bottom, whose only chance at redemption was blown when great man Thomas Wayne got denied his philanthropy arc; show things while they're still getting worse and make it clear how and why. Show how even limited welfare programs were helping people to cope until austerity policies rip that away, then show the ramifications of that first for the people who'd depended on them directly then the follow on conseqeuences for society at large. The goal here being to break down the idea of 'criminality' as an outcropping of fascist removed propaganda that pervades the Batman mythos.
It's the batverse so you can't be too on the nose with the symbolism, have stuff like a garbage collector strike causing a literal overflow of the filth of the city that could easily have been avoided by a system that had any ability to at least either behave rationally or to treat humans with basic respect. Then when the movie has Gotham's regular descent into anarchy, have the hope-for-the-future ending come as part of that breakdown of the corrupt order, rather than it come from Batman setting things back on course to the status quo.
The focus shouldn't be on Batman at all, in fact he doesn't really even need to be there; just shove in a cameo of him as a kid so the studio will greenlight the project in Hollywood's cinematic universe era.