He is vengeance, he is the night — Robert Pattinson is The Batman. But one question remains: how long until he dances with the devil in the pale moonlight?
Pattinson's debut brings the darkest knight we've ever seen to the big screen: he pounds goons with merciless oomph; pursues villains with fire deeper than justice in his eyes; and his crime-fighting isn't quite the valiant heroics of old; friend or foe, you'll cower when he emerges from the shadows.
Michael Keaton dared us to 'get nuts' in 1989, but this is the closest we've seen the caped crusader to the edge; remember that iconic quote, 'All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy.' That's how close Batman is to where the Joker is: just one bad day.
Directed by Matt Reeves, The Batman's ‘Year Two’ Gotham, vigilante and its miscreants are fully-formed: Selina Kyle (Zoë Kravitz) moonlights as a Cat burglar; Carmine Falcone (John Turturro) has the city in a vice grip; and Oswald Cobblepot’s (Colin Farrell) descent into The Penguin is only starting to take course, though not quite as literally as Danny DeVito. On this occasion, one rogue is missing from the gallery: the Clown Prince of Crime, whoever they may be.
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Ahead of the movie's release, I sat down with Pattinson and Kravitz for a quick chat. We spoke about the film's 15 rating in the UK (hilariously, Pattinson had no idea, and joked that it was a 'disaster' before explaining the BBFC to his co-star) and whether they nicked any keepsakes from the set (they were fairly mute, but he admitted to stealing many, many pairs of socks).
Notably, we spoke about the possibility of Pattinson's Batman and Kravitz's Catwoman tangling with the Joker somewhere down the line; remember, The Batman is the first of a planned trilogy, with the sequel already in development and two spin-off shows coming to HBO Max. Batman's greatest adversary must be in the pipeline.
'I mean it's always so interesting with the Joker... it's the same as Batman: you can interpret it in wildly different ways. The expectations from the audience are just so high that it's always fun to see what an actor brings to it,' Pattinson said.
'Also, in this world, it's such a specific, fully-realised world. I'd be very curious to see how the character like the Joker would grow into it. A lot of the other characters... everyone's at the beginning of their journey, and to have Joker before he's Joker would be really interesting,' he added, before realising, 'I just described the plot of Joker' and laughing.
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Kravitz was similarly intrigued by the Joker's introduction to this Gotham, given we haven't really seen the characters interact since Eartha Kitt and Cesar Romero. 'Especially as Selina, it's really complicated,' she said.
'She cares for Batman so much, and I think we have a lot of similarities, but the chaos Joker believes in is something that'd be really seductive to Selena — I think she really wants to burn things down, so I think it'd be an interesting situation for her to be in.'
The Batman hits cinemas on March 4.
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Topics: Batman, Film and TV, Entertainment, Robert Pattinson
Cameron Frew