Almost two decades ago, Christopher Nolan wrapped Chicago in a bow and labeled it Gotham City, it was a metropolis of steel beams and glass skyscrapers. Matt Reeves’ The Batman still has those steel beams and glass skyscrapers, but it also digs into its comic book roots of mahogany doors and stone cathedrals, medieval arches and marble gargoyles. The ornate has finally collided with the austere.

 

This is the Gotham a new Batman needs, a rain soaked urban dystopia that mirrors the Batman’s (Robert Pattinson) own internal conflict as the nihilistic and emotionally scarred Bruce Wayne. That is an important distinction to make - this is a Batman movie, not a Bruce Wayne one. Reeves is more concerned with the journey of the vigilante than the turmoil of the man behind the mask. 

 

Reeves' Batman is not the billionaire playboy Christian Bale played with confident nonchalant-ness, he is a recluse, closed behind the doors of his archaic mansion and the cage of his tortured past. The Batman becomes the man, and Bruce Wayne becomes the mask. Above all, this Batman returns to the origins of his comic book counterpart, becoming a stop-and-look-for-clues detective on the investigations that continuously strangle Gotham.

 

We follow this new Batman - more so than the new Bruce Wayne - in his second year of fighting crime during an investigation to solve the mystery of a serial murderer of Gotham’s elite (Paul Dano as the Riddler). In a delirium soaked performance, Dano brings the same intensity to the puzzle-obsessed, zodiac-inspired zealot that he does in his role within There Will Be Blood. 

 

As the plot to find the Riddler thickens, the rabbit hole deepens. Batman and grizzly-but-uncorrupt cop James Gordon (Jeffrey Wright) discover a conspiracy linking Gotham’s elite to a coverup those elites would much rather forget, and as the case spirals into the underbelly of Gotham, they cross paths with the Penguin (an unrecognizable Colin Farrell under a heft of prosthetics and makeup) and his boss, Carmine Falcone (John Turturro), who is never given the screen time he needs to consolidate the power he supposedly has.

 

Breaking from the stylistic influences of previous Batman movies, Reeves' film still hits all the necessary tropes the character requires: the fatherly butler, Alfred, played by longtime Reeves collaborator Andy Serkis; the split identity of Batman and Bruce Wayne that is slipped into a scene with the Riddler; the romance with Catwoman (Zoë Kravitz); and the Batmobile - a barbaric muscle car pulled right out of Mad Max - is at the center of one of the movie's most exhilarating sequences. 

 

Influenced by Kurt Cobain and David Fincher, Reeves turns The Batman into something between a ‘70s detective film and a bat-armored John Wick neo-noir psychological thriller. In a way, the plot is outlined like those red-string-maps on the walls of ‘70’s detective films. Reeves finds his own string and twists a tight story that balances all elements of the investigation, only sometimes forcing the string where to go. It’s only in the final 30 minutes of its daunting three hour runtime when that balance breaks and the tread starts to unravel. The movie dips into spectacle over substance and loses the raw, gritty reality that made up so much of its methodically constructed opening acts.

 

The crowning jewel of The Batman comes from the cinematography. Greig Fraser brings the same eye to The Batman that he did to Rogue One and Dune, solidifying himself as one of the best working cinematographers today. Submerging The Batman and the Batman in shadows, Fraser injects the bloodstream of the plot with neon lights, using puddles of rain to distort and refract it across Gotham. The most prominent color is red - a color of uncontrollable rage, of ambition and love and pain and unhinged passion. Fitting for a movie that concerns itself with just that.

 

The Batman is different, a challenge to the recent trend of overstuffed superhero movies. Even with a PG-13 rating - and it could have given so more as an R - the story is an uncompromising vision of a new kind of superhero movie.

 

I find myself, days later, coming back to the opening 15 minutes when the score pulses through your core and the shadows of the theater loom larger than ever before, when the camera hunts for anarchy and finds it prowling the streets of a Purge-induced Gotham. When the Batman - and the idea of Batman - emerges from the shadows as if he is the shadow, bringing vengeance and justice to the labyrinthine hellscape. Contained within these 15 minutes is an operatic ode to Gotham’s Dark Knight, one not seen since Nolan’s own Dark Knight all those years ago.