In the meantime, I will offer commentary on Crudblud's review of
Burtman here, so as to avoid cluttering up the Just Watched thread.
Michael Keaton is not a square-jawed, buff dude, so his casting might seem a little odd in comparison both to the typical depiction of Bruce Wayne in the comics and what we've come to except from Hollywood action movie stars. Keaton plays Wayne as an unassuming, charming, and witty eccentric, his lack of imposing stature and physique makes it that much easier to believe his secret identity is secure, because Batman's sculpted body armour makes him look much bigger.
Keaton is easily the most charismatic actor to have held the role so far, and his Bruce is definitely the most likable.
Even so, when as Batman he must rescue Vicki Vale from the Joker he is careful not to have her see him too close in good lighting.
He also disguises his voice, but thankfully only to a reasonable degree, unlike Christian Bale's cartoonish growl and Batfleck's unnecessary voice modulator. The fact that Bruce Wayne and Batman sound alike is something that Hollywood is convinced is a major problem that needs to be addressed in the movies, despite the fact that nobody in real life actually cares about it.
The identity issue is one he goes back and forth on as he gets closer to Vale, and while he thinks hard over the question of whether or not to tell her it is actually revealed to her quite unceremoniously, as Alfred allows her into the Batcave. It can be assumed that Bruce wanted this, or gave up and realised that it would be better to show her than tell her who he was, since his reaction is completely without surprise or worry when she arrives.
It was a last-minute addition to the script randomly thrown in during a writer's strike (much like the dumb idea of Jack Napier/the Joker being the Waynes' murderer) and was an obvious ploy to lazily avoid having to actually write a scene between the two characters where the secret was revealed.
The film features an extremely theatrical Batman. He does a lot of impractical things for dramatic effect, for image's sake, to lend himself a kind of supernatural mystique. Compared with later more “realistic” interpretations, it is pretty far out there in terms of how he acts and how people react to him. It's very stage-y, and your willingness and ability to accept that realism is not what Burton is interested in will probably impact heavily on your overall feelings about the film. This is not super-genius ninja Batman who takes out a whole room full of thugs without them even seeing him. In some ways he's more like Marvel's “anti-Batman” Moon Knight, who makes sure the bad guys see him coming and who will gladly withstand being beaten half to death if it gets the job done. In a time before superhero films and TV shows started to get gritty, the hits Batman takes are fairly soft, and there isn't much blood in the film, but he does find himself on a couple of occasions in real struggles with Joker's henchmen. I think this works here mainly because Keaton is not a big beefy dude, he's an average-sized dude, and he uses his gadgets and his wits to get the upper hand on opponents who are often physically stronger than he is.
That's an interesting view. I'm not necessarily opposed to an alternate take on Batman, but my problem is that Burtman seems to rely on blind luck as much as he does on his gadgets and wits. The very first thing he does in this movie is get shot and fall down! Later on, he's incapacitated by gunshots again, and could have very easily been casually executed with a headshot (roughly the 3:10 mark):
And then there's the fight during the climax (which I have posted before, but it merits another look), which is just embarrassing to watch (roughly the 1:30 mark):
He's not fighting Bane here. He's fighting a generic, nameless thug who bizarrely resembles Ray Charles, and he's getting his ass kicked. Maybe the intention was that he was trying to tire him out, or lull him into a false sense of security or something, but none of that is communicated to the audience. This looks simply like Batman was getting a one-sided smackdown from a typical heavy until he managed to essentially blunder his way into victory via murder.
That being said, a lot of the problems with the action scenes were undoubtedly due to the limitations of the awful Batsuit. Even as a kid, I could tell that the suit was a piece of shit. Keaton can barely move in it, to say nothing of fighting. Frankly, all the live-action Batsuits were shitty up until BvS. Apparently it took that long for Hollywood to realize that what they needed was a good costume, not an actual suit of armor.
Opposite Keaton, Jack Nicholson is cast as the Joker. I almost don't want to talk about it, because it is such a classic, ubiquitous performance...
I don't agree with this at all. Nicholson is a fantastic actor, but in this movie he basically just plays himself dialed up to eleven. Like with Batman, I'm not opposed to an alternate take on the Joker (insert obvious reference to Heath Ledger's performance in TDK here), but it feels very lazy to me to have it be so heavily informed by the movie star who happened to end up in the role. There's nothing transformative or iconic about his performance; it's exactly what you'd expect when you think of Jack Nicholson playing the Joker. Even Jared Leto - no, wait, that's going too far. My apologies. To put it a better way, I don't feel like this Joker is insane, or that he's even a genuine foil to Batman. His shtick is too affected, too rehearsed, too forced. And that might have been interesting if it was intentional, but I really don't think it was - I think Burton just decided to let Nicholson's scenery-chewing essentially define the character.
While Burton is often quoted as saying that he was never big into comic books, much is made of his endorsement of The Killing Joke, an Alan Moore one-shot that came out the previous year, and whose depiction of Batman and Joker has coloured pretty much everything since. Alan Moore himself, noted curmudgeon who enjoys shitting on mainstream comics whenever he gets the chance, said that it was “far too violent and sexualised a treatment for a simplistic comic book character like Batman and a regrettable misstep on my part”. But Moore's insistence that Batman just doesn't have the complexity as a character to handle that kind of material has fallen on deaf ears, generally speaking. In any case, for all that Burton apparently makes of Moore's disowned work, it doesn't actually seem to have imprinted on the film at all.
This is an interesting subject. Many capeshit fans consider Burton's endorsement of
The Killing Joke, along with DC's eagerness to use said endorsement as a marketing point, as a condescending backhand against capeshit in general. It's meant to appeal to people who, like Burton, weren't ordinarily fans of comics, and so it represents the age-old fear of becoming too mainstream. As for Moore, I suspect that his dislike of his comic is really more about the impact it had on the character and capeshit in general than the comic itself. Like you said, though, this doesn't have much to do with the movie itself. Burton is known for directing a Batman movie, and he's known for liking a famous Batman comic, so popular consciousness has simply mashed those two facts together.
I'm not crazy about Kim Basinger as an actor, but Vale is a fun and likeable character, one notable issue with the portrayal—and this is not necessarily Basinger's fault—being that she screams and faints and all that stereotypically womanly stuff despite supposedly being a hardened war photographer. It's something that feels a little dated now since women have become more prominent and active in action movies, and especially superhero movies, in recent years, but even without all that taken into consideration it's just not great writing.
It was dated even for 1989. It was probably meant to be part of Burton's homages to classic horror cinema you talked about, as many of those films feature a screaming, though largely passive woman being victimized by the monster or villain.
For myself, the successes of this movie largely lie in style over substance. The set design is terrific, Elfman's score is magnificent, and a great cast give it their all. But underneath these cool superficial elements, there's none of the heart that's been present in all of Burton's good movies. There was definitely more of an effort on that front with the sequel, for better or worse. I haven't seen it in years, though, and will need to revisit it before offering further opinions.