Since Adam West’s iconic Batman landed in feature film format with the hilarious 1966 film of the same name, the big screen adaptations of DC’s Batman adventures have been tremendously diverse; Going from the vision in a Gothic key of Tim Burton to the realism of Christopher Nolanwithout forgetting the colorful delirium of Joel Schumacher.
But today we are going to stay with Burton and Nolan’s approaches to the Dark Knight and his universe; two very different bets for more than obvious reasons in terms of shape, aesthetics and intentions. But instead of starting to analyze, let the director of the imminent ‘Oppenheimer’ explain his point of view on the matter.
matter of realism
As he told in an interview with Verbicide, the big difference between his trilogy and the two Tim Burton films is none other than the nature of the world the character inhabits. In his case, he wanted an extraordinary entity like the Gothamite vigilante to inhabit the real world.
“If you look at what Tim Burton did, it’s specifically about a world that was created and that Batman fits into. It’s a great gothic vision that’s very cohesive and consistent with the character of Batman. Which I felt there wasn’t seen before, especially in the comics, it was an ordinary world that we could be living in Gotham.
When a Gothamite sees Batman, it’s just as extraordinary as it would be in our world. He wanted an extraordinary character embedded in an ordinary world. That’s not what Tim did, so I thought it was a completely different direction to go.”
In addition, as he told during a conversation with Film Comment, Nolan considers that his ‘Batman Begins’ was the movie that invented the concept of “reboot”. Almost nothing.
“It shows how quickly things change in the film industry, but conceptually there was no such thing as a ‘reboot.’ That idea didn’t exist when I first started looking at Batman. That’s new terminology. Warner Bros. had the rights to this wonderful character and I didn’t know what to do with him. He had hit a dead end with his previous iteration.”
Be that as it may, there is no doubt that the ‘Dark Knight’ trilogy —especially its first two installments— will always be remembered as one of the best adaptations of the comic to the big screen in history.
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