At Long Last “The Batman” Trailer Reveals Robert Pattinson as Caped Crusader
At long last, the Caped Crusader is back.
The above almost rhymes. Add a question at the end, and you could make yourself a riddle. Now that Warner Bros. and writer/director Matt Reeves have revealed the first trailer for The Batman at the DC FanDome event this past Saturday, we finally know a few things about the film’s plot. And the most major thing of all—aside from the unique look and feel of Reeves’ vision of Batman and Gotham—is that it appears the Riddler is the film’s main villain.
The first indication that we’re in a completely different Gotham isn’t the look, actually, but the sound. The trailer is scored to Nirvana’s “Something in the Way,” one of the moodiest pieces of music that the legendary band ever released. That might say something about Reeves’ listening tastes (he’s firmly in the Nirvana generation), but it also says quite a lot about The Batman‘s aesthetic. Christopher Nolan returned Batman and Gotham to their noir roots, but it was on an epic scale. Here, at least in this first glimpse, Reeves’ The Batman looks to be exactly as he promised—a noir detective story, less epic than gritty and ghoulish.
If Batman’s nemesis here truly is Paul Dano’s The Riddler—and all indications in the trailer suggest it is—then we’re in for a treat. We’ve already written why Dano will make a wonderful villain. The Riddler sends a little note to Batman, along with a dead body: “From your secret friend. Who? Haven’t a clue. Let’s play a game. Just me and you.”
Joining Pattinson, who, by the way, looks pretty excellent as a younger, leaner, much more goth Bruce Wayne, is Jeffrey Wright as detective James Gordon, and we got a glimpse of Zoe Kravitz as Catwoman. Missing entirely is Colin Farrell as the Penguin.
We also get a sense of who Bruce Wayne/Batman is, and he seems a lot more vigilante than superhero here. He beats a bad guy absolutely senseless, and there’s real malice and rage in the action. The Batmobile is more gnarly muscle car than the military-grade super-vehicle it was as the Tumblr in Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy.
The trailer is lean and mean, which is fitting. The Batman heads back into production (fingers crossed!) this September, after having to shut down this past March due to COVID-19. The film is scheduled to hit theaters on October 1, 2021. The perfect release date, in our humble opinion.
Check out the trailer here:
Featured image: An image from writer/director Matt Reeves ‘The Batman.’ Courtesy Reeves/Warner Bros.
