More Batman, eh?

I watched the new trailer for The Batman.

Yawn.

I wouldn't have normally done so, since I try not to be spoiled on too much of the imagery for big new movies. I've been generally avoiding trailers for years and have talked about it many times on this blog, so I won't bore you by going back into that now.

But this year, I'm so starved for any kind of moving cinematic images that do not seem to have been designed for, or easily optimized for, a phone, that I'm willing to go against my usual rules of thumb on this.

Yawn.

I'm sorry, but is this really the best someone has to offer on a "reinterpretation" of the character? Somehow these images look exactly halfway between the way Christopher Nolan envisioned the character and the way Zack Snyder envisioned him. Just because it's not exactly like either doesn't mean it's not so in the neighborhood as to seem entirely superfluous.

To be honest, I've already forgotten half of what we even see in this trailer -- or maybe 75%. I do remember there's a part where Batman beats an opponent so vigorously, it sounds like he's pounding his fist into the squishy remainder of a corpse's face.

Yawn.

I've seen Batman be "dark" before. Like, a hundred times.

No no -- this is darker! 

Puh-leeze.

I recognize that a fair number of people whose opinions I trust are looking forward to this quite enthusiastically, maybe because for them, it'll have been nine years since they got the kind of Batman they wanted on screen. They're probably happy to just erase Batfleck from their memories entirely.

For me, the Nolan films are still fresh enough in my memory that I wouldn't feel like I needed a new Batman reboot now, even if there hadn't been a botched reboot still leaving a bad taste in our collective mouths.

It seems clear now that they are just going to keep rebooting this character ad infinitum, every seven years or so, which will coincide with the previous version running its course. If they do, maybe at least next time they can make Batman a POC.

The only really new way to left to reboot him, it seems, is to go back to his origins -- to his silly, slap-happy, sound-effects-on-screen origins.

Make Batman a comedy -- and not just Joss Whedon trying to add funny lines to a dour story -- and maybe I'll be genuinely excited again.