Jesus fuck.
Half the movies released in 2021 danced around the two hour and 20 minute mark, some of them flirting with the mythical two bucks forty. But only arthouse critical darling Drive My Car dared to breach those already verging on ridiculous upward parameters for mainstream films ... and I suppose you could not really call Drive My Car "mainstream" anyway.
Well I guess this is full-on Drive My Batmobile.
Of course, the more shocking revelation is that there is a four-hour cut of the movie out there, one fans will certainly be petitioning to see the light of day if this movie tanks. (Which it won't. But they'll still ask for it.)
In addition to yet again indicating the extreme bloat of modern blockbuster filmmaking, a boring note for me to keep hitting on this blog, this reveals what my friend pointed out to me: That they are doing the whole fucking story again.
Oh please can we once again see Martha Wayne's pearls cascade to the pavement of that dank alley.
I was cautiously intrigued -- I'll stop short of calling it excited -- about a new Batman movie. The reality is that of course they were going to make another one, I just thought maybe the more prudent interval would have been another three to five years later than it actually happened. But, especially as a film critic, I am ultimately the recipient of whatever Hollywood wants to spew at me, and writing a bunch of reviews about how "it's too soon" or "it's too long" is as dull for me as it is for you.
The real issue is not the length, but the fact that the whole story needs to be told over again from the beginning.
The devil's advocate argument justifying that choice is that it has now been almost a generation since Batman Begins in 2005, the last time this story was really told outside of a Lego movie. At least I don't recall that being in Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice, which makes sense as it dealt with both heroes, and one of them had already had a recent origin story in Man of Steel. So really, it's not that recently.
But given the prevalence of Batman in our culture, I think the argument that a new generation of fans needs to learn how Batman came to be Batman is bogus. When you reach about six years old, someone delivers you a memo on the playground about how Batman's parents were killed by a thug in an alleyway, and then he trained to become both a ripped vigilante and a louche playboy. And if that's not literally true then at least it is figuratively true.
The last film to make headlines for such a gargantuan length -- before Zack Snyder's Justice League, which I alluded to with talk of fans demanding four-hour cuts -- was Avengers: Endgame. While people were shocked about the three-hour length of that film, consider the particulars:
1) It featured 54 different superheroes, rather than just one superhero.
2) It was the culmination of 20+ movies.
3) I had a lot of work to do narratively to wrap up an arc that had been going on for 11 years.
The Batman cannot claim any of those excuses.
Then I also considered another disturbing possibility:
What if it's 175 minutes long without the origin story?
Jesus fuck.
I'll probably still see it on opening weekend.
No comments:
Post a Comment