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 JohnHwangDD wrote:

 Paradigm wrote:
To be fair, Batman still hasn't gone out of his way to kill people;

That is completely untrue. Go watch Burton's Batman again. He literally explodes a goon into a red mist.




Best Batman kill, ever.

Totally deliberate and cold-blooded murder there.

Also one of the many reasons why I reckon the 80s/90s Batman films are mainly crap, and a terrible representation of the character. Batman killing in BvS can be rationalised by the world around him, what he's been through, where in his career he is, the tone of the setting as a whole; in those, he just kills/gets people killed with no explanation, reason or justification, he's just a cold-blooded murderer.

Honestly, I find those Burton ones are bad films period, but even worse Batman films, they seem to disregard the source material completely and take no more from the comics than 'there's a guy who dresses like a Bat who fights a guy who dresses like a clown'...

And to clarify, my original comment was stricly about the BvS Batman's behaviour, rather than the character in all his many iterations.

If we combine some Dark Knight Returns, Killing Joke and Red Hood...

We could imagine a situation where, we have a no-kill Batman, until Robin is killed by the Joker.We then have Batman pummeling Joker (I'm remember a line from something about Joker commenting '6 months in a bodycast') but doesn't kill the Joker.

Batman then retires and doesn't start again until after Man Of Steel. However, in the time between Man Of Steel and BVS he doesn't encounter any major villains. If anything, Bats entire focus on what he's Batmanning about is the kryptonite, any heroic other stuff is just coincidence.

Cause that's the thing, Batman doesn't care about anything else anymore. He doesn't go out of his way to kill the various mooks, he just literally does have no interest whether they lived out died as a result of his actions.

All that matters, indeed he says this, the only thing that matters in his entire life if taking down Superman. Joker crime sprees? Irrelevant. Maybe that's the link to the Suicide Squad?

Of course by the end of the film...

Po-tay-toe, po-tah-toe.

Batman is, and always has been, a criminally insane person with a murderous streak. Deliberate inaction to cause people's death is essentially similar to putting the dynamite in the goon's pants before shoving him down the stairs. There isn't even a hair to split.

If you're OK with Batman's kill count in BvS, you should be applauding him red misting that goon.
____

 Compel wrote:
All that matters, indeed he says this, the only thing that matters in his entire life if taking down Superman.

Or, more precisely, Intended Murder One.

 JohnHwangDD wrote:
Po-tay-toe, po-tah-toe.

Batman is, and always has been, a criminally insane person with a murderous streak. Deliberate inaction to cause people's death is essentially similar to putting the dynamite in the goon's pants before shoving him down the stairs. There isn't even a hair to split.

If you're OK with Batman's kill count in BvS, you should be applauding him red misting that goon.

I see a huge difference there, between a regular old crimefighting Batman breaking his one rule for a simple street thug just because he can (completely out of character for pretty much any comic version, even Miller's) and a Batman that is so utterly obsessed with bringing down an enemy he sees as a threat to humanity's very existence killing because as far as he's concerned, he absolutely cannot let anything get between him and his goal of saving the planet (not typical Batman, but in this situation not entirely implausible... and what's more, barely justifiable from an outside perspective, which makes it all the more interesting to watch this version of Batman and how this new world is challenging everything he stood for).

Nope. The Batman movies regularly have villains who intend to murder entire cities. Same as Superman did. No difference.

Consider Batman Begins - Ras is using a microwave bomb strong enough to boil all of the water in the underground pipes. Newsflash, people are mostly water. Microwaves are blocked by metal and pipes. It needs to be a thermonuclear type detonation to be powerful enough to boil the water through layers of earth and metal. That means the device will instantly vaporize all of the people in Gotham - the drug in the water supply would affect those survivors downwind of Gotham. At a minimum, people will have massive burns from the radiation as their surface skin is fried off by the reflecting microwaves.

Or are you saying that the World's Best Detective doesn't understand how microwaves work?

I'm partial to the theory that Batman did kill the Joker in this universe- and the "Damaged" right upon the forehead Joker is an ex-Robin.

I'm not a fan of that theory, mostly because my favourite Batman film ever is "Under the Red Hood" and I'd love to see that play out in Live Action.

Pretty sure there were solid rumours a while back that the first new Batman movie was going to be a Red Hood one, which I agree would be awesome. It's certainly one of my top 4 or 5 Batman comics I'd love to see in live action (the others being Night of Owls, Hush, Death of the Family, and maybe Knightfall, though Dark Knight Rises does that reasonably well).

Still think the Joker-Robin theory is rubbish, the 'evidence' is tenuous at best and more to the point, it would totally waste and ruin the character, I reckon.

 Da Boss wrote:
I'm sorry if it has already come up, but if this Batman uses guns and has no regard for the lives of scum, how is the Joker still alive for Suicide Squad? Are they retconning him to be bullet proof?

There's a difference between killing and murder. This Batman is clearly happier to use lethal force, but there's nothing saying he's willing to murder. What's really weird is the closest any movie Batman came to actual murder was Nolan's, in Batman Begins, when Batman elects to leave Ra's al Ghul to die.


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 Da Boss wrote:
The Burton film was also (in my view) wrong to have batman use guns. I mean if he's going to use guns SOMETIMES, why not just use them all the time?

Nolan's Batman also had guns stuck on vehicles.

Most of his schtick is based on the avoidance of firearms and killing. No need for batarangs if you can just blow someone away!

No film version of Batman ever just walks in to a fight with a gun, though. This current Batman uses a gun to launch a tracker, while other Batman versions might have used a scratch built device or thrown it or something. And of course, this Batman is happy to use a gun being wielded by a villain to shoot that villain's friends.

The latter doesn't bother me at all, to be honest. Again its the distinction between killing and murder, and it recognises the basic reality that if one guy walks in to a fight with dozens of bad guys then he really shouldn't be pulling his punches.

Using the gun to launch the tracker was rubbish though, it just looked wrong.

I think the bomb in the pants was simply Tim Burton being Tim Burton...it really had nothing to do with Batman or his history of walking the line of killing vs not killing....it was a *comedic gag* meant for some dark humor. To the casual movie goes they wouldn't know about Batman's history of never killing....and I honestly doubt that Burton concerned himself with that detail because the opportunity for a dark comedic moment rose and he took it (I doubt he even knew about the no killing policy).

I haven't read much of the comics since Bane...so I can't coment beyond what's happened much after that.

However....

Up until Burton's Batman gag death...I don't recall Batman ever killing anyone.

 JohnHwangDD wrote:
Or are you saying that the World's Best Detective doesn't understand how microwaves work?

No, everyone just knows that movie run on some junk science, including the people in that movie. No-one said 'but won't that kill all the people'. Batman didn't say that either, he knew his universe ran on junk science, and that understanding turned out to be correct when they turned on the ray gun and all the people were fine.

As for gun using....

Nolan's version used them.
Burton's version used them.

I think there is a difference between using them on someone...and using them to disable vehicles, enter buildings, etc.

Which is why the dream sequence Batman in BvS going uber Rambo and obliterating those guys in the desert mirrors so well with the ahole, dictator, and godlike Superman that Batman feared would happen.

 TheMeanDM wrote:
I think the bomb in the pants was simply Tim Burton being Tim Burton...it really had nothing to do with Batman or his history of walking the line of killing vs not killing....it was a *comedic gag* meant for some dark humor.

Batman also threw a dude down the tower in the first Batman movie. It wasn't comic, it was just disposing of a goon in what was clearly a lethal way. He's also killed people in the comics, in his very first solo comic, back in 1940, he hangs a dude from his batplane. It was only with the comics code that Batman stopped killing in the first place.

That said, it's fair to argue that just because a Batman story breaks a rule it doesn't make it okay for future Batman's to break rules. Schumacher's batnipples does not make it okay for future batnipples I get that, and understand everyone, including me, has a perfect Batman inside their heads, which doesn't necessarily align to every single instance in which he's been shown.

So I think the more useful conversation is about what everyone's own version of Batman will and won't do. I wouldn't be okay with Batman as a murderer - choosing to let a helpless Ra's al Ghul die bothered more more than the use of lethal force in the new movie. But I am okay with a Batman who doesn't pull his punches as an absolute rule, who is willing to use lethal force when the situation justifies it. I think interpretation keeps with my version of Batman, and requires less plot contrivances, where bad guys are always near enough and non-threatening enough that non-lethal attacks can be used.


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 TheMeanDM wrote:
I think there is a difference between using them on someone...and using them to disable vehicles, enter buildings, etc.

Sure, and part of that is a writer's contrivance. The idea that Batman can fire cannons attached to a motorbike and always hit the car in just the right place that the car is disabled, but never accidentally kill any of the goons in the car is a contrivance. Or that he can shoot through a wall and there's never anybody on the other side who's about to have a really bad day.

I think a lot of people are happy with the idea that of course he can do that, he's fething Batman, but I don't think that's the only way the character can be. An interpretation that I think is at least as equally interesting is a Batman who won't murder, but who accepts sometimes bad guys die when you go about fighting them lethal weapons.

I would have preferred if they'd done it more in line with Miller's Dark Knight Returns, I think the build up in there was significantly better as there was years of tension and disagreement built up between the two rather than blind anger at meeting. In DKR they are more like brothers that have a deep divide on how they view justice at it's core, they know each other very well which makes it far more heated and intense sort of like having a scenario with brothers opposing each other in the civil war.

In DKR Batman uses plenty of lethal force which is sort of the point to illustrate where his inner darkness has grown to, he's dedicated years trying to keeping his last shred humanity alive by not killing despite living in a world that would be better off if the villains were simply erased. Because he refuses to kill he sees other people suffer time after time, and he's haunted by Robin's death after he allowed the Joker to live after the millionth time. He is conflicted because no matter what he does it's ineffectual, the criminals always just return to their ways and it's an endless cycle of pain and death of innocents. He's one man standing against the tide and he knows he's losing.

When he fights the much younger and more physically able gang members he realizes he can't afford to pull punches anymore as he puts himself at risk himself more than he ever did and it's a losing battle. He uses military weaponry to turn Gotham into a literal warzone, the batmobile is replaced by the bat-tank and he uses it against a lot of gang members, machine guns & tank rounds he adopts the attitude of "if you stand against me well then feth you it was your choice to risk death". He doesn't intend to murder them but he returns their level of violence in equal measure (and then some)

When he finally kills the Joker it's a very deliberate act because he simply can't allow him to harm others anymore. Decades of fighting him and hundreds of death it's caused have proven over and over that the Joker is beyond reform and there's only one way to end it. It's not a casual choice it's very premeditated and it's an act of deliberate murder and not simple fall out resulting from a fight.

It's also quite fitting that Batman stages his own death as in a way he does die when he makes that choice to kill Joker. Alfred dies and Wayne manor burns down which were what served as symbols of his moral compass. Without that he becomes consumed with the Bat demon spirit and becomes something much darker. (plus has the gak crazy sons of the bat behind him)


There were parts of the film that I liked but the dream sequence was terrible and did nothing for the story. Yes it hints at future films involving the league and Darkseid but it really messed with the pacing of the film and there was no explanation or resolution for that scene so it's jarring and highly confusing. I only have a very vague passing knowledge of that stuff so I couldn't make any connection to what the heck was going on in that sequence and as a result I was scratching my head for the rest of the movie wondering how or where it'd fit in, which it never does. It felt like they'd gotten the reels out of order or a scene from a completely different movie got spliced in on accident. Proper foreshadowing should be completed within the film, or go the route like Marvel does with having their "to be continued" tie in sequence at the very end of the film.

The Bat armor was pretty awesome, although I would have liked to see it sucking power from the whole city grid in order to fight Superman as it's a good way to show just what level of force is needed to deal with Superman. Having him blasted in the face with mega tons of energy just to get a nose bleed was a great panel.

 TheMeanDM wrote:
I think the bomb in the pants was simply Tim Burton being Tim Burton...it really had nothing to do with Batman or his history of walking the line of killing vs not killing....it was a *comedic gag* meant for some dark humor. To the casual movie goes they wouldn't know about Batman's history of never killing....and I honestly doubt that Burton concerned himself with that detail because the opportunity for a dark comedic moment rose and he took it (I doubt he even knew about the no killing policy).

Up until Burton's Batman gag death...I don't recall Batman ever killing anyone.

Burton's Batman kills people for fun? OK.

Prior to Burton's Batman, mainstream comics were pretty much pure crap. Holy Camp!, the only Batman we saw was Adam West hamming it up with his underage male lover.

For what it's worth, in Dark Knight Returns, Batman doesn't kill the Joker, he just very, very nearly killed him. Ultimately the Joker breaks his own neck to frame Batman as the killer.

Yes, exactly. The point is that even when everything has gone to hell as much as it has, and even with Bats almost off his rocker with the stress, fatigue and rage, he still can't kill the Joker.

When I read it, I found it an extremely powerful sequence, made all the moreso by the Joker's last spiteful act of self destruction to spit in his eye.

Sebster: I can see your POV, but I prefer my batman to be the hero that clings to his morals even when they don't make sense. Who does not compromise his code no matter what. I think that is actually a flaw that batman has, and it's an interesting one when explored by a competent writer. Sometimes killing people makes sense. Supes did that with the supervillains who were too powerful to let live. He didn't like it, but he knew he had to do it. That's an interesting difference to me.

Anyhow. I'm obviously pissing into the wind with this argument.

On another level, as someone who is interested in having a variety of heroes for kids to look at, I am disappointed by the only anti-gun action hero I can think of becoming trigger happy. This is definitely a more personal thing, but I also dropped Doctor Who immediately when Matt Smith started waving a gun around/being okay with River Song doing it.

 Da Boss wrote:
I think that's pretty weak, sorry Para. The number of times the "Should I kill the Joker?" dilemma has played out, to do it any justice... I can't see it working.

A batman who is okay with killing would not keep any joker worth his evil, poisonous salt alive. The guy is like the antichrist of the DCU. It's arguable it's morally indefensible that no-one has killed him yet, he's that bad.

To me, the explanation is that the people making this movie did not really understand what makes a character like Batman work.

Just playing devil's advocate, remember Bruce's words to Alfred about the stakes. The Joker is a gangster that can be neutralized by some concrete walls and metal bars, and so that's all the farther Bruce needs to go with him. Meanwhile, if some mooks are effectively putting planetary survival at risk by standing between him and what he needs, then he'll do whatever's necessary, including more extreme measures.

 Da Boss wrote:
Sebster: I can see your POV, but I prefer my batman to be the hero that clings to his morals even when they don't make sense. Who does not compromise his code no matter what. I think that is actually a flaw that batman has, and it's an interesting one when explored by a competent writer. Sometimes killing people makes sense. Supes did that with the supervillains who were too powerful to let live. He didn't like it, but he knew he had to do it. That's an interesting difference to me.

Anyhow. I'm obviously pissing into the wind with this argument.

Not pissing in to the wind at all. I think it's a really interesting conversation, not just in to Batman but in to how we each follow all these characters that are shared by storytellers, across different mediums.

And for what's worth, Batman as the guy with these absolute morals, on guns and and killing, makes great sense given his origin, and can be used to drive some really interesting Batman stories. But I'm also happy to see Batman taken another way.

So, I saw it last night.

I loved it. In the context of it as a "world setup" for Justice League, I felt like the whole "Meta Human Dossiers" was a great little way for us to see what was coming and show off the actors without things being too crazy stretched out.
Loved The Flash's time travel and his "Am I too soon? Has it happened yet?". His 'battle armor' was a bit of an interesting take, as he had a normal costume underneath as well. Wonder where they're going with that?
Can't really think of too much to say negatively beyond the pacing that others have mentioned.

I absolutely adored the score during the fight scenes. It was great hearing a distinctive 'sound' for each hero, and I really thought that the music really got perfect once it was all three of them fighting Doomsday.

Speaking of, Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman? Friggin' nailed it. That moment where she gets clobbered by Doomsday and just shakes it off with a grin that seems to say "Finally! A good fight!" just made me that much more excited for next June!

So per Jai Courtney, the reshoots for SS are more about action. Regarding humor, he said something about there being plenty of that in there already, and that we shouldn't believe everything we read.




In other (possibly SS-related?) news, WB has moved WW up a couple weeks, and added slots for DC films in 2018 and 2019. Let the guessing begin about those. I think the lead contenders are Affleck's Batman film, Suicide Squad 2, and Lobo.

I've been reading the early Batman stories reprinted in the 'Chronicles' paperbacks, and Batman's attitude towards killing is fairly casual. It shows how much the character has changed from that into the 60s camp, then the 80s grit, and to a more moderate character today.

In these early issues he's killed villains by kicking them in the neck and breaking it, or in the case of the man-monsters (transformed victims of Hugo Strange) hangs one by the neck from his bat-plane until they die and than says 'he's probably better off this way'. More often the villains die just as a result of his fighting them, but he rarely shows remorse. Batman dodged a villain who falls in acid and dies, to which Baman says that it's 'a fitting end for his kind'. In a more recent strip, a man becomes a Jekyll and Hyde villain after a bang on the head. While in a confused state between being good and bad personalities, Batman punches him down a flight of stairs and breaks his neck, but charitably Batman describes him as 'the only time I was sorry to see a criminal die'. In Joker's second appearance, he's recovering from his near fatal stab wound from the first story, upon reading in the newspaper that he's still alive (no bat-computer yet) Batman decides that he will abduct the Joker from hospital while still in a weakened state to take him to a brain surgeon for an operation to turn him into 'a valuable citizen' again.

That was a long time ago, though. It is probably safe to say that relatively few Batman fans base their enjoyment of him upon the very earliest comic strips...

Given the relative importance of movies, it is probably safe to say that Burton's Batman looms far larger than any comic arc ever published. Every Batman movie since then has been trying to turn Burton's "grit" to 11, and now Batman (v Supes) makes Supes dark & gritty. The DC Murderverse has heroes killing people left and right, because that's how Burton did it, and that's how it makes money. It only took a dozen films from Marvel, where responsibility mattered, for people to see Supes and finally ask "WTF?"

Maybe you are right John. But as a comic fan first, that makes me a bit sad.

Sure, I get that, but if you look at comics revenue vs movie revenue, it's getting to be that comics are a labor of love, a self-funding development project that feeds movie production down the line.

That's certainly true. Comics are a niche.

But what I find interesting about them is that aside from TV soaps, they're one of the few media where the serial is the standard.

Serial media has some unique properties (and weaknesses) that make it fascinating to follow. And it gives the characters deep roots and a wealth of material for adaptation.

At this stage, DC could probably scrap the comics though and stick with stuff like cartoons and movies. The comics have been pretty poor for a long time.

I'd say Batman: The Dark Knight Returns looms fairly large over all of comics since its release in 1986, and even over Burton's Batman in 1989!

DKR is certainly pretty ground breaking.

It's not my favourite batman story though - that is still Knightfall.

But I was initially cautiously optimistic about this movie, given that I liked 300 and Watchmen and felt that the issues with MoS were script rather than director related.

David Goyer killed that, unfortunately!

The Clone Wars is arguably the best serial I've seen in quite a while - it really elevates the Star Wars standard.

DC knows they have problems with the comics, hence the repeated "reboot" of their comics and continuity. NO clue who's running the show there, but I have no confidence that they know WTF they're doing.

Also, Knightfall - that's Jean Paul Valley, right? Azrael is a way better Batman than Bruce ever was.

Crazier, more batgak insane, more driven. I don't like his blue suit, tho.