In 1992, I wanted dark and serious superhero movies because comic book reading was a dark and serious hobby for dark and serious 15 year olds like me. Back then, I probably would have liked that miserable Batman V. Superman: Dawn of Justice abortion. Instead, 1992 gave me an army of penguins with rockets attached to them and Catwoman saying “Life’s a bitch, now so am I”. It was the worst movie that my grandmother ever dropped me off at the theater to see.
Best I can remember, I never saw Batman Returns again after that. UNTIL NOW.
Twenty-five years later, it turns out that Batman Returns is really good. I was wrong. I was wrong about everything in 1992. Starting with my hairstyle (the hair is so often a perfect indicator of how full-of-shit someone is).
Tim Burton’s Batman sequel is sincerely campy on a near-Flash Gordon level. It’s colorful, crazed and kinky. Batman’s enemies here are essentially a dominatrix in head-to-toe sex shop latex and a misshapen pervert who cracks the dirtiest jokes he can get away with on a PG-13 rating. It’s the only mainstream comic book movie to acknowledge that the universe of superheroes and villains kinda resembles a big Fetish Ball.
Burton’s vision is on fire here. He seems to be on a mission to make up for his terrible first Batman movie (see the scene where Bruce Wayne chides Alfred over the previous film’s “Vicki Vale in the Batcave” head-scratcher). His 1989 film was the work of a young director in over his head, steering an unwieldy mega-budget ship and crashing it against nearly every iceberg in its path.
Funny thing though, Burton’s clumsy, stumbling robot of a movie was STILL A HIT. A huge hit. The kind of hit that makes careers.
From there, Burton got one of his pet childhood fantasies (Edward Scissorhands) turned into a big studio release that was also a hit. The result of all that is that in Batman Returns, you get a mega-confident DIRECTOR. You can see his signature in every snowflake that rushes across the screen (Batman Returns joins the likes of Gremlins and Die Hard as classic summer blockbusters set during Christmas). Burton’s weird side characters matter more than the special effects.
Not that the effects here are bad. Quite the opposite. They’re beautiful slices of Stan Winston analog absurdity. Exploding miniatures. Clever lighting. Wild, state-of-the-art make-up jobs. Robot penguins. The kind of thing you just don’t see much of today.
Ultimately, Tim Burton approached Batman as neither a comic book nerd nor as someone overly impressed by or interested in the lore. Tim Burton wants to make movies about freaks. That’s his take on Batman. This movie is a stark contrast to his previous entry in the series. In Batman, Batman and The Joker are diametric opposites. In Batman Returns, the villains are dark variations on the hero. All three pivotal characters here even strongly equate themselves with animals: bats, cats and penguins. Michael Keaton’s Bruce Wayne explicitly identifies with them both (his sympathy for The Penguin’s quest for information about his parents; his empathy for Catwoman’s duality). When the villains go down, it’s more sad than triumphant.
This movie was a freak in 1992 and is still a freak today. It doesn’t fit in at all with what superhero movies try to achieve in 2017. And hooray for that.