Matt Reeves used Bruce Wayne’s family dilemma in The Batman to showcase a protagonist who’s still haunted by the legacy of the family he supposedly fights in the name of. While that twist isn’t new, given all the backstories in the comic books, this allowed Robert Pattinson’s version to aim for emotional highs that none of his predecessors managed in their respective runs.
According to the director, his Caped Crusader shares certain similarities with the Kennedys or the royals, in that he constantly has to deal with the family’s dark past and its implications. In Reeves’ own words while appearing on The Treatment podcast,
I was interested in the idea of him being at a stage where he couldn’t bear the weight of the history of being part of the Waynes. I thought he could be kind of like a member of the Kennedy family, like American royalty, or what a British royal would be in the wake of a tragedy and how there was a lens being put on you because of a family tragedy that you could never escape. And so his response would be to want to withdraw from all of that and not understand that in the mission of what he was trying to do to try and make sense of his life, he might be able to use that as a kind of mask or guise, that might be useful. He can’t figure any of that out yet.
Pattinson’s Bruce Wayne certainly has some figuring out to do in future installments if Reeves and the actor ever get around to making a sequel, which is supposedly in the works now that The Batman has managed to become a box office hit.
This latest Dark Knight flick dared to depict a version of the superhero who’s unsure of himself, and we can’t wait to see where Pattinson’s iteration will go from here on out.
The Batman is currently playing in theaters.
