Over the course of the character’s existence across all forms of media, Batman has been in a constant state of reinvention in order to move with the times and remain relevant, so each and every fresh spin on the Caped Crusader is seeking to bring something new to the table.
The longer Gotham City’s nocturnal protector remains a monolithic presence in popular culture, the harder that becomes, but we’ve got every confidence that Robert Pattinson will deliver a Bruce Wayne the likes of which we’ve never seen before when The Batman comes to theaters on Friday.
In fact, the actor has even been looking to some unexpected comic books for inspiration, after revealing to Entertainment Weekly that he’d been brushing up on Batman: Shaman, which went on to inform his methods of approaching the double life at the center of the Dark Knight’s existence.
“In this one, it felt like it was such a shock how smoothly you could move. You kind of end up moving like more of a wraith. There’s a scene right in the beginning of the movie where I’m kind of crouching over, investigating this dead body. And I really wanted [it to feel like] a sort of druid.
I was trying to play that, trying to think: “How can you be a detective when you are wearing this outfit, which is the opposite of a detective?” I thought, it’s kind of [like] he’s a witch doctor more than anything else. And the more you get it right, the more the police believe him, and so they start letting him into crime scenes and stuff.”
Despite the witch doctor connotations, we can safely say that Pattinson’s Batman isn’t going to swoop into battle with a war cry of “Ooh ee, ooh ah ah, ting tang, walla-walla bing-bang”. Instead, it adds another intriguing layer to a performance we’re very excited to see unfold on the big screen, especially when the leading man has been naming all sorts of surprising sources as his research materials.
