In the first of four adventures, Batman (Michael Keaton) battles the Joker (Jack Nicholson) and romances Vicki Vale (Kim Basinger).

Three years later he returns to save Gotham City from the Penguin (Danny DeVito) and Catwoman (Michelle Pfeiffer).

Three years after that the Caped Crusader (now played by Val Kilmer) teams up with Robin (Chris O’Donnell) to battle Two-Face (Tommy Lee Jones) and the Riddler (Jim Carrey), occasionally taking time off to romance Dr. Chase Meridian (Nicole Kidman).

Two years later the Dark Knight (now played by George Clooney) and the Boy Wonder return to battle the combined might of Dr. Freeze (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and Poison Ivy (Uma Thurman), this time with a little help from Batgirl (Alicia Silverstone).

CRITIQUE

Watching these movies today is a something of a strange experience. It hasn’t been that long since they were first released (although I do feel old when I think about how long it’s been since Batman first hit), but they nevertheless feel like relics of a bygone era. Many summer blockbusters are still big, loud, and gaudy, but these movies are big, loud, and gaudy in a totally different way.

Cutting the plastic wrap on this package is akin to opening up a time capsule; I can’t help but think those who are just now receiving their first exposure to these movies will wonder what all of the fuss was about.

I was fresh out of my first year of college when Tim Burton’s Batman was released way back in the summer of 1989. For those of you who don’t remember that time, it was impossible to escape the marketing juggernaut that worked overtime to ensure that every single living being on the planet knew the movie was coming. Hell, there was even a banner ad in my college’s post office (which a friend of mine stole while I stood point).

There was no way to escape it, and escape it I didn’t. I saw Batman opening day with a couple of friends of mine (one of them yelled out “Tough!” during the bit where the Batwing is silhouetted against the moon, and the other made us listen to a tape of the songs Prince recorded for the movie on the way to the theater).

I also bought the VHS version when it was released later that year (back when first-run priced-to-sell tapes were still something of an oddity), which I watched until I became sick of it, which seemed to be a common occurrence. A lot of people were caught up in the hype, but this enthusiasm eventually gave way to a malaise.

By the time Batman Returns came along in 1992, many moviegoers got a feeling of this again? and stayed home. Warner Brothers pumped nearly twice as many bucks into the budget of Returns but ended up with a significantly smaller gross. True, they did give Burton a free hand (whereas the first movie was, and still is, a prime example of how a committee got together and contrived an appeal-to-everyone blockbuster), meaning they got a much darker, more personal, more idiosyncratic movie (it’s essentially a grotesque pop opera, and not really suitable for the kiddies), which naturally wouldn’t appeal to the same number of people, but I can remember that a lot of people simply didn’t care about it at all.

I know I’ve stated before that I think Burton’s movies pale in comparison to Christopher Nolan’s magnificent reboot, but I really don’t dislike them (and if I say I do, I’m likely just being an ass). My main problem with both of them is they’re not really Batman movies. Despite his statements to the contrary, it’s obvious Burton isn’t interested in the title character; his heart belongs to the villains, which is perfectly fine in the sequel, but it’s not a wise move in the first movie.

You can’t introduce a main character in a movie in which the focus is largely on the nemesis. I know they paid Nicholson an ungodly amount of money (his backend deal, which included a cut of the revenue from the numerous tie-ins, was outrageous), and I know he was a much bigger name than Keaton, but his Joker is too visible to be a good villain. Much like Hannibal Lecter, the more he’s seen the less frightening he becomes. He’s supposed to be psychotic, but he’s also a buffoon, and the scales tip heavily toward buffoon as the movie goes on.

It gets a laugh when the Joker kills someone in cold blood, which is sort of self-defeating. Another problem is tying the Joker to Batman’s origin. Making him the killer of Bruce Wayne’s parents is stupid. I agree with the idea that Bruce Wayne stops being Batman the moment he attains vengeance for his parents’ murders; you have to deny him the opportunity for vengeance in order to keep him going.

Another major fault is the movie’s climax. Heavily rewritten late in the game (reportedly at the behest of producer Jon Peters, who was dating Basinger at the time and wanted to beef up her role), it goes on far too long, is almost completely devoid of energy, and is illogical in the extreme (I don’t know why the Joker even bothers to climb to the top of the cathedral tower, nor do I know why several of his goons are already waiting inside).

The movie is definitely a mixed bag; while the committee approach worked in terms of putting butts in the seats, the finished product does seem like a fish with wings.   

I didn’t care for Batman Returns when I first saw it, but over the years I’ve come to enjoy it. Like I said, it’s not a Batman movie, but is more a Burton movie with someone else’s characters tossed in. (Batman was a case of Burton playing in someone else’s sandbox, while Returns was a case of Burton stealing toys from someone else’s sandbox and playing with them in his own.)

The focus is definitely on the Penguin and Catwoman, which is good, as Burton is able to make them interesting, something he never could do with Batman. (All of that talk about these movies probing the psyche of their main character is nonsense.) Returns is funny, sick, and beyond absurd; it rarely makes any sense, and it looks as if Burton and his cohorts weren’t the least bit concerned with how anyone would react. It’s a full-bore Burton movie, possibly the one of his work-for-hire projects that is. Judged as such, it’s a pretty good movie.

What really sets these movies apart is their visual aesthetic. Burton and production designers Anton Furst (who won an Oscar for his work on the first movie and committed suicide in late 1991) and Bo Welch (who should have won an Oscar for his work on Returns but stupidly wasn’t even nominated) created a world that resembles a mixture or retro futurism, film noir, Art Deco, and German Expressionism. It’s effectiveness is somewhat compromised by the execution (it’s obvious everything was shot on soundstages, and some of the miniature buildings look like shoeboxes with slits cut out), but in terms of the look itself it’s still fantastic.

The cinematography of both movies is grand, with Roger Pratt setting a rich, dark template on Batman and Stefan Czapsky taking it to even greater heights on Returns. There’s also some fun to be had in the visual effects, which are a combination of the quaint and the antiquated. Returns makes use of miniatures and crude CGI, while Batman relies almost exclusively on model work executed by the late Derek Meddings (famous for his work with Gerry Anderson and his association with the Bond flicks). Meddings’s work wasn’t so hot twenty years ago (and was seriously upstaged by the effects in The Abyss, which was released a month after Batman), but it’s since taken on a weird charm, similar to that of seeing a man in a rubber suit stomp on model tanks (dig those balloons near the climax).

Burton didn’t want to make a third movie (although he remained onboard as a producer), and Keaton, who’d had enough, turned down a fat check, so Warner turned to director Joel Schumacher, who’d been turning out modest hits for the studio for the past couple of years. Val Kilmer was brought in to don the cowl, Robin was finally introduced (after being cut from both previous movies) and the result was 1995’s Batman Forever, a far more family-friendly, licensor-friendly movie than Returns.

I know there’s a lot of disdain for this movie, but I don’t get it. I think people who bitch and moan about it are perhaps they’re just mad it isn’t another Burton movie. (How else do you explain how people quibble about the physics of having the Batmobile scale the side of a building but don’t wonder why those penguins in Returns don’t singe their asses when they launch those rockets that are strapped to their backs?)

I think Forever is the best example of pure and simple “comic book” moviemaking--a phrase I don’t mean as an insult--the series has to offer. The action is well mounted (marking a significant improvement over Burton’s clunky action sequences), the effects are good (although now they’re a little dated), and there’s not an ounce of pretense on display. Hell, I’m not even that annoyed by Jim Carrey, whose presence in anything normally triggers my gag reflex.

Its almost complete lack of angst makes Batman Forever something of an oddity in the Batman canon, but in the end it’s just big, slick, dumb fun. But it could have been better. Schumacher’s original intent was to make a movie more akin to Burton’s original, but some of the darker material was ordered cut by the studio, and it’s disappointing that he hasn’t been allowed to revisit it.

Furthermore, it is clear no one had a firm grasp on Two-Face, so he’s unwisely presented as something of a watered-down Joker. (And why was poor Billy Dee traded for Tommy Lee?) Despite what a lot of people seem to think, Batman Returns commits no major crime, unless of course you count the fact it was popular enough to warrant the inevitable sequel.

Ah, Batman & Robin. One of the most hated, maligned, mocked, and ridiculed movies ever made. And all of this negativity is completely justified. I knew this movie was going to be awful the first time I saw the trailer, and see it was all I did.

This was back in early 1997, and the trailer ran before the rerelease of The Empire Strikes Back. The projectionist forgot to turn on the sound, so my fellow audience members and I got only the visuals, which was more than enough. To me it looked like the old ‘60s TV series crossed with Xanadu, and when I finally saw the movie (I held out for the better part of a decade) I was surprised by how on-the-money I had been.

The movie is a Day-glo nightmare, full of overblown action sequences, bad performances, unfunny jokes and lame one-liners (way too many of them), and overstuffed with unnecessary characters. Did we need yet another disposable love interest for Bruce Wayne? Did we need thirty-five villains? (I know that’s an exaggeration, but it’s not far off.) Did we need even bigger nipples on the suits? Did we need forty-five ass shots in the first five minutes? (Again an exaggeration, but it’s not far off.)

Did we need Alicia Silverstone at all? (Anyone else recall all of those “Fatgirl” jokes?) And who the hell thought Arnold Schwarzenegger could pass himself off as a scientist? What Schumacher and writer Akiva Goldsman (he has an Oscar, you know) offer here is a two-hour string of one bad idea after another. Nothing --absolutely nothing -- works. But I’m glad it didn’t work, and I’m glad it underperformed. Why? Because it killed the franchise and allowed Christopher Nolan to come in several years later, something a better movie wouldn’t have made possible.

THE VIDEO

Each movie is given a 1.85:1/1080p transfer, encoded with VC-1 and slapped onto a 50GB disc. Given their vintage and wildly varying styles, all of the movies look damned good.

Batman has a slightly soft edge, and blacks aren’t as strong as they should be, but I’ve seen the movie enough times in enough formats to know this is characteristic of any presentation. Detail is given a significant boost, and colors have never looked better (especially the odd bright primaries, which contrast nicely with all of the grays).

Batman Returns offers a step up; with a bigger budget and all of the visual kinks worked out, there’s an increased richness in the darker shades and a more vivid saturation in the brighter tones (check out the early shot of Alfred carrying the red shopping bag across the snowy city square to see all of this in play). The image here is also sharper and more detailed.

Batman Forever, with its oversaturated primaries and deep blacks, looks great, and gets my vote for the strongest transfer of the bunch. It’s definitely the most detailed and immediately eye-popping of the four, capturing the intended comic book-esque look of the movie extremely well.

Batman & Robin isn’t quite as strong, although the fact that colors are pushed even more into the realm of a love-action cartoon is largely to blame. Hues here are overblown and unnatural; combine this with an inherent softness and you end up with sapped detail and some crushed blacks.

THE AUDIO

Each film also gets a Dolby TrueHD 5.1 audio track. As you might expect, the upgrades here become more noticeable as the series trudges on. (This set provides a good lesson on how movie sound evolved over the course of the series’ eight years.)

Batman has always had a sludgy, murky sound, and while the remix here does help open it up a bit, it’s still hampered by the source mix. There’s a good stereo spread, but surround action is sparse. Effects still sound canned, bass is weak, and Danny Elfman’s classic score is somewhat constricted. (Elfman was reportedly unhappy with the way the score was mixed, and I don’t blame him.)

Batman Returns was the first feature film released with a Dolby Digital soundtrack (the first film likely had a 6-track mix prepared for 70mm showings), and the mix is more spacious, but the fact that digital sound was in its infancy is obvious. Dialogue and effects sound better, but the low end still has little power. Surround action is more plentiful, although still quite spotty by modern standards. Elfman’s music benefits most; it’s never sounded better.

There’s a huge leap between Batman Returns and Batman Forever, which sounds great. The surrounds are put to better--and more frequent--use, dialogue has a more natural sound, and the low end finally begins to thrum.

Batman & Robin exhibits a very similar sound; the bombast has been ratcheted up a notch, but it’s a tie between Robin and Returns as to the best sounding of the four. Dolby Digital soundtracks include English 5.1 tracks for each movie, as well as French, Spanish, German, Italian, and Portuguese dubs (which vary in aural configuration from disc to disc).

THE EXTRAS

All of the extras from Warner’s 2005 standard-def Anthology box have been ported over to this set.

All of the video-based extras have been given an upgrade to VC-1 encoding--albeit with low bit-rates, so the upswing in quality is minor, especially on the vintage material--but unfortunately they have ‘not’ been reformatted for widescreen displays.

The breakdown goes something like this:

Batman and Returns feature commentaries by Tim Burton. Burton has thankfully improved over the years when it comes to commentaries, and this pair is pretty good. The first is a bit spotty (due quiet likely to the movie’s information oversaturation and Burton’s ambivalence to the whole enterprise), but the second is solid.

Forever and Robin feature commentaries by Joel Schumacher. Schumacher makes no bones about his directorial decisions, defending and explaining his choices. He does apologize to those who think Robin is a complete debacle, and he’s so affable in doing so that it’s hard not to cut him some slack. (I’ll cut him some slack for somehow turning unreadable John Grisham novels into surprisingly watchable movies. Any man who can do that surely isn’t history’s greatest monster.)

Spread across the four Blu-ray discs is the 6-part documentary Shadows of the Bat: The Cinematic Saga of the Dark Knight (parts 1-3 on Batman, the remaining discs getting one segment each), which runs just over two-and-a-half hours (Batman’s segment total roughly an hour, while the remaining segments run roughly thirty minutes each). It begins with a look at Batman’s long road to the big screen, beginning with the decade-long development hell, moves into the preproduction and production phases, and then repeats the process for the sequels. All of the major players are featured in interviews (including Sean Young!), and there’s some behind-the-scenes footage sprinkled about. 

All four discs also feature music videos. Batman has Prince’s “Batdance,” “Partyman,” and “Scandalous, while on Returns you’ll find Siouxsie and the Banshees’ “Face to Face.” Forever contains Seal’s “Kiss from a Rose,” while Robin has The Smashing Pumpkins’ “The End is the Beginning is the End,” Jewel’s “Foolish Games,” R. Kelly’s “Gotham City,” and Bone Thugs-N-Harmony’s “Look into My Eyes.” (The songs are all pretty worthless, but the Prince and Siouxsie videos are so pretentious and unintentionally funny they’re worth checking out.)

All four discs also showcase The Heroes and the Villains Profile Galleries for their respective movies. These short bits feature the filmmakers, actors, and comics fans/professionals offering biographical and background info on each movie’s good guys and bad guys. 

Each movie’s theatrical trailer is also housed on its respective disc.

The following features are exclusive to each disc:

DISC ONE – Batman features:

On the Set with Bob Kane (3 minutes) is a vintage interview with Batman’s late creator, conducted during the movie’s shoot at Pinewood Studios. 

Legends of the Dark Knight: The History of Batman (40 minutes) charts the origins and evolution of the character over his seventy-year comics history. Such fine folks as Harlan Ellison, Kevin Smith, Denny O’Neil, Mike Mignola, Alex Ross, Stan Lee, and Frank Miller appear in talking-head clips. 

Batman: The Complete Robin Storyboard Sequence (4 minutes) offers a look at a dropped sequence that would have introduced Batman’s sidekick late in the movie. The storyboards are sequenced together and dialogue is voiced by members of the cast of Batman: The Animated Series. (Good thing the sequence was dropped. Not only did it feature the infamous bit where Wayne changes into his Bat-garb while riding a horse, it also makes the Joker responsible for the death of Robin’s parents. Furthermore, it’s uncomfortably shoehorned into the action. It’s also just plain stupid.) 

A Documentary Gallery, which is comprised of the following self-explanatory featurettes (which cover topics not covered in the main documentary): Visualizing Gotham: The Production Design of Batman, Building the Batmobile, Those Wonderful Toys: The Props and Gadgets of Batman, Designing the Bat-Suit, From Jack to The Joker, and Nocturnal Overtures: The Music of Batman. (The total runtime of these featurettes is 45 minutes.)

DISC TWO – Batman Returns features:

The Bat, the Cat and the Penguin (23 minutes) is a promotional television special originally broadcast to coincide with the movie’s release (I remember watching it). It’s little more than an extended commercial, providing little more than a surface-level glimpse into the movie’s production.

A Documentary Gallery, which is comprised of the following featurettes: Gotham Revisited: The Production Design of Batman Returns, Sleek, Sexy and Sinister: The Costumes of Batman Returns, Making Up the Penguin, Assembling the Arctic Army, Bat, Mattes and the Dark Knight: The Visual Effects of Batman, and Inside the Elfman Studio: The Music of Batman Returns. (The total runtime here is 43 minutes.)   

DISC THREE – Batman Forever features:

A selection of deleted scenes (18 minutes), which hint at the darker tone Schumacher originally wanted. (The Two-Face material suggests that at some point someone perhaps did have a better grip on the character.)

Riddle Me This: Why is Batman Forever? (22 minutes) is another promotional television special, this one hosted by O’Donnell.

A Documentary Gallery, which is comprised of the following featurettes: Out of the Shadows: The Production Design of Batman Forever, The Many Faces of Gotham City, Knight Moves: The Stunts of Batman Forever, Imaging Forever: The Visual Effects of Batman Forever, and Scoring Forever: The Music of Batman Forever. (The total runtime here is 45 minutes.)

DISC FOUR – Batman & Robin features:

One deleted scene, Alfred’s Lost Love (1 minute), which is too short to even worry about.

A Documentary Gallery, which is comprised of the following featurettes: Bigger, Bolder, Brighter: The Production Design of Batman & Robin, Maximum Overdrive: The Vehicles of Batman & Robin, Dressed to Thrill: The Costumes of Batman & Robin, Frozen Freaks and Femmes Fatales: The Makeup of Batman & Robin, and Freeze Frame: The Visual Effects of Batman & Robin. (The total runtime here is 48 minutes.)

A Digital Copy of Batman is also included on a separate disc.

FINAL THOUGHTS

The presence of the fourth movie drags down the overall quality of this release, and the price is a little steep, but on the whole this is a nice, well-rounded package. I do wish they had also tossed in a copy of Catwoman and a hammer (for reasons that should be obvious), but I guess that wasn’t feasible.