Robert Pattinson’s Batman Could Be the Most F*cked Up Yet
One of the film's screenwriters dropped some tantalizing hints about what to expect.
Thanks to some surreptitious photographs and director and co-screenwriter Matt Reeves’s tweets we know a bit about what The Batman will look like, but details on how Robert Pattinson will play the character and what the film will actually be about has been scarce. So it’s exciting that one of the screenwriters behind the film just laid out some vague but still illuminating intelligence about The Batman.
The Batman co-screenwriter Matson Tomlin recently spoke to Den of Geek, and while he was loath to throw back the veil of secrecy surrounding the film, Tomlin did offer some interesting peeks behind it.
“It’s the early days,” Tomlin said. “I think that, first of all, it’s a younger version than the most recent versions that we’ve seen.”
A younger Batman means, of course, a Batman both less removed from his parents’ death and less experienced as Gotham City’s vigilante savior. Younger suggests a brasher, less cautious Batman whose emotions might get him in trouble.
In line with this theory, Tomlin pointed to Reeves’s previous emotion-driven work, suggesting that action sequences will be less important than exploring the emotions of a younger Batman.
“I think that Matt Reeves as a filmmaker, if you look at any of his work, whether or not it’s Let Me In or Cloverfield or the Planet of the Apes movies, he’s always coming from a point of emotion, it’s never the big action thing,” Tomlin says. “It’s always, what is this character’s soul?”
Batman’s soul is always marked by the trauma of losing his parents, a point that Tomlin made in his final hint.
“I think that really looking at Batman as somebody who has gone through this trauma, and then everything that he’s doing is then a reaction to that, rather than shy away from that, I think this film leans into that in some very fun and surprising ways,” he says. “I think that’s all I can say without getting yelled at.”
A young, recently traumatized Batman in an emotionally-driven exploration of how he reacts to that trauma? Sounds like a perfect role for an actor whose big break was as a young, brooding vampire.
And if it somehow manages to be “fun and surprising,” we could have one of the best Batman movies yet when it (hopefully) opens on October 1, 2021.
