BATMAN RETURNS
The operatic, imaginative, highly artistic interpretation of The Batman & his word make it the only Batman movie I really care about ...
His knight-like armour is kind of cool and novel. The catwoman outfit is unsurpassed in coolness. It's got it all ... highly attractive, fetishistic, it's humourous (with the little, strategically-placed tears & obvious stitches <along with the little cat ears>). And contrasting her with the sexually desperate & "ghastly grotesque" Penguin was brilliant. Max Shrek was alright, too. The batmobile is supremely cool ... very masculine and powerful ... the perfect wheels for its intended driver. The city itself is really cool looking ... very dark and menacing ... and unreal, in the sense that it's obviously not real. It's a set of some kind, it's on a lot somewhere, it's not on location, as it were ... and I love that.
Otherwise, the only real gripe I have about it is the time-wasting plan The Penguin has of killing Gotham's firstborn. This isn't the kind of franchise, or movie, that's going to have us see kids getting slaughtered, so it's not even satisfying when The Bat appears as a shadow and puts the kibosh to it. Unlike, say, a nuclear weapon. We know that Gotham's not getting nuked out of existence, but if a baddy threatened to use one, the thing could still go off and blow up other areas, or whatever else that allows the thing to remain as an interesting threat, until the end. But otherwise, catwoman's random dropping off the radar for a while, until the movie's climax was kind of awkward, too. Despite these shortcomings, the Artistry of Batman Returns, the gorgeous cinematography and the classiness of the whole production is just so sweet. I don't really care for Tim Burton's 1989 Batman or the other movies out there. I'm not really into comicbook characters, to begin with ...