Ben Affleck was announced as the new Batman in Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel sequel last week. This, we all know. By now, there have been enough eloquent writers defending the casting decision; I certainly don’t need to add another piece into the mix.
What I would like to do, however, is revisit the movie that even the most ardent Batfleck doubters admit will likely be worse than anything Snyder and his new, well-chinned dark knight could possibly cook up.
Batman and Robin is unequivocally, a terrible movie. It’s like all the conspiracy theories of angry internet commentators made real; as if director Joel Schumacher, writer Akiva Goldsman and star George Clooney actually sat around a table and agreed to the pitch, ‘hey guys! Let’s make a goddawful Batman movie and crap on everyone’s days!’
That’s not what actually happened, of course. It’s worth looking back at the tumultuous history of Batman and Robin, because it paints a very vivid picture of how differently filmmakers and audiences perceived comic book movies back then. For all the things that irritate us about the genre today, we expect more from it than we ever did in 1997. There’s something to be said for that; some perspective to be gained from it.
Joel Schumacher was asked to return to the Batman franchise in the immediate wake of 1995's Batman Forever, which he also directed. Schumacher was getting ready to shoot A Time to Kill, but the studio wanted to fast-track the sequel in order to cash in on the cape and cowl’s current wave of popularity. Schumacher and writer Goldsman were thrust into the production on the fourth movie with little chance to reflect on the film they’d just completed.
“It did seem like the audience and the media and the studio – everyone wanted me to do another one,” said Schumacher in the ultra-revealing Batman and Robin Making of (where most of the quotes in this feature are drawn from). “And of course, everyone wanted to be involved. So, it was the opposite of Batman Forever where we had to go around and convince everyone… this was: how could we stop everyone? Everyone and their mother wanted to have their franchise in the movie and be part of it.
“Batman Forever kind of crept up on people. Batman and Robin was so over-hyped from the minute we said we were going to do it. I think that backfires many times – when you’re supposed to be a blockbuster, then you have to be.”
The hype machine for Schumacher's Batman and Robin was indeed running on a full tank of snake oil as soon as the film was given the greenlight. According to the director, the studio put immense pressure on him to make Batman and Robin bigger on every level in half the time. Without a coherent vision and a script rushed off during A Time to Kill’s pre-production, all Schumacher had to rely on was spectacle.
Chris O’Donnell, who returned as Robin, had misgivings that production on his second Batman movie began so fast. He claimed that making Batman Forever felt like making a film, whereas making Batman and Robin felt like making a “toy commercial.”
The rest of the cast were groping around for their characters like blind mice. Uma Thurman, who played Poison Ivy, likened comic book material to opera, an excuse to go as “big” as possible (and my god, did she go big). Arnold Schwarzenegger, who played Mr. Freeze, claimed he was only there because Schumacher said he couldn’t make the movie without him (and presumably a massive pay check had something to do with it). An uncharacteristically nervous George Clooney felt he had nowhere to go after Michael Keaton and Val Kilmer’s portrayals of the Dark Knight. Keaton’s portrayal was too iconic, Clooney thought, and Kilmer’s was too dark for him to travel down the ‘serious’ road.
“There were some pages originally that had him dealing with his parents being dead again,” said Clooney. “And I said, 'you know, he’s a 35 year old guy who lives in a giant mansion and has billions of dollars and goes out with the most beautiful women in the world and has the coolest toys and is Batman. And I don’t think anybody is going to feel sorry for and listen to a guy who goes ‘woe is me, my parents died when I was 4.’”
This superficiality united the film as a whole. The rumour goes that Schumacher used to yell out: “Remember! It’s a CARTOON!” before each take. When considering the canned sound effects, rent-a-dialogue and classic ‘hole-in-the-wall’ gags thrown in for good measure, I wouldn’t be surprised if this were true.
Yet it is important to acknowledge that Batman and Robin was very much a product of its time. In 1997 very few filmmakers were making superhero movies, and those who were hadn’t thought to look far beyond the masks into the dense and multi-faceted history of the comic books themselves. Tim Burton had planted the seeds of something positive with his cautiously human portrayal of Bruce Wayne in Batman and Batman Returns, but as history notes, Schumacher and his merry men stopped that idea dead in its tracks. The train of thought in ’97 was that superheroes were not humans. They were catchphrases, costumes. Icons.
“Watching it, I realized why it makes absolutely no difference who plays Batman” wrote famed critic Roger Ebert in his 1997 review of the film. “There's nobody at home. The character is the ultimate Suit. Garb him in leather or rubber, and he's an action hero - Buzz Lightyear with a heartbeat. Put him in civilian clothes, and he's a nowhere man.”
With this emphasis on costume came a near-frenzied emphasis on merchandise. One of the buzzwords Schumacher quickly found the studio force-feeding him was ‘toyetic.’ “Make the film more ‘toyetic’ he was told. What will Robin's suit look like as a toy? How can we transform the Batmobile into three different types of vehicles in the movie so kids feel they need it even if they already own a Batmobile toy? Early, rough designs were snatched out of the filmmaker’s hands and sent to toy companies overseas so they could be built in time for the release of the film.
With all this considered, it’s little wonder the film turned out as poorly as it did, a garish show-reel for late ‘90s special effects with actors wearing oddly erotic rubber outfits awkwardly thrust in to validate it as a ‘movie.’ Even in the immediate aftermath of Batman and Robin’s critical pounding, Schumacher and his team probably had no idea that they had destroyed the franchise for years to come.
“If there was anyone who that say, loved Batman Forever – and went into Batman and Robin with great anticipation - if I disappointed them in any way – then I really want to apologise,” was Schumacher’s melancholy conclusion in the aftermath of the movie’s release. “Because it wasn’t my intention. My intention was just to entertain them.”
What Batman and Robin can be thanked for, albeit generously, was everything that followed. It was the ultimate low point for the genre, and as the saying goes, when you hit rock bottom, the only way to go is up. In 2000, Bryan Singer proved people were ready for a more mature take on superheroes with X-Men, which was the first notable ‘character-driven’ superhero movie. But it wasn’t until 2005, when Christopher Nolan and David S Goyer looked at the corpse of the Batman Franchise, decided it had been satirised enough, picked it up, dusted it off and took it damn seriously, that superheroes on film were to change irrevocably.
“If we’re successful,” Goyer told Variety in a 2004 interview, “the thing that will be talked about a lot and on what we worked on the hardest is that the audience will really care about Bruce Wayne and not just Batman. II doesn’t matter how much you spend on special effects — if it feels hollow, no one gives a damn.”
Nowadays, respect for comic book source material is a given. Characters are treated with the utmost reverence – sometimes, I would argue, with too much reverence – but there’s an understanding that the Bruce Waynes of these universes can no longer be nowhere men. Superheroes have morphed dramatically from their cartoonish pasts.
"The reasons comic books survive over time is that the characters are durable," concluded Batman and Robin writer Akiva Goldsman. "And they’re afforded different realisations. They’re different lenses in which to see the world. They change and are changed by the historical moment that they’re in. And without those abhorred, or perhaps less successful bends and twists, you never get Dark Knight Returns.
"We yearn for something old made new spectacularly. That’s the job. The job is to stand it on its head, and see if it stands up or falls down.”
For those of you who gnashed your teeth over the decision to cast Ben Affleck as Batman in Snyder’s Man of Steel sequel, I have this to say: look at where the genre is now compared to 1997. Look at how good we've got it. And if there's still a "but" ready to trip off your tongue, at least be glad that your beloved heroes will never, ever be treated with the same flippancy as they were in Batman and Robin.
Lucy is Entertainment Editor at IGN AU. Follow her ramblings on IGN and Twitter.
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