My Review of "Batman Returns"

Batman Returns came out back in 1992. At the time this was the long awaited sequel to the blockbuster original Batman (1989) movie. The anticipation for this movie was pretty big and everyone had high hopes. I remember watching this movie back in the day thinking wow this was the same but very different from the first movie.

It all starts off with the introduction to the new bad guy called The Penguin. We get his origin story where he was discarded by an affluent family because of his monstrous appearance. Not a lot of people today remember but back in the day but Penguin's character was based off a 1950's syndrome known as flipper babies.

The movie makers did a lot of work in planning and preparing for this movie. You can tell with a lot of the details you can already see in the art direction of the opening scenes.

This opening with the introduction of Penguin really helped set up the motivation for our big bad guy. Though he's not the only nemesis for Batman. We also have a big bad business mogul named Max Shreck. He and Penguin work collaboratively to gain political power to help each other's respective agendas.

Then we have Catwoman. She's Max Shreck's secretary, Selina. When she stumbles upon Max's dastardly plans by accident Max unsuccessfully tries to kill her. I guess this was the last straw for Selina to go full on Catwoman. She turns from timid secretary to confident Catwoman.

That's a lot of characters for Batman to deal with and you'd think that would be a little too much but it isn't. This movie does a good job in keeping everything contained while still giving each of the characters a good enough time to shine. It's really quite a feat especially when they keep us interested in the characters and their motivations.

Each of these villains have really good reasons to be angry and we understand their motivations despite how evil they are. I was shocked how I was still able to have some remorse for some of these villains despite how bad they were.

The tone of the movie is somewhat familiar with the original movie. There's still that camp factor that makes it feel like a cartoon however the special effects are so much better. You can see so much more advancements in make-up and animatronics in this movie. They experimented with certain visual effects and they didn't translate too well.

This is dramatically different from the first movie because it's a lot more complicated. There's so much more going on with this movie whereas the original was pretty simple in plot point. Though I really feel that this movie does a good job in keeping us on track of what's going on. At no point in the movie was I lost but I'm an adult.

You can tell that children are still the target audience of this movie so I'm not sure the key demographic would have appreciated the storytelling involved with this movie. Then again some of the cartoon like fight scenes are rather violent in live action. Seeing them in live action makes it way more visceral than I was expecting.

Overall, I was able to enjoy this more than I thought I was going to. In my opinion it's actually constructed better than the original movie. This was done really well. There are a few parts of this movie that don't quite jive by today's standards but I think it stands the test of time. That's why I have to give this movie a 7.5 out of 10. It is something that I could go back to and oddly enough it's a Christmas movie.