The Batman

For a character that has been booted and rebooted to the point where any sense of permanence or progression has been subordinated to an endlessly regurgitating state of origin, Matt Reeves and Robert Pattinson's take on the caped crusader manages to eke out a place of its own in this ever-expanding pantheon by making him deliberately inexpert. This desire to play the masked vigilante as disconnected and insufferably weird is just enough to numb the nagging feeling that, perhaps, the Dark Knight might be better served by a period of hibernation. Although the overarching story is completely dissimilar, this The Batman is grounded in themes and ideas that didn't quite make it to the screen when Frank Miller and Darren Aronofsky were circling Warner Bros' prize property in the early 2000s - a Bruce Wayne estranged from the gaudier aspects of his wealth and a Batcave that, rather than occupy a cavernous space beneath a mansion, is actually a cordoned off stretch of abandoned subway. 

Like Miller and Aronofsky's recalibration, this Bruce Wayne isn't portrayed as worldly either. There's zero sense of the globetrotting pilgrimage that underpinned Christopher Nolan and Christian Bale's shinobi cinema take. Reeves' Batman has put down roots then rotted, a phantom committed to drifting along the streets that claimed his parents. Pattinson offers up gauntness, a malnourished cigarette stink that is reflected back to him by a Gotham filled with blaring video screens and neo-Grecian majesty; a city resplendent with ill-gotten gains and drowning in a constant downpour. Suited up, Pattinson's Batman isn't played as intimidating either. The street-level cops he interacts with are not awed by his supernatural presence, they treat him as a nuisance - an unwanted physical affectation that, for some reason, is allowed to pollute their evidence gathering procedures. 

Pattinson has a theatrical, carnival, quality to his looming. The horned cowl he wears more evocative of a Victorian depiction of The Devil than the usual animisitic totem. Batman as a dressed-up, Spring-Heeled Jack style, eccentric rather than the world-shaker who counts Superman amongst his friends. This Batman then has been plucked out of folklore and deposited into a particularly dour police procedural. This clash plays beautifully, at least at first, largely thanks to Pattinson's decision to not adapt in the slightest to the superhero production line. Rather than a gleaming Adonis, this masked vigilante is sinewy and violently unhinged; his venom maintained by poisonous-looking chemicals that can be injected into his body when he finds himself in dire need. Firmly located within sodden squalor, Reeves and Cinematographer Greig Fraser's film very obviously strives to evoke David Fincher and Darius Khondji's despondent work on Seven but the invocation frequently plumbs deeper influential depths. 

A constant technological prickle recalls the uneasy symbiosis of analogue and biomechanical machinery tidied into every frame by Ridley Scott and Jordan Cronenweth on Blade Runner. In the early goings, eyes gather and compute long strings of visual information, spitting out leads for this button-pushing meddler. It's a shame that the demands of Bruce Wayne's case have him leave this visually unusual feedback loop; damning his interactions to yawning exposition dumps and criminals casually surmising their murderous intents. Although the aesthetic is often sublime, the actual structural mechanics underlining this beauty frequently work directly against the spell. As well as an elasticated relationship to bodily harm that (bizarrely) aligns him with his Warner stablemate Daffy Duck, Pattinson's Batman isn't just dim, he's blank. An empty vessel just waiting to be filled up. 

Mouth-foaming data is batted aside, more than once, when Bruce Wayne finds his way to another, contradictory, perspective. There are sequences in the film where Batman dutifully trots from meeting to meeting, instantly rearranging his entire outlook based on nothing more than the last thing that was said to him. The character's strongest convictions are the revulsion he feels regarding firearms, an abstinence he lords over those who plainly weren't rich enough to keep a butler on staff to teach them the ins and outs of Spanish martial arts. In a film where, comfortably, hundreds of innocent civilians are swept away by polluted filth, why shouldn't Zoë Kravitz's Selina Kyle shoot a man involved in the brutal murder of her lover? Similarly, Batman's yelping admonishment of the supervillains he faces comes off as rote and sanctimonious when we've seen that the public-facing 'Bruce' persona is a barely maintained shadow. Scenes designed to draw clear lines under the idea that Batman and his foes are reflections of each other repeatedly fail to land because of the voyeuristic strangeness constantly being generated by Pattinson. If anything, the final Wayne's unholy quest to pummel turnstile hoppers makes considerably less sense than a violent uprising determined to rid a terminally compromised city of its parasitic ruling class.  

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

More elastic animation principles haven't tended to get a lot of play in CG blockbusters. There's an ever-present sense of restraint. Nobody wants their robots or their dinosaurs slipping into capering, so movement and expression are kept rather routine. There's an inbuilt critical backlash too. Any film that spends too much time with its effects tends to get labelled as a video game - the vulgar other that most people don't even consider a worthwhile artform. So what should cinema aspire to? Three people bickering in a small room? Why are dynamics so looked down upon? Surely as a visual medium there should be space in the canon for spiky things moving incredibly fast?

Despite his assertions to the contrary, Andy Serkis' motion capture acting has ended up being a vessel for smuggling sustained computer generated animation into mainstream films. As a credible human actor, Serkis has become the poster boy for acceptable simulated excess. His loud boasting, coupled with the inherent critical safety his thesp credentials offer, has allowed a feature creep. Films like Dawn of the Planet of the Apes hinge, dramatically, on a lot of time being spent with textured 3D models. Press releases tell us they're just visual approximations of physical on set acting, but it's obvious there's a lot more to it than that. Scour any article in which Serkis evangelises about mo-cap and you'll find a string of animators in the comments section casually chatting about how much, or how little, of his performance they ended up using when constructing their passes.

Serkis then has allowed live action filmmaking and animation to intermingle at a conceptual level. Films no longer need to stop dead for special effects sequences, the entire piece can be one. The apes in Dawn and Rise of the Planet of the Apes inspire a genuine sense of wonder - higher primates are always fascinating but seeing them act with clear, dramatically delineated, agendas is spellbinding. If either film has a fault it's that the human story never grabs the attention in the same way as Caesar's. How could it though? What actor could possibly be as interesting as a photorealistic Chimp that's Arthurian monarchy personified one minute, extreme personal threat the next? Ralph Fiennes came close recently with a similar kind of performance in The Grand Budapest Hotel, but that film didn't spend actual minutes gazing lovingly at Fiennes while he drew his muscled body up to its maximum height.