Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, part 1 (Blu-ray Review)

We’re introduced to bad-ass old Bruce Wayne as he’s driving a formula 1 racer down the city streets of Gotham. I was reminded of Paul Newman, the beautiful silver fox actor well-known for also racing cars, but I’m not sure any younger watchers will get the reference. However, because the race is referred to as the “Newman Elimination”, possibly I’m not the only one.

That led to me wondering who the intended audience was for this original animated movie. Those who know the story of Batman: The Dark Knight Returns — which includes many comic readers by now — will find the going slow, as elements are recognized that they’re already familiar with. Those who don’t will wonder why Batman’s old and there’s a girl Robin. possibly it’s “someone who wants much more Batman stories on film, so they don’t have to read comics.” Although someone concerning it now would likely wonder why this Batman story is full of so numerous cliches, items that have become commonplace in the 30 years because the tale was originally told.

Then again, because this part of the film has become “old men are still tough”, maybe the audience is the people who read the comic back when and like hearing that the aged can still be the center of the universe. The director, during the promotion for part 2 (see special features below), mentions how this story was the top request from the fans to see animated, so maybe a lot much more people want it than I’m aware of, and I’m simply not part of that group.

Visually, the female reporter looks like Frank Miller drew her — the other characters, not so much. They’ve been redesigned and made much more common to work in animation. Peter Weller’s voice is fantastic to hear, and it enhanced the character instead of distracting from it. David Selby is also fantastic as Commissioner Gordon. On the other hand, I didn’t think Michael McKean’s voice matched the visuals for Dr. Bartholomew Wolper at all. (Credit note: Bruce Timm plays Thomas Wayne, Batman’s daddy, which is poetic, because he’s responsible for the character’s animation renaissance.)

The plot is how Batman returns from retirement to face a supposedly cured Harvey Dent and a Mutant gang (who look very 80s, with the spiked hair and the star trek Geordi glasses). The problem with a story about how “things are different now” is that we’ve all heard that so many, numerous times in our entertainment, and our stories are now full of vigilantes. None of us believe that government or the police are there to help us any more, so this story feels very familiar. Heck, for many comic readers, it is, as the industry has fed on it and what it inspired for decades. The bits everyone recalls, with Superman and the Joker, will appear in part 2, due next year.

Although I was disappointed that the style didn’t much more closely follow Miller’s, this looked really cool on my HD big-screen TV. The animation was smooth and easy to get lost in, as a world on its own. The story wasn’t as deep, though, without the meaningful captions offering internal monologue, which added a lot of mood and atmosphere to the print version.

The things that made the story visually dynamic and distinctive on the printed page have sadly been lost in the need to make the images move. Miller’s developments in using, for example, the talking-head TV screens, included the page layout as a whole, with the overlapping artwork. Here, each image is full-screen, so the storytelling is much more straightforward. The parallelism of multiple things going on at once is lost, which gives Dark Knight Returns a bit of a dumbed-down feeling.

Then again, it needed to fit in with the other films. This ought to have been the first animated Batman movie, not the 15th in the DCU series, but they needed the success of those others to get to this one. However, 15 minutes into the hour-and-fifteen-minute film, there hasn’t been much exciting to watch. There are nods to classic panels, of course, as well as homages to atmospheric film shots, but it doesn’t puff up the otherwise flat storytelling significantly.

In my opinion, Miller’s story was never great on its own — it was the way he told it, distinct to comics and extremely fresh at the time, that made The Dark Knight Returns a modern classic. He developed a new storytelling language, one we now take for granted. That’s been lost here in the animation. I think they could have done something as visually significant, but it would have required much more money and a much more artistically oriented development team, and I suspect that Warner wasn’t searching for that kind of project these days.

Then again, Warner has a problem in selecting material. They need to do the best-known stories in purchase to get the sales and attention they need to make the projects successful. They also need stand-alone stories that have something like a conclusion, which are still rare. original work is much morenull