The Batman (2022) Review: The Noir Gotham That Almost Sticks

🦇 This review is part of the DC Elseworlds – explore the standalone Batman and Joker films.

When The Batman (2022) opened in March 2022, it arrived carrying an enormous expectation: a complete reimagining of the character after the DCEU’s version concluded, Robert Pattinson in the cowl after years of scepticism, and Matt Reeves promising a detective noir Batman that had never quite been attempted at this scale. The film delivered on some of those promises completely, on others partially, and on a few not quite at all. It is, on balance, a genuinely good film — technically exceptional, tonally bold, occasionally riveting — that somehow manages to be harder to hold onto in memory than its craft deserves.

I watched it when it came out. I rated it well. When The Penguin series arrived two years later and I couldn’t reliably reconstruct the plot of its parent film, I went back and rewatched. The Batman, it turns out, is a film you have to choose to remember. That is not an insult, but it is a limit.

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The core creative decision of The Batman is the right one: Year Two. Not an origin story. Not an established legend. A Bruce Wayne who has been doing this for two years and is still working out what Batman is actually for — whether the fear he generates is useful, whether he is becoming something the city fears along with its criminals, whether the symbol he has built is serving the purpose he intended. That ambiguity, that incompleteness, is the engine of the film. It does not resolve fully, which is the source of both the film’s integrity and its frustration.

Detective First: The Noir Reorientation

The Riddler that Paul Dano constructs is not a riddle-obsessed game-player. He is a Zodiac Killer — a forensic accountant turned domestic terrorist who has been collecting evidence of Gotham’s corruption for years, has constructed an ideology of punitive exposure, and has selected Batman as his audience. The murders are messages. The riddles are communications. Edward Nashton is not playing; he is proselytising.

Dano plays him as someone who has been radicalising alone for years and finally found the outlet he was waiting for. The specific texture of that performance — the still, contained, procedural quality of someone who has rehearsed this moment in their head so many times that the reality of it feels slightly surreal — is genuinely chilling. The interrogation room scene, in which the Riddler realises that Batman doesn’t know who he is yet, is one of the best villain-hero confrontations in superhero cinema. It is shot almost entirely in close-up, in silence, in flickering light, and it is terrifying.

Robert Pattinson’s Bruce Wayne is the correct choice for this specific story. He is not the charming billionaire playboy; he is barely functional as a person when he is not in the costume, which is not a failure but a design: this is a Year Two Batman who has not yet figured out that Bruce Wayne has to be someone. Jeffrey Wright’s Gordon treats him as a forensic consultant — a detective who actually detects — which repositions Batman in a genre he fits much better than the “puncher of criminals” framing most adaptations default to.

Zoë Kravitz as Selina Kyle provides the film its warmth and its moral compass. She is the character with direct, personal stakes in the Gotham corruption story — her backstory connects the political crime at the film’s centre to individual human cost — and Kravitz grounds every scene she is in with an emotional directness that the rest of the film approaches more obliquely.

The Craft: Greig Fraser’s Gotham

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Greig Fraser — the same cinematographer who gave Dune its planetary scale and Zero Dark Thirty its documentary intimacy — brings a different register to Gotham: amber sodium streetlight, rain on every surface, close-up faces in near-total darkness. The colour palette is genuinely distinctive, a neon-noir that avoids the blue-teal of generic blockbuster cinematography and commits instead to a specific palette built around the absence of light rather than its presence.

What this means technically: The Batman was shot with a visual grammar designed for calibrated display technology. The deep blacks are real; the shadow detail is real; the amber-blue neon separation needs an OLED or QLED panel to fully render. On a backlit LCD in a bright room, a significant portion of the film’s visual achievement evaporates.

Michael Giacchino’s score builds the Batman theme from a simple repetitive cello figure that escalates slowly — not an immediately memorable fanfare like Danny Elfman’s iconic take, but correct for this version of the character. It builds the way dread builds, which is the right emotional register for a Batman who doesn’t know yet if he is the hero Gotham needs.

The Batmobile chase sequence — Batman pursuing the Penguin through a highway tunnel at night, the entire thing shot from the perspective of vehicles and road rather than from above — is tactile in a way action cinema rarely achieves. Cars are heavy. The road is wet. Nothing flies or floats or defies physics. The chase feels dangerous because it is designed to feel dangerous, and it does.

Where It Falls Short

The film’s problem is the third act. The first two acts — serial killer procedural, detective investigation, Paul Dano’s Riddler methodically dismantling Gotham’s political class — have genuine momentum and a clear escalation logic. The third act pivots from that contained thriller to a wider conspiracy involving Gotham’s criminal underclass, a political power vacuum, and a flood sequence that resolves more as setup-for-the-sequel than as earned dramatic conclusion.

The pivot is not wrong — it opens the Gotham universe in a way that The Penguin series needed — but it breaks the film’s own rhythm. The Batman, at its best, is a tight procedural. By the time the flood comes, it has become something slightly different, and the join is visible.

Robert Pattinson’s Bruce Wayne also never completes a character arc. He begins the film not knowing what Batman is for. He ends the film marginally more certain, but the specific realisation — that hope rather than fear is the better symbol — arrives too quickly in the final act to feel fully earned. Two years of the character established, and then the growth moment lands in approximately ten minutes.

The Vision Pro Benchmark

Rain, neon, close-up faces in near-darkness — this is architecturally a Vision Pro film. The spatial audio positions the rain around you. Greig Fraser’s close-up cinematography gives Batman’s mask, the Riddler’s eyes, Gordon’s face the weight of objects in physical space. The darkness that kills the film on an uncalibrated television is exactly what the Vision Pro renders correctly.

Runtime advisory: 176 minutes is a serious commitment in the Vision Pro. The headset is comfortable for long sessions, but the film earns approximately two of its three hours. Plan for the full duration and the occasional feeling that you’ve been here longer than the story requires.

Is The Batman (2022) worth watching?

Yes, with expectations set correctly. It is technically excellent — Greig Fraser’s cinematography, Paul Dano’s genuinely disturbing Riddler, Colin Farrell under prosthetics — and the detective approach to Batman is the right one. The third act runs long and the emotional arc is incomplete. Worth watching once, ideally before The Penguin series.

How long is The Batman (2022)?

176 minutes — just under three hours. It earns most of that runtime but not all of it. The first two acts move with procedural momentum; the third act loses pace as it pivots from serial killer thriller to political conspiracy. Not a casual evening film.

Who plays Batman in The Batman (2022)?

Robert Pattinson. His Bruce Wayne is deliberately anti-charismatic: withdrawn, barely functional as a person, and only fully present in the Batman costume. An unconventional choice that makes logical sense for a Year Two story about a man still figuring out what the symbol is for.

Do I need to watch The Batman before The Penguin series?

Recommended but not required. The Penguin picks up immediately after The Batman’s climactic flood and features returning characters including Colin Farrell’s Oz Cobb and Cristin Milioti’s Sofia Falcone. Watching The Batman first provides full context. If you found The Batman’s world compelling but underutilised, The Penguin is where it fully delivers.

Is The Batman (2022) suitable for kids?

PG-13, but on the upper end. Paul Dano’s Riddler is genuinely disturbing in a realistic rather than cartoonish way — the Zodiac Killer influence is deliberate. The tone is consistently dark and the violence is impactful. Suitable for teenagers comfortable with crime thriller content; not recommended for younger children.