The widely detested 1997 adaptation and its various bizarre spin-offs are worth a reappraisal in this era in which nothing makes sense
Serious comic book fans and discerning cinephiles consider director Joel Schumacher’s Batman & Robin from 1997 one of the worst films ever made – but they are wrong. It’s easily more entertaining than Christopher Nolan’s feted Batman trilogy (come at me Nolanites) – an endlessly quotable and absurd corporate climate change parable and the source of teenage mania among my early 2000s high school friends.
The intensely silly caper is more reminiscent of the 60s TV show, and Silver Age comics, than the brooding 80s publications that inspired Nolan and everyone since. Fans were understandably upset with the film’s reduction of Bane (one of Batman’s most intelligent foes) to a witless henchman; but in The Dark Knight Rises, Nolan and Tom Hardy turned Bane into a helium-fuelled, amateur Shakespearean actor, so, whatever.
