As you may know, Ben Affleck has been chosen for to play the role of Bruce Wayne/Batman in the sequel to this year’s Superman movie, Man of Steel.
Firstly, I want to get this out of the
way…I think the casting is ludicrous.
I won’t rant as to why I think Ben Affleck
will totally flop as Batman in this movie, because I think the rest of the
InternetZ is doing a fine job as it is. However, I will say that Ben’s casting
is a very positive thing for the Batman franchise.
Batman suffers from what I will call the
“Phoenix Syndrome”. It is a franchise which needs to be repeatedly burnt to
ashes before it can be born anew into something glorious and exciting.
Before Tim Burton’s rendition in 1989, we
had the very camp TV Series which slowly molded our conception of Batman as
something fun and zany. Then, the excellent Batman comic books of the 80’s
paved the way for Burton to remind us that Bruce Wayne/Batman was a very dark
and twisted character in a very dark a twisted world. He was neither good nor
bad; he was simply Batman.
Then the rot started again, with Batman
Returns commencing Warner Brother’s foray into the grotesque. Penguins wore
rocket launching backpacks and Danny De Vito rode around on a giant rubber
duck.
Next, Val Kilmer, Tommy Lee Jones and Jim
Carrey carried the torch into Crazyville, and further continued the campaign to
annihilate the Batman franchise. Two Face was basically a poor-man’s rip-off of
Nicholson’s joker (and a very embarrassing rip-off). The Riddler was fun…and
the Riddler is not meant to be fun.
And finally, George Clooney, Chris
O’Donnell, Uma Therman and Arnold Swarzeennaggeggageggegrgegegrr really FCUKED
it up with Batman and Robin. I won’t even explain how they did it, because the feat
was too perfect to describe.
The year was 1997 and the Batman
franchise was in tatters.
Enter Christopher Nolan and Co, and the
rest is history.
Chris Nolan and his team took Batman to new
heights, they pushed the franchise to places it had never been before; both
financially and artistically. The Nolan Batman Trilogy is by no means perfect,
but it’s an honest, well crafted and mature attempt to portray a cultural icon.
Ben Affleck will begin the rot. His
blocked-nosed Bruce Wayne will herald the start of the downward spiral which
needs to take place before Warner Brother’s accountants warn the clueless
executives that they need to make a good superhero movie again (and not ones
with giant spiders in it).
This guy would have been my choice for Bruce
Wayne:
But that would have been too good to be
true. Instead we’ll put up with this,
and we will wait for the phoenix to rise
from the ashes…bring on Batman 2021
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