Like Tears In Rain: Blade Runner at 40

Even though Blade Runner takes place in the future (well, what was then the future of 2019), it strangely feels more evocative to me of 1982 than any other film from that summer. Other summer of '82 films were set in the actual present day, of course, like Poltergeist and Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and those do have their own nostalgic triggers of dated fashions and era-specific slang but as soon as Blade Runner opens on 2019 Los Angeles, with flames erupting from industrial chimneys into the night sky, I'm not in the future, I'm in the past. It doesn't look like 1982, it doesn't sound like 1982 (Blade Runner composer Vangelis may have had a #1 Billboard hit the previous year with his instrumental title piece for Chariots of Fire but the Top 40 in '82 belonged to the likes of The Human League and Toto), but somehow it is 1982, in all its nerdy glory. 

Over the years, I've never been able to get comfortable with any of the various revised editions of Blade Runner that director Ridley Scott has supervised. While I'm glad he's had the chance to realize the movie to his satisfaction, that initial compromised adaptation of Philip K. Dick's 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep? is the one I fell in love with. No matter how true to his artistic intent the Director's Cuts are, they just aren't Blade Runner to me. The theatrical cut made such a stamp on me that my mind rejects any move to tamper with it. But when it comes to a movie about the differences between humans and replicants, though, I think it's only appropriate that I shouldn't be able to divorce irrational sentiment from my appreciation for it. I remain emotionally attached to Blade Runner in its original form. 

If I don't hear Harrison Ford's voice over narration, as we first meet his world weary Rick Deckard, saying "They don't advertise for killers in the newspaper. That was my profession. Ex-cop. ex-Blade Runner, ex-killer," I'm checked out.  

Blade Runner is more than a movie, it's a memory and as Blade Runner demonstrates, there is a sanctity to memories. Even artificial ones are worth fighting for. Blade Runner's replicants pine for and cling to pasts that were never really theirs while desiring open-ended futures to call their own. Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer), Pris (Daryl Hannah), Zhora (Joanna Cassidy), Leon (Brion James), and Rachael (Sean Young) long for more than they've been given and that puts them in contrast to the humans of Blade Runner like Deckard or his supervisor, Bryant (M. Emmet Walsh), who have a flat, cynical take on their own existence and don't show any special interest in imparting their lives with meaning (as Deckard says in his voice over: "Sushi, that's what my ex-wife used to call me: cold fish."). The human characters in Blade Runner all take for granted the fact that their lives intrinsically matter by simple dint of biology. No matter how much they might squander their existence there's an authenticity to their being that can't be questioned. Replicants, however, are left longing for validation.  

The lives of replicants are someone's else's daydream, an accumulation of stolen, appropriated details, with fabricated props like photographs to help complete the illusion. The German word fernweh is translated as "an ache for distant places," and the beauty of Blade Runner is that it identifies that distant place as oneself. It is a destination that no replicant can ever quite reach and no human seems to give much thought to. 

Replicants inhabit their manufactured bodies but struggle to instill them with meaning. Tyrell Industries' CEO Eldon Tyrell (Joe Turkel) says to Roy Batty that "the light that burns twice as bright burns half as long" but that is no comfort to a being that simply wants more life because life, even an artificial life, is preferable to nothingness. Humans can comfort themselves with dreams of an afterlife but there is no afterlife for machines. There is only existence or non-existence. Replicants will not meet their loved ones in some celestial palace. Their memories of their parents and siblings aren't real, there is no one waiting to greet them on the The Other Side and Blade Runner evokes that particular, peculiar sadness.

That sort of melancholy wasn't what audiences were craving in the summer of '82, though. The previous summer Harrison Ford had dominated the box office with Raiders of the Lost Ark and when it was released on June 25th, 1982, audiences quickly realized that Blade Runner was not in any way a reprise of Raider's crowd pleasing, cliffhanging thrills. It wasn't even the kind of intense but exhilarating roller coaster ride that Scott's Alien (1979) had been. Instead this big budget sci-fi film was morose and steeped in sadness. The action of Blade Runner was minimal and what little action there was usually ended with Deckard killing a woman. Replicant women, perhaps, but deeply unpleasant just the same. Seeing Ford as Indiana Jones giving Nazi scum what's coming to them in Raiders was one thing but to see him as Deckard shooting a fleeing Zhora in the back was something else. 

When Deckard has the opportunity to take Zhora out, he takes it and as dangerous as she may be, to see Deckard gun her down in such a ruthless (some would say cowardly) way, sending her crashing through sheets of glass to bleed out in the street, is not what audiences either expected or wanted to see from a movie hero. There is no way to spin Deckard's actions as that of a good man and Scott never attempts to (the most bitter sounding words in the entire movie belong to Edward James Olmos when Gaff says to Deckard "You've done a man's job, sir."). When Deckard shoots Pris in J. F. Sebastian's apartment, her violent death throes as her lithe body spasms out on the floor are horrific to watch. That we are never meant to root for Deckard in his mission, that it always is portrayed as nothing but cruel is the main reason why Blade Runner didn't catch on in '82. Americans at the time wanted to feel good about themselves and be sure of their purpose. They didn't want to see protagonists consumed by doubt. To have a movie where the supposed hero could not convince himself that he was in the right was anathema to most Americans in '82.

Man vs. Machine has been a perennial theme of science fiction, from the malevolent HAL 9000 in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) to the deadly, malfunctioning androids of Westworld (1973) to the relentless T-800 in The Terminator (1984) but Blade Runner is the rare instance of the empathy being on the side of the machines. Replicants aren't just physically superior to humans, they possess a sense of morality and a soul that the humans around them lack. 

What even critics at the time had to concede was a triumph for Blade Runner was its groundbreaking look. To regard Blade Runner as purely an achievement of its extraordinary production design, though, is to not understand how well Scott uses all the tools at his disposal. When the design of a film says so much, you can't just glibly wave it off as superficial. The sets are not just simply environments that the characters are standing in and delivering their lines, like the living room of a sitcom. These environments complete these characters. The style is the statement. You can't separate how Blade Runner looks from what it's saying and what it's characters are feeling. 

In the forty years since its release, no other cinematic vision of the future has surpassed Blade Runner. From 1982 on, when filmmakers have set out to imagine the future, Blade Runner has been the default starting point. When the look of a movie is so groundbreaking, so transformative that it influences everything afterwards, there's no denying that you're dealing with a classic. The greatest testimony to Blade Runner may be that it's been the vision of the future for so long, I forget what the future looked like before it. 

After it tanked in theaters, critics likely assumed that we'd soon stop talking about Blade Runner. But it has gone on to defy all expectations by having a life that has stretched well beyond what any would have guessed. Deckard's final words in the theatrical cut to describe Rachael as the pair head off to an unknown future together apply to the surprising longevity of Blade Runner itself. 

It's a movie with no termination date. 

20 Years of Dangertainment!

At some point, most slasher sequels - even the ones that didn't get much love originally - tend to attract a fanbase that claims these films as their own. Even Friday the 13th: A New Beginning, with its impostor Jason, has come to collect a core of passionate devotees over time. 2002's Halloween: Resurrection, however, remains the rare slasher sequel that still can't claim much of a following. Surprising, I know! For some reason this one's still a hard one for Halloween fans to love and, by God, most of them don't. But today, on the twentieth anniversary of its release, I am here to profess my own ongoing affection for Resurrection. 

Right off the bat, just so it's clear where I stand, let me say this: Halloween: Resurrection > H20. 

As well as H20 was received by most critics and fans back in '98, that movie has never done it for me. Not then, not now. Michael's mask looked like shit in every shot (it's the worst the mask has ever looked, and it's looked like trash in several of the sequels), the big final confrontation between Michael and Laurie was tepid, not at all worthy of the twenty years of history behind it, and its young cast, featuring up and coming stars like Josh Hartnett and Michelle Williams, was entirely wasted. H20 felt weirdly truncated, too, as though it jumped directly from its first to its third act. 

As much as I love Jamie Lee Curtis, H20 sucks. And the worst part about Resurrection is the opening with JLC as she tries to kill Michael by setting a Scooby Doo trap for him. Bullets and fire have done nothing to slow this guy down but somehow Laurie thinks that having him dangle upside down and falling on his head might do the trick. This is by far the dumbest thing about Resurrection but after that we're doing fine. 

Yes, really! 

Now I will not try and make a convincing case that Resurrection itself is particularly good. Slasher sequels are meant to be graded on a curve. If you've stuck with a series like Halloween or Texas Chain Saw past a certain point, well after you know that most of them are going to be crummy, you have developed a flexible set of standards. I will just say that, when I saw it in theaters on its release date of July 12th, 2002, I immediately enjoyed Resurrection far more than I had H20. I didn't straight up love it right then and there, no. That'd be crazy. But even on first viewing I thought it worked as a Halloween sequel far better than H20 had and arguably better than either 1989's The Revenge of Michael Myers or 1995's The Curse of Michael Myers. I'll say this: if I were to rank the series, Resurrection sure wouldn't be at the bottom for me. This is mid-level Halloween, folks!

Actor Brad Loree makes for an excellent Michael. His body type is right (no middle aged girth filling out his gray coveralls like George P. Wilbur had in Curse), his moves are good and the Michael mask is on point in a way that it hadn't been in ages. I am a big believer that when you're dealing with an iconic character, that character - whether it be Superman, Godzilla, Michael Myers or whoever - ought to have what everyone with a passing familiarity with them would recognize as the classic look and Resurrection has that going for it.

Even the Myers house looks right in this movie for the first time since director Rick Rosenthal made his first trip to Haddonfield back in 1981 with Halloween II. Prior to Resurrection, the Myers house had been fucked up on screen for over twenty years. When the Myers house was featured in 5 and 6, it looked unrecognizable from the established look of the first two films (worse than that, the houses in 5 and 6 looked completely different from each other!). Given that, I do appreciate the fact that Rosenthal realized it was actually important to, you know, have the key locale of the series look the way it's supposed to. I'm a little iffy on how well they did when it comes staying true to the interior layout but whatever. 

Close enough, I say. 

I know filmmakers shouldn't be applauded too hard for just showing the most basic attention to detail but given that when it comes to the Halloween movies, it's been established that you can't rely on people to do even the bare minimum I think Rosenthal deserves credit for getting some things right that others absolutely did not. Personally I hate watching a Halloween movie and having Michael's mask be an eyesore. And it drives me nuts to see the Myers house look nothing like it's supposed to. If you manage to at least not fuck that shit up, I'm ready to forgive a lot of other stuff.

I know some will say I'm ready to forgive too much but I would argue that, story-wise, Resurrection is fine as far as slashers go. Certainly it's nothing to be embarrassed about as far as slasher sequels go. I'm not saying this is top shelf material, I'm just not seeing how this is inherently so much worse than what some of the other sequels came up with. If you're watching Halloween movies this deep in, I say it pays to be willing to bend a little.  

Resurrection's screenplay by Larry Brand and Sean Hood does a more than fair job of setting up its body count narrative involving a group of college kids live broadcasting their night in the Myers home via the webcam show Dangertainment. And to have characters in the movie watching Dangertainment and, through text messages, remotely advise the characters in peril what they need to do in order to stay ahead of Michael is a nice meta touch, making the horror tradition of audiences shouting their instructions to characters on the screen into a clever plot point. 

Also, let's give Resurrection some credit for being smart enough not to waste everyone's time trying to expand Michael's mythology with any Druidic nonsense. Say what you will but there's no pointless revelations about Michael's origins here that needed to be retconned out of the series.   

The biggest problem that most people had with Resurrection is with the larger than life head of Dangertainment himself, Freddie Harris, played by rapper Busta Rhymes. This is an area in which I will strongly disagree with the haters and say that I totally dig Busta in this movie. His character brings a completely different type of energy to the series. Freddie may be loud and obnoxious and abrasive to some but I'm all for it. Some will say this movie crosses a line by allowing Freddie to disrespect Michael but I don't go along with that. Yeah, he gets in Michael's face in one scene when he thinks it's just someone in a Michael mask but so what? This scene may not be an example of the terror that the Halloween series usually strives for but Michael himself isn't any the worse for wear for it. 

Busta definitely makes a bigger impression here than does likeable but bland Final Girl Bianca Kajlich. And he ends up delivering one of my favorite lines in the entire Halloween series, describing Michael in purely poetic terms as a "killer shark in baggy ass overalls." And of course, the immortal "Trick or Treat, motherfucker!" is all him. Freddie rules, period. If only he and Loomis could have met. 

Oh, what a pair those two would have made. 

I only wish the next Halloween would have continued on from the end of Resurrection. I liked where they left things off here and I would have loved to have seen Freddie square off with Michael again. Had the series continued with this timeline, it would have had to carry on without any of its familiar touchstones like Laurie, Loomis, or even the Myers house. What kind of Halloween movie that would have been, who knows, but I wish we would have had a chance to find out. Resurrection tee'd up the franchise for an interesting next step and it's a bummer that step never got taken.

So as much as it is still vilified by many fans, on this day I say "cheers" to Halloween: Resurrection. Happy Anniversary, motherfucker!

Stranger Danger

I have to say I was feeling a little apprehensive at the prospect of watching The Black Phone. As a hardcore horror fan who came of age in the splatter era of the late '70s, early '80s, not much fazes me but as a parent, kids in peril is something that I am squeamish about and The Black Phone's story, about kids being snatched and killed by a psycho known as "The Grabber," seemed primed to be unpleasant. Even though I figured the chances were good that this was going to end alright for the main kid, you still have to go through that journey with him and, man, was that something I really wanted to put myself through? Not every type of horror movie is for every horror fan so I was kind of leaning towards giving this one a pass and maybe check it out once it hit streaming. 

Thing is, though, I have really liked director Scott Derrickson's previous films. Sinister (2012) is the one that gets the most attention and that's a great one, just a tremendously effective shocker, but I think The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005) is terrific too. He even made the best of the direct-to-video Hellraiser sequels with Hellraiser: Inferno (2000) so when he puts out a new horror movie, it's kind of a big deal. Bottom line, I decided to suck it up and see The Black Phone and, damn, I'm glad I did because it's fucking fantastic. It doesn't match the sheer terror of Sinister but it's still damn scary and, more importantly, it is a much more emotional movie, hits on a deeper level and although the subject matter is grim, Derrickson and scripter C.Robert Cargill (collaborating again with Derrickson after Sinister and Doctor Strange) find a way to make this adaptation of the Joe Hill short story suspenseful but not exploitative. It never wallows in the pain of The Grabber's victims or lingers on his deeds. There's enough there to know the stakes involved but Derrickson knows when to pull back and when to let suggestion do the work. 

As much as I was dreading the way the kids in peril aspect of The Black Phone would be handled, it turns out that's only part of the misery its young characters have to face. Brother and sister Finney (Mason Thames) and Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) live in constant fear of enraging their alcoholic father Terrence (Jeremy Davies, very good in a role that could've have easily been played as a one-dimensional shitbag). On top of that, Finney faces bullies at school who are looking to kick his ass. He gets a brief respite when the school's toughest kid, Robin (Miguel Cazarez Mora), lets it be known that Finney is his friend and therefore off limits but when Robin becomes another victim of The Grabber, it's open season on Finney again. So these kids already have to navigate a brutal existence on a daily basis, even without the looming specter of The Grabber. 

Even if you were lucky enough not to live in an abusive home, the '70s were still a savage time to be a kid. Seeing the bloody fights that occur in this movie, with kids just fucking beating on each other, it brought back memories for me of being a young kid back then and seeing the same kind of violence and having it just be a normal part of life. 

Every time is a hard time to be a kid but the '70s felt very raw in its own particular way. Adults were largely indifferent to what kids were up to, being wrapped up in their own personal shit during the "Me Decade." It was a time when more and more kids were becoming children of divorce or else they grew up with both parents together but with both of them working so either way most kids of the '70s were latchkey kids and so much of their lives were ungoverned and unsupervised, no matter how much scary shit was going on. 

Kids had to take the bus home to empty houses or walk to and from school alone all while the news was frequently filled of stories about predators, with the police unable to crack these cases and communities living in terror. This was long before cellphones and iphones and surveillance cameras and so on. There was a sense then that people could easily just vanish that isn't quite the same in today's world. Not that horrible things don't still happen, of course, but the world used to be much more advantageous to predators than it is today. 

The Black Phone nails the vibe of what it was like to grow up then. Even with The Grabber on the loose taking kids left and right, the kids in The Black Phone are still roaming the streets alone rather than being safe at home closely guarded by their parents and that is a very '70s thing. If you survived your '70s childhood, luck played a part.

The fear of a predator stalking the neighborhood and snatching a kid here and there might seem quaint or even, in its own way, innocent to today's generation of young people who have to live with the possibility of having a random mass murder occur during the middle of their school day but there was a particular type of creeping terror that hung in the air in the '70s and Derrickson and Cargill do an expert job of tapping into it. 

Ethan Hawke is fittingly spooky as The Grabber, sporting a series of eerie devil masks designed by Tom Savini. I don't know if I would say it's a particularly great performance but it's effective enough. It gets the job done. Honestly, I actually like that this is a movie where the villain doesn't steal the show, The focus is very much on Finney and Gwen (both Thames and McGraw are outstanding in their roles) and there's no attempt to make The Grabber cool or appealing. We don't even get a backstory for him. That might strike some as a weakness but I think it was the right choice here. What do we really need to know about The Grabber? There's no need to give any kind of psychological justification for his crimes. All we need to know about is the terror he inflicts. 

With Gwen having psychic abilities that she inherited from her deceased mother and the phone calls from the dead that Finney receives courtesy of the titular device in the Grabber's basement, there is a supernatural component that puts The Black Phone just enough in the realm of the fantastic to make it more than a drab story about a child murderer. The balance of gritty realism and supernatural horror is a combo that other horror movies have had but it works especially well here. The supernatural elements allow this Good vs Evil tale to attain an almost fable like quality. At the same time it remains a movie filled with bitter truths and harsh realities. The wins the characters achieve feel earned but it's also understood that darkness will continue to play a part in their lives.

Derrickson choose to leave the sequel to Doctor Strange to direct this instead as it felt closer to his heart and seeing it, it's clear that he made the right choice. I really think that Derrickson has made a special film with The Black Phone. It's a model of how to do mainstream horror right and it shows what can be done in the genre when everyone involved isn't just phoning it in.  

The Ultimate in Alien Terror: The Thing at 40

As soon as the throbbing electronic pulse of Ennio Morricone's score comes up in the opening shots of John Carpenter's The Thing, accompanying a doomed pursuit, it's clear that a light hearted caper is not about to unfold. That said, the intensity of what follows still took audiences by surprise in 1982. The reception towards The Thing when it was released on June 25th, 1982, wasn't just dismissive, it was openly hostile. Beyond the fact that the film simply wasn't an enjoyable experience for many, the reaction to it was as though it was telling people something that they didn't want to hear and people were quick to push back. 

A remake of the 1951 Howard Hawks classic The Thing From Another World but more of a proper adaptation of that earlier film's source material - John W. Campbell's 1938 novella Who Goes There? - Carpenter's Thing is often described as downbeat and nihilistic. Personally, I prefer to think of it as a tough film rather than a bleak one. Despite being surly loners in general, the men of US Outpost 31 actually give a damn about not just their own lives but the lives of everyone who will suffer if the shape shifting organism that has invaded their base should somehow get past them and into the general population. As the saying goes, they might not be the heroes we want but they're the ones we need.

There are no excessive attempts on the part of Carpenter or screenwriter Bill Lancaster to humanize these men or to manufacture an extra level of sympathy for their plight by having any of them take a moment to refer to, say, that special girl waiting back home or to any loved ones that they're fighting on behalf of and wanting to reunite with. You never get the kind of stock scene that you would see in other movies where one character or another pulls out a photo of their wife or fiancee and says how they just want to kill this damn Thing and get back to their life.

Nah, there's no cheap sentiment here. All these guys seem to be, by choice, pretty alone in the world. Richard Masur's Clark likes his dogs and that's about it. These guys are where they are specifically because they aren't looking to mingle with the rest of civilized society. Which, for me, makes their determination to stop the Thing all the more poignant and noble. Yes, they're fighting for their own survival but they are also completely cognizant of what will happen if they fail to keep the Thing from proceeding further and they are willing, without hesitation, to make any necessary sacrifice to save the world. Not once do they flinch from what needs to be done or stop to whine about the shitty hand that they've been dealt.

When the Thing takes out the generator in its Hail Mary attempt to freeze its enemies to death and return to its arctic slumber, helicopter pilot R. J. MacReady (Kurt Russell) is able to get Nauls (T.K. Carter) and Garry (Donald Moffat) instantly on board with the idea to "warm things up around here" and bring the whole base down. They don't even bother to consult with Childs (Keith David) before they set their suicide plan in motion. They just do it, like Carpenter protagonists should.

Even in the film's famously ambiguous final moments, when the prospects of survival for MacReady and Childs look grim and it's very possible that all their efforts to stop The Thing may have still come up short, MacReady is still able to give a rueful chuckle before the fade out. Maybe he'll make it, maybe he won't. Maybe Childs is going to Thing out on him or maybe they're just two men about to die. Whatever happens, there's no sense crying about it. 

Carpenter and Lancaster don't ascribe the failures of the men of Outpost 31 to any specific errors on their part, an aspect of The Thing that I believe makes it more troubling to viewers. I think most people honestly prefer it when characters in horror movies make stupid mistakes. You know, it allows them to nudge their friend next to them, roll their eyes and feel safe in believing that, well, if these fools had been smart about this, all this could have been avoided but that does not happen in The Thing. You could say that MacReady and Cooper (Richard Dysart) shouldn't have brought those burned remains back from the Norwegian camp but hey, the damn dog was already in their base. The remains were superfluous. Many horror movies have a moment where the characters do something specific that unleashes the evil or sabotages everyone's chances of survival (in the original Thing, it was putting a heated electrical blanket on the block of ice holding the Thing). In the '82 Thing, though, there are no obvious, egregious fuck ups. As much as paranoia may be running rampant, the men of The Thing manage to keep their heads and make smart decisions at every turn. That they still can't claim a decisive win as the credits roll did not sit well with 1982 audiences. The we're fucked before we even started pessimism of The Thing was completely contrary to the gung ho, can-do spirit of the times. 

After the defeatism of the '70s, audiences of the early '80s were not into seeing Americans forced to play a losing hand. And they definitely did not want to hear a protagonist wearily admit "We're all very tired." No sir, not in the same summer where Rocky was getting the eye of the tiger.

The Thing's poor box office performance has always been laid at the feet of E.T. with the belief being that audiences choose Spielberg's kindly alien over Carpenter's nasty one but I don't think that one had anything to do with the other. The fact is, Ridley Scott's Alien could have come out in the summer of '82 and still crushed it. The Xenomorph would have held its own just fine against E.T. because Alien is a crowd pleaser, pure and simple, and, in every way, The Thing just isn't. Had MacReady encountered Childs in the smoking ruins of the base at the end and they immediately high-fived each other over the Thing's defeat just as a rescue helicopter arrived, well, then it would have been a different story at the box office. 

It wasn't the shocking splatter of The Thing that alienated audiences. Had its story ended with MacReady being satisfied that the Thing had been defeated and if he and Childs had survived to tell the tale, I believe that audiences could have stomached whatever hideous sights The Thing had to offer. No, it was the hopelessness and the ambiguity that really got to them.

Had Universal held off on The Thing's release until the fall, saved it for Halloween (and maybe chose to re-title it Who Goes There?), maybe it would have fared better. Who knows? Forty years later, it's all moot. It tanked and the fallout was what it was. 

The only person whose star immediately rose after The Thing was young FX genius and former Rick Baker protege Rob Bottin. As much as the grotesque FX of The Thing was slagged as borderline pornographic by outraged critics, no one could deny the astonishing level of skill that it took to pull off The Thing's transformations. 

Only twenty-four at the time and placed in charge of leading a massive crew, Bottin threw himself into the creation of the Thing so hard that he had to be checked into the hospital for nervous exhaustion by the time the shoot was done. The result of Bottin's groundbreaking wizardry, though, allowed Carpenter to make a monster movie that finally broke the "guy in a suit" cliche that even the best examples of the genre, like Alien, had always succumbed to. 

Even though the critical plaudits did come eventually it's still a shame that Carpenter took such a beating upon The Thing's release. There's some irony to be found in the fact that Carpenter made a movie about people fighting to hold onto their individuality only to get so much shit for being true to his own artistic identity. 

A lot of directors might have folded after receiving the kind of body blow that Carpenter suffered with The Thing but he not only persevered and toughed it out, he kept on making classics for years to come. Just the same, I'm sure he wishes that his first foray into major studio filmmaking had not been its own sort of painful transformation.  

In the end, I suppose you just have to believe that, come what may, every Thing is meant to be.

We're Going To Need A Bigger Cave: Batman & Robin at 25

The famous line in The Dark Knight is "You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain" but with movies, it's all about going the distance. Over time, many movies that were reviled on their original release see their reputations improve. The longer that a movie is out there, being watched and rewatched, the better the chance that it's going to finally find an appreciative audience. Movies are constantly being reappraised, long after their initial release. If nothing else, once enough years go by, people inevitably find themselves getting nostalgic for almost anything. 

Now that a quarter of a century has passed, are we finally at at the point where we can say whether time has redeemed Joel Schumacher's Batman & Robin? When it was released on June 20th, 1997, it was instantly vilified. Schumacher's Batman Forever (1995) had been a successful shot in the arm for the franchise after Tim Burton's Batman Returns (1992) had made it unsafe to sell Batman Happy Meals to kids so to have Schumacher come back for more seemed like the safest move imaginable. I'm sure the attitude of the studio was "That thing you did, just do it again." And to be completely fair to the man, that is exactly what Schumacher did.

Having George Clooney, still in the early days of his movie stardom after leaving ER, step into the role of the Caped Crusader seemed like such a slam dunk at the time. Just a flawless choice. You only had to look at Clooney's performance in From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) to believe that he could easily be the best Batman yet (reportedly, Schumacher drew a cowl over Clooney's face on the Dusk Till Dawn poster when he was considering offering him the role). Then you also had Alicia Silverstone hot off of Clueless as Batgirl and Arnold Schwarzenegger as Mr. Freeze (questionable casting there but whatever) and Uma Thurman as Poison Ivy (spot on!) so, you know, on paper everything about Batman & Robin was looking good. Better than good, maybe. I'd say it was looking great! 

So with all these promising elements, and with a proven director in charge, what could go wrong? Or let me put it this way: what could go so catastrophically wrong that this would be torture to watch? If you had told most people ahead of time back in '97 that this would be a total disaster, they'd have brushed that kind of talk off. You know, even if it isn't great it'll be mindless fun. A good popcorn movie, as they say. 

I mean, come on, it's Batman! 

Then the movie came out and, oh my God. 

I say again, OH MY GOD.

I remember sinking into my seat on opening night, right from the start of the movie, mortified by what I was seeing, and it never got better. But hey, that was then. Were we all just being too hard on it? I know that no matter how much time goes by this movie is not going to magically morph into The Dark Knight or even into The Dark Knight Rises (a lousy movie, just not Batman & Robin lousy) but is it at least looking a little better these days? I think the assumption would have to be that, yeah, it must be.

Sadly I have to tell you that, no, it's still every bit as horrible. That in itself, though, is actually kind of impressive. If there's such a thing as doing a great job of making a terrible thing, holy shit, they did it.

Listen, I would like nothing better than to report that Batman & Robin is waaaay more fun than people initially gave it credit for. As a movie fan, I think the best thing is to revisit a movie that didn't click for me only to see it again and suddenly find myself loving it or at least having a better appreciation for it. However, as much as moments like Batman sliding down the tail of a brontosaurus can be a kick (let's not be completely anti-fun here), Batman & Robin is still a bust. If someone were to tell me that they loved Batman & Robin, I'd be very happy for the joy it brought them. I would only wish I could experience it through their eyes. 

For what it's worth, I do believe that Schumacher and everyone involved made an earnest effort to give the people what they thought the people wanted, to give them another Batman Forever, but it just didn't work out. Batman Forever had managed to fall on the right side of a certain line while Batman & Robin just careened over it. Why one struck the right balance and the other didn't, who knows? All the ingredients were essentially the same, they followed the same recipe but somehow one was tasty and one was inedible. 

One positive thing that the last 25 years have done for Batman & Robin is to put it in perspective. We're two successful Batman reboots down the line so we're long past the point of having to blame Batman & Robin for killing the series. Batman has long since proven his resiliency. That said, the franchise did not escape completely unscathed, with the chief casualty of Batman & Robin being Robin himself. This movie did what the Dark Knight's entire rogue gallery never could - it killed the Dynamic Duo. We've had eight solo Batman movies since 1989. Over those eight movies we've had five Batmen (with, of course, Ben Affleck as Batman in the Snyder-verse entries BvS and Justice League) but yet Chris O'Donnell remains the only Robin in all that time (and no, Joseph Gordon-Levitt's character in Rises doesn't count). For a character that is so integral to Batman's mythology, that's crazy.

 Sure, we've seen Dick Grayson and Jason Todd in Titans but as far as having Robin in a Batman movie, forget it. As far as the big screen goes, Robin is a bird that's as extinct as the Dodo. I will say, though, that Matt Reeves' The Batman did leave me with the hope that he was setting the stage to re-introduce Robin. The way Reeves leaves things off at the end of The Batman, with Bruce embracing the idea that he can be and should be a symbol of hope, that the citizens of Gotham need to see him as a hero, I felt for the first time since 1997 that we might actually see Batman take on a partner again.

Reeves is much more interested in bringing a comic book sensibility to his Batman than Christopher Nolan was and I suspect the arc of Reeves' trilogy will be to transition Batman back into classic superhero mode with not just a new Robin but eventually the whole extended Bat Family of Huntress and Batgirl and others potentially making their way to Gotham City. This is just idle speculation on my part, of course, but I have a feeling that under Reeves' watch, the Bat Cave won't stay so empty.  

When he was on the press tour for The Batman, Robert Pattinson stated that he thought there was no such thing as a bad Batman movie, saying "...None of them are bad movies. People kind of shit on some of them, but they're not actually bad." I think that was very cool of the new wearer of the cowl to say and, you know, maybe he's right. But even if you agree with his assessment that there are no bad Batman movies, I think you still have to concede that even 25 years later, Batman & Robin remains the closest that they've come.