THE BATMAN BREAKDOWN! Full Movie Analysis & Details You Missed!

welcome back to new rockstars i'm eric voss and this is a breakdown of the batman matt reeves detective noir take on the caped crusader also known as the world's greatest detective in this case played by robert pattinson not always the world's greatest detective in the story but hey it's only his second year into it and the movie is all the better for it this is one of my favorite cinematic depictions of gotham and its broken broken toys there's so much to appreciate about this film the clues reeves hid throughout this film to set up the mystery subtle details in the camera work in the music and easter eggs pointing to the broader dc universe my favorite kind of movie to break down and i'm gonna do it scene by scene spoilers ahead here we go and big thanks to boxu for sponsoring this video more on their tasty offerings later oh by the way i am wearing our custom design of gotham noir a shirt available for a limited time at new rockstarsmerch.com it's really the best way to support what we do here so the film opens with the abrupt title text of batman filling the screen actually the way the 2019 joker opening title text filled that screen but here it's kind of like one of bruce's red tinted snapshots taken from his eye lenses filling in all of his vision this film constantly shows extreme close-ups of eyes and fingers objects objects so close we can't really distinguish them as well as the point of view shots from those peepers a reflection of this film's shifting points of view that keep us guessing who the real villains of the story are the opening shot is actually one of these povs from under the mask of the riddler his breath sucking through his military cold weather mask as he peers through binoculars a recurring voyeurism as we later see batman doing the same thing to selena kyle this opening shot is reminiscent of john carpenter's opening point of view shots in the movie halloween a silent boy killer heard only by his heavy breathing from behind his mask the riddler's gaze passes a cop guard sitting at the gate didn't you see seinfeld you never give them a chair to sit in there's lots of holes in the security but then he lands on a boy dressed as a ninja inside pretend killing his father before heading out to trick-or-treat we've been primed by so many batman films to expect the first skin we see to be a young bruce wayne especially since christopher nolan's batman begins explored bruce's backstory as a ninja but this flips a script on us revealing it to be the son of the corrupt mayor don mitchell jr yet still this is a grieving boy that batman will later feel a connection with now the music over all this is schubert's ave maria sung by a boy falsetto a recurring track setting up the riddler's history as a choirboy orphan framed in a press photo with the wayne family ave maria is a common funeral hymn it actually plays later at the mayor's funeral and then again back at the orphanage and if you listen closely throughout this film the composer michael chiaquino uses a minor key rendition of ave maria as the riddler's theme music now opening on halloween night is definitely a nod to the long halloween the first real great batman detective storyline from the comics a story that ties heavily into the falcons and the maroons other comic influences were batman year one and cook's ego both arcs you definitely want to read but really i gotta say matt reeves clearly made this movie its own thing and you could just point to anything in this movie and say it was from any comic book ever but this movie is better appreciated for its cinematic details not as just a list of comic book easter eggs so that's the approach i'm gonna go in this breakdown because speaking of carpenters halloween there is a great michael myers-esque reveal of the riddler directly behind the mirror only revealed when the tv light flickers brighter like batman the riddler first appears to us from the shadows but never steps out of those shadows until he is ready to kill not giving his prey an opportunity to see him and make a different choice now this riddler look with the glasses over the mask is inspired directly from the descriptions of the zodiac killer who also taunted police and the media with mysterious ciphers written in his own alphabet he clubs the mayor with a tucker a tool used in carpeting proving the riddler planned from the beginning for batman to find this tool and use it later to uncover his home floorboards to reveal his long game to bomb the city sea walls and then we jump to halloween night from bruce's perspective we actually start on these weird two glowing shapes that look like eye holes from inside his batman cowl but these extreme close-ups are actually part of the bat signal igniting steaming in the rain and you'll notice this bat signal is not the clean stencil that we have seen before but a chunk of metal jammed into the shutters of a standard searchlight just showing how batman and gordon are really in the early days of their partnership also reflected on the location of this bat signal in this unfinished construction site then we see gotham's times square region with a gotham empire building a holiday in gotham a bank of gotham the gotham tribune and then this screen psa warning addiction to drops on the rise drops being the name of a new eye drop drug of this world the guy who robs the store is actually wearing a green drop mask he's a literal drop head and this story is called good times grocery which is an easter egg to the robert pattinson crime movie good time which matt reeves said that he watched while writing this script for this movie that made him want to cast robert pattinson and you'll notice it's almost always raining in gotham a detail lifted directly from the movie seven in which david fincher made sure it was raining in every exterior shot in the city to show the oppressive nature of urban life bruce describes how the gothamites ignore the rain all this rain setting up the city's eventual flooding in the third act the more water the more the criminals are able to overtake the city batman stalks this group of thugs wearing white face paint though you'll notice their initiate played by jayla sergo who actually plays tim drake on titans he only has half of his face painted since he has not yet earned his full spot in the gang now after we saw two fake outs where criminals looked into the shadows of an alley terrified that batman would step out of them finally he does here on the train platform giakino's score evokes john williams imperial march for darth vader and batman's entrance here definitely recalls darth vader's first arrival through the smoke in a new hope by the way the cinematographer on this movie was greg frazier who also dp'ed rogue one which had its own iconic darth vader shots and he introduces himself the hell are you supposed to be i'm vengeance yes now this is a year two batman still getting his name out there and he's actually called vengeance more often than he's called batman in this movie also i am vengeance is part of his famous three-line phrase from the nothing to fear episode in batman the animated series i am vengeance i am the knight i am batman batman tazes the last guy on the throat showing that batman's armor itself must be electro proof setting up how he survives getting shocked by that generator in the flooded arena in the final act batman joins lieutenant jim gordon at the mayor's crime scene showing off some impressive detective skills deducing the thumb was severed when the mayor was still alive and noticing a bloody mark on the floor from where the murder weapon bounced over there that even the photographer was like oh what's he looking at oh damn i should snap a shot of this now in a way he does live up to his title of the world's greatest detective but i would argue in this film he's actually not yet that much of a detective he makes some crucial errors but it makes for a much better story especially for someone at the beginning of his career in vigilantism on the walls our newspaper celebrating the mayor's maroney drug bust referring to the gang of sal moroney rivals to the falcons the whole thing we later learned in the movie a total sham newspapers also include a subtler headline about the city's sea wall construction problems teasing the riddler's final plan to target those sea walls and then this clue from your secret friend who having a clue let's play a game just me and you this card with the skeleton saying from your secret friend was modeled directly on the real life card sent by the zodiac to san francisco chronicle reporter paul avery that had a skeleton saying from your secret pal the riddle is what does a liar do when he's dead answer he lies still is decodable using the same double letter technique cited by robert graysmith in the zodiac film that's the most common double consonant in the english language the double l and what's the one word that we know that he'll use in here at least once you'll notice how later alfred will try using the same technique to mark off all the double o's before bruce realizes that eliminating the six letters that they were given fills out the riddler's favorite ryan gosling movie from the crime scene the music shifts to nirvana's something in the way with kurt cobain's lyrics reflecting this grunge take on batman from robert pattinson a guy who wishes he was homeless and feels more comfortable on the streets at night but also as the final track on nirvana's never mind album it actually precedes a secret track that comes after 10 minutes of silence called endless nameless so this recurring track in the movie is really the something in the way of bruce's true mindset as he is a detective masking a secretly violent monster underneath that layer cobain's lyrics also reference the animals i trapped referring to the past criminals that batman has caught in these first two years and how the riddler literally traps animals in cages for batman to find and you'll notice right as bruce arrives in his bat cave the old wayne tower subway station of wayne terminus we hear cobain singing underneath the bridge tarp has sprung a leak another indication that the flood is coming a flood that probably will actually flood this whole batcave bruce's moody voiceover has actually been his journal entry in a notebook labeled gotham project framing this batman as a young physician experimenting with different cures for the city a doctor like his father a contrast to the riddler who approaches the ills of the city as a forensic accountant looking for and diagnosing redundancies where the numbers don't add up but not prescribing true cures to those discrepancies his first entry in this film is the night of thursday october 31st and in the epilogue after the flood it's the morning of wednesday november 6th meaning the whole movie transpires in about six to seven days but it is the dawn of the seventh day in genesis it took god seven days to create the universe but since we are right on the border between that sixth and seventh day the sixth day is when god created man we haven't fully gone through that seventh day yet a way of showing how in this movie we have not yet fully acquired that seventh day of rest there's still work to be done when bruce joins alfred for breakfast i love this he squints at the morning sunlight and has to put on sunglasses as he is a self-described nocturnal animal who's getting too accustomed to seeing nighttime prey through his special lenses kind of like morphe's line in the matrix his eyes hurt because he's never really used them properly before here on the ground floor there's actually a bust of william shakespeare which could be a possible nod to the 60s adam west batman when the batcave was accessed by a button hidden in shakespeare's bust then in the mayor's garage batman knows which car to check from the shears and the tire left there by the riddler the shears probably used to sever the mayor's thumb which is why batman then looks for a usb thumb drive port thumb drive and they say this movie doesn't have jokes batman fights his way into the iceberg lounge and breaks the nose of the moonlighting cop named bill kenzie who's actually a narco from the gotham central comics and batman means oz cobblebot the penguin there's a great visual exchange here where he sees selena kyle boots first and then as selena exchanges cash for drops with oz selena quickly recognizes anika from the photos which batman notices and then later after talking to oz he sees the same boots on annika in the photo so knows for sure that the two must be involved somehow but then my favorite detail in this movie comes right after this as they exit the lounge we're outside in the upper corner of the frame there's a lit window showing a silhouette snapping photos of the lounge entrance this is the riddler that is how he got all of these embarrassing photos this is only 30 minutes into the film folks but this isn't revealed and confirmed until two hours later that nashton's home is across the street from the lounge and you'll notice this is in a hotel lit in a green neon sign this is under our noses from the beginning of the film i love it then after sparring with selena batman finds her overdue electric bills that list selena's address as queen street and gotham us there's no state listed because throughout the comics of the films gotham's exact location in the united states tends to shift around the news reports commissioner savage's murder his head in a cage fed to snarling rats a detail from george orwell's 1984 when winston is tortured in room 101 with his head in a similar rat cage then when examining his body batman and gordon look at the riddler's rat maze with the new cipher in a linear path in a tray as a second riddle this time a purple envelope with a card showing a mad scientist pouring chemicals i'm mad about you want to know my name just look inside and see and then inside an explosion with but wait i gotta tell you that might spoil the chemistry of course teasing the riddler waking up a bomb for the ta and at the bottom he writes follow the maze till you find the rat bring him into the light you'll find where i'm at batman then teams up with salinas that she wears his recording lenses to scan vips in the club here she meets da gil coulson and as she talks with them her red wig contrasts with the blue light on his face which gets colors to get mirrored at the end of the night when the riddler straps the neck bomb to him in the car which reeves and frazier keep way out of focus just flashing blue and red lights invoking a police squad car ironic for him being the arm of the law but now facing justice for his own corruption i also really like the detail of coulson having to wipe the steam off the windshield since riddler had been sitting in this parked car all night steaming it up and as the camera pulls back from this attack it's all framed with a gotham sea wall in the foreground the waves right up to the top super high tide from all this rain marking this street corner as one of the targets of the riddler's later detonations alfred has translated the maze cipher 2 you are el rata alada saying that the spanish isn't perfect since as oz later points out rata alada is a spanish feminine noun an adjective meaning it should have the pronoun of la not l a clue of course setting up the word play of url also perhaps a nod to the spelling of grammatical mistakes throughout the zodiac's letters and ciphers which some code breakers believe may have actually been intentional probably not but most of these criminals think they're smarter than they are alfred gives bruce thomas's wayne family cufflinks a w with a curved line through it which visually matches the designs that the riddler used for many of his symbols hard lines with curved s-shapes or question mark shapes snaking through them at the mayor's funeral bruce gets met with paparazzi now later in the riddler's home there's a newspaper clipping wall of a past bruce wayne tabloid photo with a smiling face behind him that matches the smile of barry killen who plays the joker in an arkham prison cell in one of the final scenes now i didn't see barry kyoen in this mom but i just love the idea that he might have stalked bruce as one of these photographers in the past similar to how john doe in seven cameoed in plain sight earlier in the film as a paparazzo inside a young man tries to sneak past a barrier before getting caught and bruce chats with another angry father glad that the mayor's dead both of these men are wearing dull green and jackets i think they were both among ridler's followers who later attacked the rally actually that angry dad is definitely the same guy who later gets unmasked on the catwalk and says he's vengeance now you can see there's a lot to talk about when breaking down this amazing film so to fuel me through this process i've been trying my best to focus on some interesting choices in my snacking game and you can take your snacking on an international adventure with our friends at baksu boksu is a monthly subscription service that delivers premium japanese snacks and tea pairings straight from japan to your door baksu partners with family-owned snack makers to make their original treats every monthly box is themed this month's theme is sakura season sakura is japanese for cherry blossom and the cherry blossom is an important cultural symbol in japan and their blooming is a huge event so every year people celebrate by gathering under the trees for flower viewings called hanami and they have picnics together it's wonderful as you can see the box is just packed with all sorts of limited edition cherry blossom themed snacks and this booklet that comes with it tells you everything that's in the box what part of japan it came from so this is a sakura mochi from nagano in japan i just love the texture of mochi i love how squishy it is oh that's really good i love mochi so much it's like i'm eating a pillow that's hugging my teeth back so if you want to have your own sakura celebration and support new rockstars here click the link in the description and use the code rockstars to get 15 off your order but this funeral gets interrupted [Music] i love how for all this we stay inside the church we only hear the faint [ __ ] revs the screams the dull pops of the gunshots all growing louder and louder until the suv crashes in you'll notice the riddler painted the letters d-o-a on the car a joke for the d.a being d-o-a dead on arrival and using a neck bomb this way may be inspired by the horrible incident involving brian wells in 2003 very complex plot that involved theft and blackmail i'd recommend a documentary i saw on netflix about that but i hate that documentary because it showed the death with zero trigger warning netflix could you please just put a little trigger warning before that part happens or take it out anyway bruce returns as batman to claim his third riddle now in a yellow envelope in these trying times never forget i'm just a phone call away and then he wrote ring ring dozens of times you'll notice the text gets more and more crammed in toward the bottom of the card the riddler's live stream includes comments egging the riddler on including one that says hope it's a dud and we gotta do it all again tuesday a clue for how the riddler actually plans to blow up the sea wall on tuesday election day others diss batman screw the pose room black i need more riddler and what if that's body armor i think it'll save him from the blast indeed it totally does the riddler asks it can be cruel poetic or blind but when it's denied it's your violence you may find justice the answer's justice the second riddle if you are justice please do not lie what is the price for your blind eye he's referring to the cost of coulson's bribes which apparently is 10 000 a month not to prosecute certain cases which brings us to the third riddle since your justice is so select please tell us which vermin you're paid to protect but because coulson will not give up the rat batman clashes with the gcpd but gordon helps him escape with a dramatic leap off the tower and wingsuit glide but the part of the l train that he clotheslines is actually right next to that neon green hotel sign so this is right where the riddler lives he probably saw all of this go down now suspecting the penguin is the winged rat they follow into a drug deal at the recycling plant leading to this shootout and chase this movie's batmobile fires up it's a true muscle car with an exposed engine flames bursting out the side of the undercarriage like batman himself he's ready to explode this street chase is some of the best action filmmaking i have seen reeves and frazier mount the cameras on the sides of the cars to make us feel like we are looking through the side view mirror or we're in the back seat looking out meanwhile the music that jakino uses here interrupts his main batman theme with rapid percussive breaks so that we only hear the charging theme when the batmobile gains on the penguin also they the which syncs perfectly with a percussion they pass under some highway signs with dc references the gotham docks are freight docks used by organized crime in the games robinson park is a poor neighborhood in gotham city where selena kyle lived during the no man's land storyline tricorner yards refers to the tri-corner it's a triangle-shaped island on the south side of gotham where the gcpd is located in no man's land and then hinckley river could refer to south hinckley a downtown burrow in the gotham knight anthology film and a location in dark knight rises and the chase reaches its climax as batman approaches oz we see him framed upside down in the fire upside down like a bat hanging from above and i love this after they interrogate the penguin he waddles after them with his ankles bound moving just like a penguin does but the riddler lures them back into the orphanage that thomas wayne donated to the city but since his renewal fund was emptied it fell to ruin a projector shows thomas's mayoral campaign announcement beside a group of choir boys one of whom was edward nashton and i like how when bruce realizes he is the next target the riddler's previous two riddles come back to haunt him the woman picking up the phone and the old man blowing up alfred opening up the explosive package and dory answering the phone to tell him he was too late as bruce tries to figure all of this out laying out the evidence on the floor an overhead shot positions him at the center of all this evidence as his dual rules as both the wayne eyre and batman make him really the center of the riddler's plot more centered than even the riddler realizes selena reveals falcone is her father as has been the case in the comics and bruce sees the riddler's latest video detailing the histories of the wayne and the arkham families how reporter edward elliott uncovered the secret of martha's parents murdered suicide leading to her being in and out of arkham for years she was actually the heiress of the arkham family riddler wrote over this the word hush referring to thomas's hush payments on this story but also a clear nod to the batman hush storyline another great detective mystery that also features batman and catwoman romantically involved while the riddler orchestrates this plot from behind bars that reporter's name being edward elliott could be a nod to the great grandfather of thomas elliott aka hush in that storyline thomas's cease and desist comes from the law firm of miller and more an easter egg to the comic writers frank miller and alan moore who wrote what i think are the best batman graphic novels the dark knight returns and the killing joke respectively falcone tells bruce that sal moroney had his parents killed to keep thomas from being a forever loyal asset to falcone but alfred clarifies that thomas was actually planning to sell out falcone to the police on the night that they were murdered he could just never verify if it was actually falcone's doom and i love love love that this movie keeps it a mystery selena is able to get the truth out of kenzie that falcone killed annika and that falcone was the true winged rat being protected by city leaders and ruling over the corruption of all of gotham as everyone was really draining thomas's billion dollar renewal fund the way this mystery unfolds in the movie parallels the movie chinatown which explores how the city of los angeles was built on corrupt dealings around the city's water infrastructure including the twist of the top boss having a secret daughter batman charges in to stop selena from killing falcone with an amazing hallway shot from reeves and frazier lit only by the flashing of the machine guns just like frasier's hallway shot in rogue one lit only by the lightsaber in the blasters falcone gets arrested and he taunts gordon saying what are you with zorro here classically it was outside a screening of a zorro film where bruce's parents were killed in the comics which is one of his inspirations to don a black mask but the riddler shoots falcone dead and batman notices this is under a flickering street lamp bringing the rat into the light also marking the spot as one of those blinking christmas lights in the riddler's floor mat right next to where a seawall bomb was planted the riddler surrenders calmly in a diner with imagery actually matching edward hopper's painting nighthawks but his surrender at the end of the film's second act plus the police's discovery of his horror show apartment is also directly from venture 7. both criminals having thousands of pages of handwritten ramblings and john doe surrendering to police as part of his master plan such as the case for the riddler who calmly traces a question mark in his drink the riddler has two ids one for edward nashton the other for patrick parker both are known aliases of edward nigma in the comics the police are able to id nashton as a forensic accountant thus how he knew which city leaders were profiting from the renewal fund and whether coulson was telling the truth about his 10 000 bribes and why here all of his journals are written on ledgers you'll notice a close-up of one of the pages shows entries from july reading i know what i must become a line that he repeats then over and over and over below like a student repeating a lesson as a punishment on a chalkboard what he must become is a masked vigilante something he learned from batman whom he viewed as a silent partner someone he thought would be impressed with his work batman finds one more letter in a red envelope in a bat cage a card with a proverbial monkey dancing for an organ grinder this proves that the riddler at least at first did not know bruce wayne and batman were the same person if his plan was to kill bruce with the bomb that alfred opened and then for batman to find the see you in hell note followed by this card riddler must have thought he could kill bruce wayne and then celebrate afterwards with batman a separate person but the way the riddler whispers his name here grows away does make it seem for a beat that the riddler is saying it to batman to taunt him but then the scene backpedals when the riddler comes back to it saying bruce wayne he's the only one we didn't get which i think is a great twist showing how the riddler saw him and batman working together to bring down the elites like bruce wayne and he was just repeating the name out of his own personal lingering envy for the orphan who got spotlight instead of him but i think there is another way to read this that perhaps after setting his plan into motion putting those stamps on all the letters and sending them out when bruce wayne ended up not dying in the explosion the riddler might have been able to conclude that that was because he led him that night to the orphanage accidentally keeping his target away from harm so that maybe now he might know that they are the same person he's just not yet revealing that he knows continuing to tease batman i don't know i could make an argument either way and the fact that paul dana walks the line so carefully so that we're not really sure how much the riddler knows is what makes him so great when batman returns to the realers apartment on his social media account he finds comments from others including one who says don't forget the cling wrap paul dano actually revealed an interview that originally he committed to wrapping his whole body in cling wraps so that the riddler wouldn't leave any dna at the crime scene so paul dano eventually just gave up doing that because uh when you wrap your body in cling wrap your skin cannot perspire so the plan comes to fruition in the vans explode the sea wall caves flooding the city enacting an old testament disaster a plague upon the city wiping it clean and this herds everyone in the high ground at belarus campaign rally in the arena where the riddler's followers plan to open fire but batman drops in takes them all down fighting alongside selena at one point he checks himself with adrenaline he goes full ralphie parker but floodwater pours in and a loose electrical cable dangles over the water so batman swings over and using the detachable chest emblem blade that we saw him used before he cuts the cable knowing that his shock absorbent armor will protect him i mean i love this reveal as it confirms my theory from over two years ago when i demonstrated how that chess piece could actually be made into a blade by fully making one out of cardboard and then stabbing phillip with it and then he leads the survivors to safety he has transformed from a shadow to be feared to a beacon of hope and for the first time in this movie as he looks into the daylight he does not squint meanwhile his voiceover describes how the flooded city is now at risk for a new criminal takeover as we see the penguin gaze out at its new empire a flooded city perfect for a penguin a flightless bird but an excellent swimmer back in arkham barry killing cameos as the unscreened arkham prisoner in the cell beside riddlers saying one day you're up the next you're a clown laugh you maniacally while teasing a wide grin a bit of a disfigured face yes the joker which was further confirmed by this movie's post-credit clue directed us back to ratalata.com where a new cipher revealed the symbol for the letter z leaving the only letter left in the riddler's alphabet still a mystery the letter j well mr j his new best friend actually since then a new cipher dropped on the site translating to you think i'm finished but perhaps you don't know the full truth every ending is a new beginning something is coming still in all those letters no jay matt reeves actually confirmed in an interview that there is a deleted scene in which batman after seeing the riddler's clues pointing to him in particular did actually meet with the joker face to face in arkham to consult with him i guess kind of like chloe starling consulting with hannibal lecter and he indicated that it might show up on the blu-ray release in the final scene selena says she is planning on moving to bloodhaven a neighboring city in the comics known as the base of operations of nightwing but batman does not follow her and she says who am i kidding you're already spoken for now yes this is something alfred says in the year zero comics but as elena says it her eyes dart to the left her eye line is connecting with the bat signal in the sky that was the first image we saw associated with batman in the very opening minutes of the movie while this movie at times flirted with being a bat in the cat story i think its strongest partnership was really between batman and gordon it is a detective story however they were not in this movie the world's greatest detectives honestly they screwed up constantly their spanish was bad the only way they caught the riddler was because he surrendered to them the city sea walls still imploded the city's left flooded you could argue that they completely failed their riddler investigation really the victory belongs to the riddler here the most corrupt leaders of gotham are now out of the picture but that makes batman's victory in this movie a personal one he started the movie blind now we can see by losing the battle of this movie it sets him up to win the longer war and it shows us that work always needs to be done while this may be the dawn of the seventh day it is not the time for rest i obviously love this movie and i love it more and more each time i watch it the more i talk about it hopefully diving into the details helped you appreciate it more too hey a reminder that you can get this limited edition gotham noir shirt at newrockstarsmerch.com follow me on instagram and twitter at eavos follow new rockstars 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Channel: New Rockstars

Views: 2,884,300

Keywords: batman, the batman, batman breakdown, batman analysis, batman easter eggs, batman full movie, batman 2022, robert pattinson, joker, riddler, batman joker, new rockstars, erik voss

Id: zYjCTKgXS9Y

Length: 29min 24sec (1764 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 06 2022