BATMAN UPDATES: Penguin Look, Robert Pattinson ...

BATMAN UPDATES: Penguin Look, Robert Pattinson Training, Zoe Kravitz & Matt Reeves Interview & More

Matt Reeves announces batman filming

 

We’re getting closer to the release of the new Batman with Robert Pattinson, and a tonne of new information has come out.

We’ll be covering a teaser on what the Penguin will look like, Robert Pattinson’s training, and a new interview with Zoe Kravitz as well as Matt Reeves.

There’s a lot of cool little details within each one that really paints out how the overall film may be and they’ve definitely got me excited for what’s in store.

There may be some spoilers here so if you want to go into the movie as blind as possible then I highly recommend that you click off now.

Matt Reeves Interview

Ok so firstly we’re gonna be starting off with The Matt Reeves interview that was dropped on the Daily Beast last week.

In it Reeves was asked several questions about the process of the film, how it felt to be dealing with delays and the ins and outs of his series Tales From The Loop.

I’ll leave it linked in the description below if you wanna check it out but the most interesting aspect of the entire talk is how Reeves is differentiating his Batman from the other depcitions that we’ve seen of the character on screen.

When discussing this Matt said the following:

The way I loved Apes is the way that I loved Batman. The only two franchises that might have been something I would have connected with, amazingly, are the ones I was approached by. That’s been a very special thing. I can’t say that about almost any other franchise, that they would have been the right fit for me. My thing about it, on both of them, is that I had a particular take that, for me, was personal. I feel like if I can’t approach something through a perspective that resonates with me on some personal level, I don’t know where to put the camera, and I don’t know how to talk to the actors. I also felt like there have been some great Batman movies, and I didn’t want to just do a Batman movie.

I appreciate that you want me to do a Batman movie, but I don’t want to just do a Batman movie; I want to do a Batman movie that has a chance to be something different, and humanist, and can use the metaphors of the genre. It’s the same reason I did the Apes movies. Those movies were incredibly personal to me, despite the fact that they were what they were. So I made my pitch for what it would be, and to my great pleasure, it turned out that they were totally open to that. I took a tremendously long time working with my partners on writing that script, and they waited. And when I turned it in, they wanted to make it. I’ve been incredibly fortunate that they’ve been so open to it being different. And one of the exciting things about it is that it drew an incredibly interesting and talented number of actors to want to be involved in it. To me, that’s been the dream.

“Woke” storyline?

Now when this was first announced a lot of people interpreted it as meaning that the film would be woke. There were cries of it being SJW bullcrap and that it would be in line with the recent trend of movies by Hollywood that put politics before plot.

However, when reading this storyline and knowing what we know about the movie I disagree heavily with the interpretation.

We already know that the film will be a detective story that centres around Batman investigating a string of murders in Gotham. Last month we dropped a report that discussed how insiders had informed us that the work would be in line with the Batman Earth One storylines and I think this hints at the humanist side that Matt is talking about.

In that Bruce really has to deal with the pressure of donning a mantle and what his mission to save Gotham ultimately leads to. It’s a far more grounded tale than the majority of Batman films and Bruce really feels like hes the underdog throughout it, fighting against a corrupt system that caused the death of his parents.

Add to this the fact that it too contains several murders and we have to watch the psychological toll that this takes on Bruce.

Dealing with Death

In Batman films there often are killings but it’s rare that we see Bruce truly horrified by them and as of now we haven’t really dealt with the psychological toll that this takes. Often in murder mysteries and dramas we see the damage that murders can do to the mind of someone trying to understand them and I take Matts interview at hinting at the toll it will take on Bruce.

Batman often tries to paint himself out as a symbol but at the core of it he is a man that ultimately ends up isolating himself from even his family because of what he’s had to go through through the years. Whilst I love the Bat God style Batman that we got in things like BVS I would also love to see more of Year One style storyline that deals which Bruce realising he may be out of his depth and ultimately sucummbing to it.

The Look

Batman is often depicted as a muscle-bound man that looks like me in the mirror however they are definitely doing something different with him and that leads us to our next point.

That is Robert Pattinson’s look.

The actor was recently seen jogging and working out.

Make sure you stretch Rob…don’t want you pulling a Sam Hamm string…eh get it cos Sam Hamm wrote the script for Batman 89.

High brow jokes here at the channel.

Now as you can expect plenty of people on Twitter who also happen to probably be personal trainers as well, experts in biology and fitness, who didn’t like it and then we got the people who did and the usual back and forth happened where people said it wasn’t their Batman and yada yada yada.

Anyway personally I think that him being skinny at this point makes a lot of sense and though I can understand people wanting a bulkier Batman, if we look at the comics, Rob is more in line with the earlier stories than a lot of the bigger depictions.

How Is the Body Difference Explained?

So firstly, we do know that this is a year two story.

Batman has recently come back from spending 7 years around the world in which he learnt martial arts, forensic science, chemistry and so on.

So he’s hasn’t really had that much time to hit the gym because he was mainly focused on training his mind and not his body.

This is reflected in the comics in Year One and the aforementioned Earth One in which he is still muscular but leaner rather than bulkier.

What tends to happen in the comics that tell his origin story is that he comes back to Gotham having learnt all this stuff and then he starts properly training over the years.

He has already gained the knowledge that he needs now so doesn’t need to focus on learning as much and can therefore take on perfecting his body.

Putting on muscle mass takes years and years and at the age of 25 which is when Bruce typically returns to Gotham he tends to bulk up till he’s about 30 and then stays at this weight for the next ten or more years.

So I do think this makes a lot of sense and again this hammers home the fact that this is a different kind of Batman to what we’ve seen before. He’s more of a detective and the guy isn’t fighting superman, he’s fighting criminals in back alleys so the idea of being bigger isn’t even necessary yet.

That’s kinda how those two points tie together but it also seems like we are getting something more inline with what we’d expect to see in terms of the Penguin.

The Penguin

Rob McClure briefly mentioned the prosthetics for the Penguin in a recent discussion about Mrs Doubtfire The Musical. He says on a table he saw “what they were building” for Colin Farrell to wear as the Penguin.

So not a massive amount of things we can take from that, however, we do know now for definite that Colin Farrell will be getting things added to his face in order to complete his Penguin look.

Farell has stated that he’s putting on weight for the part and this adds to the idea that he will be taking on the classic appearance of the character.

I don’t think these prosthetics will be full on as I think from what we’ve seen that may be a bit jarring.

Batman is filming on the streets of London and Glasgow rather than being all green screen and looking at the Batmobile and Batsuit, they seem quite toned down and very DIY.

This grounds the movie quite a lot so I doubt that it will be a long Pinnochio nose…but I could be lying…ey?

I think it will likely be something like what they did to Charlize Theron on Bombshell where they just changed the character’s features but it still looked like a real person.

Obviously time will tell but that’s just what I would take from this judging by the other elements of the movie that we’ve seen so far.

Zoe Kravitz

And finally we have the interview with Zoe Kravitz that talks about her role as Catwoman. This was originally posted by Vanity Fair but they paywall a lot of their articles and I’d already clicked it so couldn’t open it.

So huge thank you to Batman twitter account The Bat source for pulling together the main segments of interest for us.

Zoe was asked how preparing for the role was going in quarantine and she said the following in regards to her diet and exercise:

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So what we can take from this is that Kravitz will be wearing a catsuit for the film and that she’s on my diet hashtag suns out guns out.

There were worries that she wouldn’t actually be appearing in the catsuit in the film due to the bike chase scene which we saw filming in Glasgow.

That had her just wearing a typical biker outfit but this now confirms there will indeed be one.

When we will get a chance to see it we don’t know yet but it does at the very least let us know that there will be costumes galore throughout the movie.

As always I’m really hyped for the film and hopefully, it isn’t too long before we get to see some first looks.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on these updates and what you wanna see in the next couple of weeks.

 

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