The Dark Knight of Gotham City begins his war on crime with his first major enemy being the clownishly homicidal Joker. (from IMDb)

Batman 4K 2019 Release Intro
Before Twilight's Robert Pattinson (yup, that's officially a thing now), before Batfleck, and even before Christopher Nolan's stellar Christian Bale-led trilogy, there were four other Batman adventures that spawned from 1989 to 1997. To celebrate 85 years of the caped crusader, Warner Bros. is re-releasing all four films individually in a brand new 4K transfer with updated accompanying blu-ray discs. (The movies will also be releasing collectively in a set on September 17.)

I was just a kid when Michael Keaton's Batman debuted. I still remember seeing it on the big screen... and being terrified. It wasn't a kids movie by any stretch of the imagination, and that kind of set the darker tone for the films that would follow (even though the final in the series, Batman and Robin, was the most "kid-friendly" of the bunch, despite still being pretty creepy at times). Revisiting these films all these years later, it just shows me how far superhero movies have really come. After this year's gigantic event film, Avengers: Endgame, or even Warner's newest property, Shazam!, the quality is so much greater than what was produced in the late 80's and 90's (and this is coming from someone whose top 4 favorite movies of all time are out of the 80's). For these Batman reviews, I'm going to give an overview of them as a movie and also in this new transfer quality, while giving my usual content breakdown at the end. The 4K discs didn't have any special features on them beyond commentaries, but the regular Blu-Ray discs included in these sets do. Since the main feature of these releases are their new 4K transfers, I'm going to just focus on that aspect (and not the blu-ray bonus features).

Batman Review
1989's Batman was something really special and different for its time. As a kid, I was definitely not ready for this film, especially with its dark and sadistic qualities that stemmed from its main villain, The Joker, played by Jack Nicholson. Keaton, who was best known for his comedic roles in the 80's, was an interesting choice for Bruce Wayne/Batman, but he turned out to be great in both roles in and out of the cowl. Nicholson was brilliant as the creepy and maniacal foil for Batman, while director Tim Burton did a pretty good job world-building with the very unique, gothic Gotham City. The movie certainly feels dated three decades later, but of these four films, it's by far the strongest one.

What surprised me by revisiting these movies is realizing that Batman is NOT the focus of these movies. Each film focuses heavily on developing the film's central villain(s), with Batman kind of being that mysterious force that now has to combat the new threat (Batman Returns was most guilty of doing this). In most cases, it left me feeling cheated and wanting to see Batman as less one-dimensional and, ironically, cartoonish; many of the films just spent way too much time on what the villain was up to. (But more on that in my Batman Returns review.)

The content for Batman is rough, and it definitely terrified me as a kid. There was some language (including plenty of blasphemy), but the worst parts about the film were the shockingly gross or gruesome moments. The first comes when Joker ricochets a bullet off of Batman's arm and it hits him in the face. We soon see what looks like very bloody enter/exit wounds on either side of his face just before he falls into a vat of chemicals. A scene soon after shows him in the plastic surgeon's chair and it's creepy and dramatic as we see him react to what we don't see, but we do see very ugly and bloody instruments on a nearby table. Later, Joker uses a joy buzzer to literally fry a man to death (this especially terrified me as a kid), and he walks around the charred, smoking corpse, talking to it for an extended period of time. A scene soon after shows a creepy young woman with a Phantom of the Opera-style mask on her face, and it's a dramatic moment as she removes it to reveal bubbly acid burns on her cheek. And finally, the end battle between Batman and Joker gets a bit bloody, especially when we see a pool of blood under Joker's head after he falls to his death, and his eyes are wide open with a creepy grin on his face. A lot of this might not be too bad by today's standards for a PG-13 superhero movie, but for me as a kid in the 80s, it was terrifying.

Now, I have to say the 4K transfer is quite good. Warner Bros. went back to the original negatives for these transfers and scanned them in at the highest resolution they could. Not every scene looks great, but I promise that you we've never seen 1989's Batman this clear or vibrant before. If you're a fan of the film, it's worth getting this one, even if it's a double-dip for you.

Of these four Batman films, this one is still the best, but I'm definitely partial to Nolan's films since these (and even The LEGO Batman Movie). Also, while the disturbing content doesn't affect me now like it did then, it's still pretty intense, and I can't recommend this film openly to viewers sensitive to dark, disturbing content. Still, this 4K release is the best you'll ever see this particular Batman, and for already-fans, I definitely recommend it.