I loved Riddler's introduction but can't help feeling his whole plotline was eventually just wasted and thrown to the side in favor of the other. Bat and Cat did not need to deal with their past in this film, as much as many people like to think of it as essential character. Halfway in the Riddler gets put on hold so long that when he is reintroduced you've kinda forgotten all about him. It slows his side of the movie down so much that it comes across as anti-climactic in the end. We also need a little more here on Batman as a character, hes the protagonist man! The movie drops the narration midway right until the very end again.. this being present throughout would have made the movie more artistically cohese. Go all-in on the noir please Matt! In noir fashion the movie should have also ended on a grim note, in fact when the assassination of Falcone happens, I was wholly ready and expecting of the movie to end there yet it kept on going for another hour or so. A lot of scenes were nedlessly wrought out and needed the fat cutting, another aspect Nolan excels at.. Bruce mythologizing his father but then realizing he is flawed I think was potentially really interesting, but could have been saved for something like the second movie, equally so with Selina Kyle's backstory and their whole involvement with Turturro. Turturro played up the replacement father figure really well which also would have been lots to chew on if this was dedicated to its own movie. There are a lot of interesting and important topics touched on in here just to be reduced to one liners. There were a handful of scenes which would have also felt more impactful if they were shown rather than told, maybe this was an unfortunate product of the pandemic though I don't know. The detective side of the movie could have been played into more I think as well, the studios need to be more insistent on making the movie's grand scheme smaller rather than larger, this is what made Joker such a success.

If the movie spent its whole runtime focused on family legacy, as he investigates his parents real backstories, and all their faults of just being human, including the intertwined crime mystery of Falcone and the Penguin, the DA and the cops all being involved in the crime, Turturro playing up the replacement father, and Bruce caving into it, the recyclable fashion in which the news forgets about the tragic death of Annika, in favour of powerful white people, the relationship plot of Selina and Bat, this would have been its own really great emotional movie.

And on the other hand if the movie focused all its attention on the Riddler, vengeance and its consequences, moving from a symbol of fear into a symbol of hope, the dynamics of being an orphan in your ivory tower compared to being an orphan on the streets. Being promised better for it to just be broken, the powers of just a small online following, and the disastrous consequences of it going unchecked.. this would have been an equally engrossing pot-boiler movie.

Overall though it's emotional and hits a lot of great notes, and hopefully Reeves learns from some of the pitfalls when creating potential sequels. If he does then this will end up becoming a legendary telling.