Big Bad Harv wrote:

DKnight007 wrote:I like Burtons first film.

Batman Returns is a polarizing one it seems. It had a chance to be great IMO...but Burton chose to film on sound stages? Ugh....which well looked like they filmed on soundstages and the action was not great. The film was too whimsical for me. My wife though loves Burtons whimsical films and she loved Pfeiffers Catwoman.

Pfeiffer as Catwoman was great, but her origin was terrible and ill conceived IMO.

Burton's interpretation of both Catwoman and Penguin worked because they were as grotesquely absurd as his Gotham was a nightmare world -- or, to quote the great Bob Kane, "like Hell rising up through the concrete." Somehow a fat man-monster disowned by his parents and sent into the bowels of the Gotham sewer system, where his deformities would mirror those of his feathered friends, didn't seem out of place. The same goes for Catwoman: killed by her megalomaniacal boss, she returns from the dead in pure Frankensteinian form -- her outfit bearing overtly white stitch patterns showing that she "sewed herself anew" makes the motif that much darker. Both of their origins are inconceivable in the world of reality, but Burton's Batman universe so borders on the nightmarish that they just fit without question, really. The action was decent, but I also personally love that most of the film was done on sound stages, in much the same way the Golden Age films noirs were constructed around the "city of the imagination." And to think that Nolan would use Pinewood Studios in London to film some scenes in his Batman trilogy goes to show just how influential Burton's two films were to later films.