With  director Matt Reeves’ critically acclaimed The Batman now in theaters and with an over $150 billion opening weekend, fans and critics have been looking back at director Chris Nolan’s The Dark Knight, which was the last movie in the franchise to enjoy this level of commercial and critical success.

Robert Pattinson’s ‘The Batman’ Opens to $120 Million at International Box Office, Nears $250 Million Globally https://t.co/NoqIttDxc1

— Variety (@Variety) March 6, 2022

The following is a excerpt by Owen Gleiberman at Variety:

“The Batman” is like the follow-up that “The Dark Knight” should have had. It’s a spectacular movie, with an epic sense of fear and corruption, a hero played more subtly than Batman has ever been played, and a villain worthy of our fascination at the larger malevolence he evokes. More than that, what’s amazing about “The Batman” is what an exquisitely layered onion of a script it has, and how much further into reality it tips than “The Dark Knight” did. Robert Pattinson’s Batman truly stalks through Gotham like a freak in a hellbent Halloween costume — the film is set two years into his midnight reign, when he’s just becoming notorious as a vigilante. In a weird way, it manages the minor miracle of letting us see the character, after so many blockbuster incarnations, as if he were unprecedented.

Most of that has to do with how Pattinson plays him. This is the first Batman who’s almost completely uninterested in being Bruce Wayne, who Pattinson turns into a dolefully unkempt neurasthenic shell. Yet as the Batman, he’s a hypnotic anger junkie; you feel the totality of his wrath in every vicious punch. He may be the first Batman who utterly belongs in that suit. It completes him, just as Pattinson’s jawline completes the beautifully rigid black cowl like a piece of sculpture. And he’s got a voice that shoots beyond the mannered growl we’ve heard variations on far too often. Pattinson talks in a way that’s steely and resolute but hypnotically quiet, with a mythic echo of another timeless movie voice — the all-knowing tightly coiled seethe of Clint Eastwood in his “Dirty Harry” era.

“Robert Pattinson’s #TheBatman collected a mighty $128.5 million in its box office debut, marking the best opening weekend of 2022 by a landslide.”

(@variety) pic.twitter.com/6YzTXaeVQ9

— Robert Pattinson Photos (@pattinsonphotos) March 6, 2022

I hadn’t seen “The Dark Knight” since 2008 but watched it again recently; it more than held up. Yet there’s one way it looks different, and that relates to the very existence of “The Batman.” Fourteen years ago, “The Dark Knight” seemed as dark as a comic-book film could be, and in Ledger’s performance it still is. But the rest of the movie is… a comic book movie. A brilliant one, scripted and shot with a glistening clarity, but it remains true to the stylized graphic origins of the genre. I would say, in that sense, that it’s still the greatest comic-book movie I’ve ever seen, with a playfully why-so-serious frisson that made it the perfect vision of terroristic madness for its time.

But “The Batman” is something else, more like the greatest movie that also just happens to be a comic-book movie. (I’m not counting “Joker” in all this, because that film, much as I adore it, is its own non-comic-book thing.) “The Batman” allows us to revel in the presence of the Batman, with his Phantom of the Belfry cape whooshing behind him — a crime-fighter who declares “I’m vengeance” because for a while that’s all he is. He’s policing a world that’s in tatters; even the Bat signal seems stitched together out of shards. But the beauty of the movie isn’t just in how dark it gets, but in how mesmerizingly it hones in on the meaning of that darkness. “The Batman” leads us in — and out — of a vortex. I predict it will have no problem breaking the awards barrier (and maybe winning best picture), because even more than “The Dark Knight” it channels the scalding miasma of the here and now. It’s dark enough to touch who we’ve become.

Read the full essay here.