The Batman (Movie) Review

The Batman (Directed by Matt Reeves, Warner Brothers, 2022)

Finally got around to watching this on Amazon Prime. In terms of the Batman films (that I've seen) I'd probably put it in the top-half, but I'm not very enthusiastic about it.

For starters at 177 minutes this film is nearly three hours long and it absolutely did not need to be. Avengers: Endgame ran slightly longer at 181 minutes, but that movie was wrapping up story-lines, references and jokes that had been set up in 21 previous movies released over the course of a decade. The Batman was juggling four different villains in barely related plots and rule number one of superhero movies? The more villains you stuff into a film the worse it is going to be.

Despite suffering from villain bloat, the film has a lot going for it including a star-studded cast. Robert Pattinson channels his rage at the Twilight movies into his angry, young Bruce Wayne. Jeffrey Wright (Daniel Craig's CIA buddy in the James Bond films) is fun as always and gets some zingers in as Batman's police buddy Jim Gordon. Zoe Kravitz, Paul Dano, John Turturro and an almost unrecognizable Colin Farrell round out the Whitman's sampler of villains. Farrell deserves extra credit for clearly relishing his role as The Penguin who he plays as a snarling, Coppola-style gangster.

Which is where my other objection comes in. I get that modern directors want to pay homage to the films that influenced them. Lucas and Spielberg wanted to remake 1930s serial films giving us iconic series like Star Wars and Indiana Jones. 

For some reason the secret password to getting your Scorsese-homage filmed is to jump on the superhero bandwagon as seen in The Joker (2019) by Todd Phillips.The Batman follows the same title scheme and despite being set in the present day it's heart is clearly in the 1970s. From the stark opening credits to its depiction of Gotham as graffiti-covered and overrun by hoodlums it is clear what era Reeves is longing to direct in. Even the Batmobile harkens back to the age of Serpico being based on the chassis of a late-60s Dodge Charger.

The film captures the atmosphere beautifully and the cinematography is top-notch, but we've seen decaying Gotham City before, along with the constant arguing about whether it can be saved or deserves to be saved. Meanwhile cities in the real world have survived AIDS, crack, personal autos, suburban migration, reckless demolition, double-digit interest rates plus a host of other challenges and emerged stronger than ever. The skyline of today's New York resembles the futuristic towers of Metropolis more than the gritty hell-scape seen in early Al Pacino films.

Also, if Gotham is such a hell-hole, why would anyone live there? New York, even at the worst of times, was the place to be if you wanted to work in finance, fashion, advertising, theater or publishing. It was the Greatest City in the World and it's inhabitants never let you forget that, even if a garbage strike had let six weeks of trash pile up during the summer. That's the Gotham I want to see, not one consumed with self-doubt and morose musings about whether there's still room for hope in the world.

Batman and his supporting cast are a plastic bunch and while I've loved the more grounded take on a billionaire ninja who fights crime with a rocket car? It's starting to become stale. We don't have to go full Adam West, but let's see more knight and less dark.

Finally, while the film was respectful of the source material, something early superhero films often lacked, there were two little bits that struck me as off.

** SPOILERS BELOW **

There's a subplot where it's suggested that Thomas Wayne, Batman's dad, reached out to a mobster to do some dirty work for him. Making Thomas Wayne corrupt is part of that “grit fatigue” trend I mentioned earlier, but why would he reach out to a mobster? He's got Alfred the Butler (played by Andy Serkis aka Gollum from the Lord of the Rings) to do his dirty work. And Alfred is not a dude you want to mess with.

There's a related plot about a reporter working on a story about Martha Wayne, Batman's mom, who in this film was born Martha Arkham. The story was going to reveal that Martha and her family had a history of mental illness. And yes, that would be the Arkham family, of the Gotham Arkhams, the founders of Arkham Asylum, which was inspired by the insanity-filled tales of HP Lovecraft who was haunted by his own history of family madness

I did love Pattinson's reaction to this news and realizing that maybe he wasn't processing his grief in a healthy way, But the Arkham family has always been depicted as nuttier than a five pound fruitcake. Telling the gossipy citizens of Gotham (where Bruce Wayne is recognized on sight by everyone) that the Arkhams are a few sandwiches short of a picnic is like me telling the people of Boston that the Kennedy family has some acquaintanceship with tragedy.

How Heavy Is Your Hill Giant? - Part Two

Some of my future plans for this website include the use of javascript calculators to make things fun and easy. To test the waters I whipped up a short calculator illustrating how you can use the BMI equation to find out other things and am including it below. When in doubt, just hit Clear All and start from scratch but it should be pretty easy to figure out.

Height-Weight-BMI Calculator

Height (cm)

Weight (kg)

BMI (19 to 24 is healthy)

 

Looks like the javascript insert is working well, so now to include a link to the downloadable file. 

Height-Weight-BMI Calculator.htm

This will give you an HTML file that you can launch in your browser that will duplicate the script embedded here. The only non-local resource is a link to a stylesheet hosted on Bootstrap.

How Heavy Is Your Hill Giant?

Sometimes when I'm off on a weird tangent I have to use a Standard Reference Human when crunching numbers. What's the average person's weight, height, surface area, volume? That sort of thing. The answer for all of these is that it depends on sex, age, ethnicity and a multitude of other factors that I ignore to make calculations easier.

It turns out that defining a Standard Reference Human is actually serious business done by various national and international organizations for safety, engineering and ergonomic requirements. It's also semi-controversial since standards that work great for a 6'0" man might not be so great for a 5'0" woman. Fortunately I can ignore all of that, grab whatever values show up in my search results and then round them off to make calculations easier.

So without further ado, my Standard Reference Human is below. All values are in metric because have you tried doing math in the Imperial system? Actual values are taken from a variety of sources.

Key	My Value	Actual Value	Notes
Height	200 cm	170 cm	At 6'7" my value is grotesquely inflated, but two meters is a nice easy figure to work with.
Weight	100 kg	70 kg	Again my value is high, making our giant dude slightly overweight.
Volume	100 liters	66 liters	This number is not only easy to work with, it is also consistent with my previous two figures
Density	1.01 kg per liter	1.01 kg per liter	Life is basically self-directed seawater. A handful of other chemicals in a mix of 99% H20.
Surface Area	2 square meters	1.5 to 2 square meters	You can find anything on the internet, including skin area calculators. My number is a bit low for 200cm, but reasonable. Source: https://www.calculator.net/body-surface-area-calculator.html

One advantage of using my larger values, besides ease of calculation, is having a built in safety margin. So if you need to calculate something that will work for the pro-wrestler sized numbers above you know that it will absolutely work with regular people.

So that's great when you want to estimate how much material you'll need to make uniforms for 10,000 soldiers or something equally wacky. But while working on another project I found myself asking “How tall would a human shaped object be if it had to contain 3 square meters?”

You could just assume a spherical human and call it a day. I find it easier to work with cubes and there you could quarter the depth, quadruple the height and get a rough rectangle shape. That could work. But luckily for us there's an equation out there that works perfectly for calculating human heights and weights.

The Body Mass Index or BMI. Scourge of power-lifters and middle-aged men getting physicals alike, this formula divides your weight by your height to get a measure of how obese you are. A range of 19 to 24 is considered healthy with figures above and below that indicating how underweight or overweight you are.

BMI = Weight (kg) divided by Height (meters) squared

Using our Standard Reference Human above we use the following equation: Take the weight in kilograms and divide it by the height in meters squared (BMI=w(kg)/h(m)^2) or 100 kg/ (2 meters)^2 → 100/4 = 25 for a slightly overweight individual.

The fun thing about equations though is that you can flip them around and use them to solve for things you aren't supposed to. And if right now you want to bolt from this website and never come back I feel you. The way they teach math in our schools is an abomination and traumatizes millions of kids every year. Math isn't about mindless calculation and rote formulas. It's a set of lock picks for opening up the secrets of the universe. It's a damn shame it's not taught that way.

So, we can take our BMI equation and flip it around. I'd walk you through the steps but it's been decades since I did it and I was never good at it. But I know it can be done so I had WolframAlpha.com do it for me giving us the two equations below.

Height (meters) = Square Root of Weight (kg) divided by the Square Root of BMI.

Weight (kg) = BMI times the Height (meters) squared.

For our purposes we'll make the Standard Reference BMI 25, which is a bit unhealthy but is a lot easier to work with since the square root is 5. So now we can answer all sorts of silly questions, like how much does a hill giant weigh? According to Dungeons and Dragons they are 5 meters tall, so we square that to get 25, multiply that by our reference BMI of 25 and get 625 kg or about 1,400 lbs.

What about shapeshifters? Let's say you are looking for were-bears amongst the populace and despite living in a world of magic and wonder assume that conservation of mass still applies. According to Wikipedia the average weight of an adult brown bears is 217 kg, so let's solve for height. We take the square root of 217, which is around 15, and divide that by the square root of our reference BMI of 25, which is a nice easy 5 and we get 15 / 5 = 3 meters. So to find the hidden were-bears keep an eye out for any adult males who are 9'10" tall.

Feel free to play with the numbers if you want to figure out the stats for runway model were-bears or hill giants who have really let themselves go. Also a fun fact, in metric a kilogram of water is equal to a liter in size, so you if you have the weight of a person you have the volume as well within one percent.