Batman Forever
I haven’t seen this one in ages, feels like, and within the first 5 minutes (less than that even), I was cringing for 2 reasons – 1) I realised it’s one of those movies I know shockingly well by heart, lol, it was probably one of a still very limited VHS collection back in the mid-nineties, and 2) that opening line, my god, how unfunny can you get, yet I remember laughing at it almost every time I watched it when I first had the video!
Opening line aside, though, this movie does make me glad they let Joel Schumacher have his way with the series to a point. Batman and Robin, of course, was far too far and it was good they didn’t let him take the fifth, but y’know what, even the cheesiest of moments here (opening line aside) have something about them that, I don’t know, I just know I’ll probably still be watching this in 20 years time and beyond. Val Kilmer is every bit as good a Batman as Keaton and Bale (Clooney, meh, he wasn’t bad), it’s kind of astonishing to see the rest of the cast in one place – Tommy Lee Jones, Nicole Kidman, Jim Carrey, Drew Barrymore? lol – and I really like Eliot Goldenthal’s score.
Most interesting of all to me on this viewing were the visual effects. It’s kind of intriguing to watch movies from this time, before CG was so easily available to just about any big budget flick. There are bits of CG effects here and there, but overall the visuals are very ‘real’ looking (note: not realistic, lol) ... it’s clear that at this time the industry were practically waiting for CG to be so available as it is now, truly struggling each year to make movies bigger and better. That this movie boldly not only attempts that but still tries to cram as much into its story as it does (the dialogue in Akiva Goldsman’s screenplay is him at his worst but the structure is pretty delirious).
I don’t know, I’m almost certainly wrong on this movie’s goodness, it comes from that special time in my teens when I was just beginning to love film, and just about any movie I saw during that period holds some special memory for me – I’m sure any movie lover has a similar period they really can’t be objective about (hey I suck at being objective anyway, lol). All I can really say in the end – hey, all anyone can really say reviewing anything – is that I personally still like it.