Writers: Daniel Waters, Sam Hamm
Director: Tim Burton
Producers: Denise Di Novi, Tim Burton
Batman: Michael Keaton
Time indexes refer to the 2005 Special Edition NTSC Region 1 DVD of the film.
00:00:11 -- Once again we get a special logo, as the sky behind the WB shield becomes dark and snowy.
00:00:17 -- Although the character first appeared as The Penguin in Detective Comics #58 (October, 1941) by Bill Finger and Bob Kane, it wasn't until a 1946 storyline in the Batman Sunday newspaper strip that Finger established his real name as Oswald Chesterfield Cobblepot. Further years of comicbook storytelling established the Cobblepots as an old money Gotham family of approximately equivalent age and standing as the Waynes, although with a much more shady reputation.
00:00:27 -- Penguin's Father, here portrayed in a cameo appearance by Pee-wee Herman himself, Paul Reubens. PEE-WEE'S BIG ADVENTURE, the character's big screen debut, was also the first feature film of Tim Burton.
00:00:57 -- Penguin's Mother is also a cameo role, Diane Salinger who played Simone in PEE-WEE'S BIG ADVENTURE.
00:05:27 -- Well, that was different. And bizarre. And kinda horrifying. An apt description for the rest of this movie. Burton has chosen to change the Penguin's origin dramatically. In the comics, the Penguin debuted initially without an origin and it was several years as one developed slowly. Set down most thoroughly in "The Killing Peck", a story by Alan Grant and Sam Keith in Secret Origins Special Vol. 2 #1 (1989), the origin of the Penguin in the comics is as as follows. Oswald is the son of the wealthy Cobblepots. The father dies of pneumonia after being out in a rain storm, causing the mother to insist on Oswald carrying an umbrella wherever he goes. Oswald is bullied as a child for his rotund body, beak-like nose and waddling walk. Having discovered that the father had in fact left the Cobblepot family in financial ruins, the mother kills herself and Oswald is sent to live with his Aunt Miranda, who ran a pet bird store. Oswald vows to restore his family's name and position and becomes a career criminal, taking on the nickname of The Penguin to reclaim it from those who used it to mock him. His original characterization by creators Finger and Kane was that of a Gentleman Criminal, who tried to bring respectability and good manners to the art of Crime. Burton, on the other hand, became drawn to the idea of Oswald as an outsider and wanted to portray him as a literal freak, with a circus backstory and a more exaggerated physical deformity. So in this film, Oswald's parents toss him in the sewer because apparently even as a baby he was malicious and evil and he ends up in the penguin tank of the closed/abandoned Gotham City Zoo because apparently the zoo's water lines and the sewer mains are directly connected (?) and comes to be raised by the freaks in the Red Triangle circus gang, a criminal outfit that fronts as a travelling circus, becoming their leader, but continuing to live in the sewers with the penguins for some reason. None of this is ever really said or explained, just shown or talked briefly about, leaving the audience to make their own connections. I know a lot of people who think, based on some visuals in the film, that baby Oswald was raised by penguins in the sewer. The movie doesn't really do much to say otherwise. I, for one, don't understand why the giant, art deco buildings and statues of the Zoo are left standing and decrepit if the place has been abandoned for over thirty years and why the animals were left to live there still. Who or what is feeding these penguins?
00:05:30 -- 33 Years Later. We're supposed to believe that 48 year old Danny DeVito's character is in his early thirties.
00:05:37 -- The mascot of Shreck's Department Store looks a lot like, but isn't, Felix the Cat, for reasons that could've been important if it had something to do with Catwoman, but it doesn't.
00:05:59 -- Anton Furst had envisioned Gotham City in a memorable "Dark Deco" style for BATMAN. Here, that vision is skewed towards expressionism and Romanticism, with these giant idealized human statues everywhere. Gotham seems less like a dark, alternate New York and more like a completely fictional fantasy city. While the look of BATMAN took inspiration from the roots of the character in pulp film noir, RETURNS reaches back farther to the seeds, and takes its inspiration largely from German Expressionist films like THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI.
00:05:28 -- Comic book Penguin's physical oddities are limited to a short statue, heavyset body and long, beaklike nose. For this film, Burton added bizarre flipper like hands where the last three digits have fused together, a balding head with long stringy hair, sharpened teeth, and a tendency to drool black bile. This version was used in the 1992 animated BATMAN series, although Oswald reverted to his comic book look for THE NEW BATMAN ADVENTURES in 1997. Portrayals since have alternated between the deformed and classic look, with cartoon THE BATMAN and the art of Tim Sale favouring the deformed version.
00:06:41 -- The Gotham Globe makes a reappearance from the previous film, but journalist Alexander Knox does not. Actor Robert Wuhl was disappointed he wasn't asked back for the sequels, but I've never run into any diehard Knox fans.
00:07:32 -- Maximillian Shreck, in many ways the main villain of the film, is a movie-original character portrayed by Christopher Walken. His name is a reference to German silent horror actor Max Shreck, who played the vampire in NOSFERATU. "Shreck" is the German word for fear. In Sam Hamm's original script, this character was Harvey Dent, as portrayed by Billy Dee Williams in BATMAN. Harvey is running for mayor of Gotham, and turns to darker and darker methods to win the election as he believes that he is the only one capable of cleaning up crime in Gotham. The explosion at the end of the finished film that kills Shreck (spoilers) would've been what scarred Harvey and transformed him into Two-Face, to serve as villain of the third film. However, Hamm was dropped from the project early on, and new writer Daniel Waters replaced Dent with Shreck. Waters, it should be noted now, had never read a Batman comic before working on RETURNS and instead took his story cues from Burton, who had hired Waters based on the success of his black comedy about high school angst, HEATHERS. In earlier drafts, Shreck was a corrupt industrialist, an evil mirror of Bruce Wayne who turns out to be the younger brother of the Penguin, the child his parents kept over him. In the final version, Shreck is a department store owner, but elements of the earlier versions remain -- his power plant plot to "steal power from Gotham City", his relationship with the Penguin, his political attempts to get Oswald elected, etc. Shreck is one of several great examples of how the many rewrites of this movie's script give it a fractured structure and storyline where characters have multiple and contradictory goals and personalities.
00:08:29 -- Michelle Pfeiffer plays Selina Kyle/Catwoman. The character debuted as master thief "The Cat" in Batman #1 (Spring 1940), having been created by Bill Finger and Bob Kane as a way to inject some sex appeal into the feature by providing a recurring character whom the Batman would be torn between his attraction to and the fact that she was a criminal. Despite being such an early character, Catwoman would not gain a civillian identity or backstory until Batman #62 (December, 1950), when Bill Finger named her as Selina Kyle. In that story, it was revealed that Kyle was an airline stewardess who had suffered brain trauma during a crash. The amnesia had wiped her memories and she became the Catwoman. After recovering her memories, she swears off a life of crime and opens a pet shop. This was done in an attempt to write the character out of the series, as there had been complaints that she made a life of crime seem too glamourous to young girls reading the comic. However, she was too popular and soon returned, revealing the amnesia story to be a lie designed to trick Batman into letting her escape her life of crime. After that, a few different origins were proposed for Selina. The first, from Brave and the Bold #197 (April, 1983) by Alan Brennert and Joe Staton, has Selina as a young woman in an abusive marriage who divorced her wealthy husband and was left with nothing. She decides to steal his jewels and money as revenge and decides she enjoys stealing from the wealthy and becomes the Catwoman. However, after DC rebooted its comics line in 1985, a new backstory was developed for Selina in Frank Miller and David Mazzuchelli's 1987 BATMAN: YEAR ONE storyline. In that version, Selina Kyle is a dominatrix prostitute in the poverty-stricken East End of Gotham, who is inspired by the Batman to become a costumed thief in order to buy her way out of her situation. This was the current and modern Catwoman at the time of the film's production. Daniel Waters used none of this. Rejecting the version of Catwoman in Sam Hamm's script, Waters chose to emphasize the "female empowerment" aspect of the character and felt the best way to do this was to show Selina Kyle as a mousy put-upon secretary before her transformation into the sexually powerful Catwoman. Burton, on the other hand, wanted to show Catwoman as a shattered psyche who comes unraveled to use as a mirror to Bruce Wayne/Batman, continuing his "Batman is just as crazy as the villains" theme from the first movie. This added an element of crazy to Selina, who in all other portrayals of the character is one of the few sane Batman villains. Coupled with picking a blonde actress to play the traditionally brunette character, an we're left with a Selina very, very different from any previous comics version. Michelle Pfeiffer was not the first choice to play Selina. Mirroring the situation of Sean Young and Kim Basinger on the first film, Annette Bening had been cast initially, but had to drop out due to an unexpected pregnancy. During the subsequent casting scramble, Sean Young broke into the Warners lot wearing a homemade Catwoman outfit and strutted into Burton's office, hoping to impress the filmmakers and win the role. It went to Pfeiffer.
00:08:53 -- Andrew Bryniarski doing a delightfully hammy Chris Walken impression in his role as Shreck's son, Chip.
00:12:53 -- Pat Hingle reprises his role as Commissioner Gordon, his role reduced dramatically in this film into essentially becoming what he was on the Adam West TV show: an ineffective public official who calls Batman and briefs him on the situation.
00:12:55 -- Wayne Manor, now a scale model, looking nothing like it did in the last movie.
00:13:20 -- As dramatic as this sequence is, what we have here is a Bruce Wayne who is depicted as sitting in the dark in his library, doing nothing but wait for the giant reflectors he's had built outside the building to reflect the Bat-Signal dramatically into the room so he can be Batman. For one thing, what happens if the Bat Signal is lit while he has company? How is his identity a secret? And two, this is a pretty dramatic visualization of how unimportant the character of Bruce Wayne is to these movies -- in Burton's interpretation, Bruce is simply something Batman is when he's not being Batman.
00:13:58 -- So apparently, the Penguin's Red Triangle Circus Gang (though we don't know that's who they are yet) are here to kidnap Max Shreck. But he runs away and escapes... into a bunch of members of the Gang who keep wreaking havoc and comepletely ignore him. Said havoc appears completely pointless, chaos for its own sake, unless its to cover the kidnapping of Shreck, which seems to be low on the priority list.
00:15:21 -- Batman takes the time to use a gadget on the Batmobile to light a man on fire.
00:15:50 -- The new Batsuit. Basically the same as the old one in design and material, it does have a few differences. It's thinner, lighter and sleeker, appearing all around more streamlined and better designed, less cheap and heavy. It's got pretty much all the same limitations as the old one, but all around just looks better. It's more stylized as well.
00:17:00 -- "Thanks for saving the day, Batman." From outright panic and chaos and the police can do nothing, to the day is saved, and Batman hardly even got out of his car. What was the point of it all?
00:17:26 -- Shreck falls down a drain trapdoor that somehow takes him from downtown Gotham to the underground penguin aquarium zoo ruins Penguin Lair in the outskirts of town. If that's all they needed to kidnap him, why the elaborate Circus Gang attack?
00:18:02 -- In case you haven't noticed yet, we're not watching a Batman movie directed by Tim Burton. We're watching a Tim Burton movie starring Batman.
00:18:22 -- The primary reason for the Penguin nickname in the original comics was that, in addition to Oswald's physical appearance, he commited crimes wearing a tuxedo and top hat as part of his Gentleman of Crime persona, which tuxedos long having been referred to as "penguin suits". Burton dropped this entire aspect of the character, with the character portrayed as mean-spirited and malicious, an amped up version of the Burgess Meredith version on the TV show, with the tuxedo replaced by a decidely late 19th century look with union suit, bow tie, heavy overcoat, etc. So instead we get the whole "raised by penguins" ridiculousness.
00:21:08 -- Penguin states a desire to become "respected", which mirrors the comic book versions desires to be perceived as respectable and to restore the Cobblepot name. However, this is one of like four different plans/goals/motivations that movie Penguin has. I'll try to sort through them as we go.
00:22:42 -- Penguin has gone to a lot of trouble to gather evidence to blackmail Max, so that Max will help him... ? He wants to rejoin society aboveground, but there's really no reason he can't at this point. He's the Penguin man of the sewers, sure, but he's also the Criminal Master of the Red Circus Triangle Gang, and with his implied but never seen or spoken of but apparently important to Burton circus freak background, he's obviously been aboveground before. He could find out who his parents are without Max too, so all he really gets from Max Shreck is an endorsement that may help him get "respect". But as we'll find out, all this parents/respect schlock may or may not be all just a cover for Penguin's real plan. It'd be a bit clearer if the script writer's knew what that plan was, but apparently that changed in almost every rewrite.
00:23:35 -- Selina takes care of stray cats, possibly the only thing she has in common with her comic book counterpart.
00:26:55 -- So here's Max's evil plan: his power plant is actually a giant capacitor that will stockpile power from Gotham rather than generate it. I don't really understand how that works, or why that would be beneficial to Max, but it doesn't matter because the power plant isn't the point. It's why Max wants the Mayor out of the way, which ends up motivating his plans with Penguin, but it never itself comes back in a major way.
00:33:45 -- Once again, that was bizarre. Selina is pushed out a window and falls like thirty stories to the ground, presumably dying. And this somehow attracts a shit ton of alley cats who sorta crawl around her and lick her and gnaw at her fingers and this... brings her back to life? Or something. And this snaps her psyche and causes her to go completely nuts and trash her apartment. Which is understandable. But then she decides to make herself a skintight black vinyl catsuit and adopt an entirely new Catwoman persona for no real reason other than "she's crazy now!" Given that insanity and the supernatural were never parts of the comics character, what we are seeing here is a Burton character, not a Batman one, complete with a dramatized rejection of American suburbia imagery in favour of fetishized Gothica.
00:33:47 -- Penguin has a giant rubber duckymobile that he's gotten from... somewheres? For the fact that he's rejected most of the comics story and imagery with his own, Burton still employs a lot of comic book logic in the sense of heroes and villains just having gadgets and lairs and vehicles and weaonry because.... they do, right? Also, why a rubber ducky?
00:38:06 -- Okay, so Penguin's been given access to the Hall of Records, ostensibly so he can find his parents, although I'm not exactly sure how looking through birth certificates would help in his case. Of course, the reason he's actually here is that he's looking up every firstborn son in Gotham for his later evil scheme. Why the firstborn children specifically is a little unclear, especially since the idea of Oswald having a younger brother who was preferred by his parents is no longer in the movie. Also, if the only thing Penguin really needed from the surface was these records, why the elaborate cover up? Why did he need Shreck? The Hall of Records, as dialogue said, is a public place, Penguin could've walked in at any time. Or hell, had one of his many goons walk in and do this for him. Also, he copied down the name of every firstborn son in Gotham by hand? That's like, millions of people, ain't it?
00:39:32 -- So here's the one scene that kind've explains who Penguin is and what he's doing with the Red Triangle, although how he got from a baby with the penguins at the Zoo to there is unknown. What is neat is that this is a scene that, like the offscreen discovering of the solution to Joker's poison in BATMAN, emphasizes Bruce as a detective. He's looking through old microfiche on the Red Triangle and discovers their link to Penguin. In addition to The Shadow, the other big influence on Batman's character was always Sherlock Holmes, and most Batman stories of the Golden and Silver Age had a mystery/detective element to them. After all, this was a character who debuted in Detective Comics. In the post-Frank Miller age, this aspect of Batman has occasionally been overlooked in favour of the violent vigilante aspect.
00:41:06 -- So ostensibly Penguin figures out who his parents are somehow through the Hall of Records. They're dead now, though and the scene of his gravesite visitation is an interesting parody of the standard Bruce Wayne at the Waynes gravesite scene, although Burton never in fact does a version of that scene, it still strengthens his themes of presenting Batman and his villains as mirrors of each other. Penguin is an orphan who was born into privilege, like Wayne, but was rejected by his parents and grew up twisted and evil. What's a little ambiguous is how much of Penguin's emotion here is genuine and how much is an act, given that the entire parents/respect motive is a cover for his real plan, a plan that is motivated seemingly by hatred of his parents and what they did.
00:43:11 -- Again, why does Penguin need to convince the public that he's a good person? Why does he need the respect? It's obviously not a genuine want, given his later goals, but it only makes sense in the context of his political run for Mayor, which wasn't his idea and hasn't been suggested to him by Max yet.
00:44:07 -- Catwoman and her appearance. Burton, like with Penguin, has gotten rid of the original rationale for the name Catwoman. In the comics, Selina is a cat burglar, and thus her name and persona are a play on that term. Makes sense. But Burton's Catwoman does no thievery whatsoever. Here she engages in some feminist vigilantism and thunder stealing from Batman, but for the majority of the movie she either wants to get back at Shreck or at Batman, her motives being unclear for the same reason everyone else's is. So instead the Catwoman name and persona come from... Selina's mystical connection with cats? I guess? The costume designed for her here soon became iconic -- skintight black vinyl with a ragdoll pattern of stitches that Burton meant to suggest that Selina had stitched her psyche back together with the Catwoman persona -- note how the costume comes unraveled along with her sanity as the movie progresses. Like he did with Batman and Penguin, Catwoman's appearance is a revision from her comic book look. In her first appearnance "the Cat" did not wear a costume, but in Batman #35 (June, 1946) Bob Kane finally designed a memorable costume, but a cowl like Batman's that freed her hair in the back, with a dress and cape, in purple and green (standard comics villain colours, see Joker, Riddler, Two-Face, Green Goblin, etc). That costume lasted in numerous variations (the skirt becoming pants, exactly how pointy the ears were, etc) until the 1966 BATMAN TV series, which featured Julie Newmar as Catwoman. This costume was a complete departure, a onepiece catsuit with a gold belt, domino mask and cat ears that sat on top of the head and was the first time Catwoman was dressed in black. By 1992, Catwoman had four additional comic book looks, and was currently dressed in a skintight grey catsuit with ears, whiskers and a tail. Burton's version was in black (of course) but otherwise a gothic fetishized version of the comic book look, without the whiskers and a bullwhip instead of the tail. The original comic's version used a "Cat o' nine tails", of course.
00:49:36 -- Of course Oswald likes raw fish! Because he's a penguin! Wait, I think we're getting the difference between a nickname and some kind've genetic hybrid confused. You guys know he's not literally a penguin man right?
00:50:03 -- How did Shreck get all this stuff down here without anybody upstairs hearing anything? If he did it while Oswald was away, how did he get upstairs without seeing it??
00:50:46 -- The entire plotline of the Penguin running for Mayor is from a second season episode of the Adam West Batman show, "Hizzoner the Penguin, Dizzoner the Penguin", where Penguin runs for Mayor in order to legalize all his illegal activities. Despite the fact that the Burton movies were praised for moving public perception of Batman away from that TV show, they were in large part more inspired by the show than the comics.
00:52:15 -- Why is this movie set at Christmas? It doesn't add to the plot or themes in any way, and in fact creates a plothole that has to be addressed and explained given that Penguin is running for office in December instead of November. I mean, I understand Burton wanting snow on the ground for his "black, white, blue, shot in an inkwell" colour palette but why Christmas?
00:52:39 -- Penguin's mayoral platform is freeze the planet? In earlier drafts, believe it or not, Penguin's plan was in fact to freeze Gotham City... for... some... reason...
00:55:29 -- The computer controlled batarang is stolen by a poodle. Batman makes no effort to get it back, for some reason.
00:57:35 -- Batman takes a ticking TNT time bomb from a goon and attaches it to a strong man goon and blows him up. That happened.
00:57:40 -- This sequence, where Catwoman puts some aerosol cans in a microwave and it blows up Shreck's department store, was cut from UK prints for fear that children would repeat the action at home. Which does leave it hilariously unexplained as to why the building explodes at the end of the scene.
01:00:06 -- This moment, where Catwoman complains about Batman hitting a woman and he falls for it, would be right at home in the Adam West show. This is a Batman who has no problem with stone cold blowing up a dude, but feels bad about hitting a woman.
01:00:40 -- This is perhaps the worst directed action sequence of all time, with an appaling misuse of eyelines, screen direction and axis that makes it headache inducing to try to understand where the characters are at any given time. Batman is hanging over the side of a building, Catwoman standing on top of the building holding him up. For some reason, he thinks throwing a glowing blue something at her arm is a good idea in his position. She falls off to the right, landing on the side of another building, scrambling to get up to the right. Batman falls directly downwards, landing on a ledge. He looks down and to the right, so somehow he's now above her and to her left despite falling down from her position. As she scrambles up and to the right a pair of hands reach down from the right and pull her up, and it's Batman on his ledge.
01:01:17 -- Batman punches Catwoman off a building, into an openbed truck of kitty litter (no shit!) and doesn't bother to go after her.
01:04:32 -- Okay, so Catwoman's gone to Penguin's to convince him to team up with her to destroy Batman. Except, how does she know he's against Batman? So far as anyone knows, Penguin is a respectable citizen (from the sewer and with sociopathic tendences and physical deformities) running to impeach the mayor because of... crime, or something. She doesn't know that Penguin controls the Red Triangle gang (well, she does now that she's in his apartment, which is above the campaign headquarters, because the gang is all there too -- which would make it really easy for anyone to figure out Oswald's a fraud). So if Oswald is anti-crime, why is he anti-Batman? Hell, ignoring the whole mayoral thing, why is Penguin against Batman at this point any way? He's already plotting his "discredit Batman" campaign, having already stolen his batarang, but why? How does discrediting Batman discredit the mayor? Also, Catwoman's motivation up til now (at least the one that made sense) was to get back at Shreck, the guy who is bankrolling (presumably) everything the Penguin's doing!
01:04:56 -- How did the Penguin get blueprints to the Batmobile? Seriously?
01:05:13 -- All right, so check this out. Catwoman is the one who suggests the plan to frame Batman to Penguin, claiming that turning him into a criminal would destroy him more than killing him. But Penguin has already set the plan to frame Batman into motion by stealing the batarang and plotting to sabotage the Batmobile? But his mentioning of the Batmobile plan is what causes Catwoman to suggest framing him! None of this makes sense!
01:11:14 -- And here we kinda get an explanation of where Vicki Vale went, since BATMAN decided to end with that relationship happy and strong and yet she's totally gone here. According to KeatonWayne's mumbled ramblings, Vicki left him because she had issues with his duality, despite seeming to be totally cool with him Batman at the end of the last movie. Oh well, that happens, what's more crazy is that this means there's a prize-winning photojournalist running around who KNOWS WHO BATMAN IS.
01:12:05 -- This movie's kinda trying to do a standard Tim Burton "it's okay to be weird" message, but it sorta comes across as "it's okay to be weird, so long as you're not a murdering psychopath", as well as "it's okay to be a murdering psychopath as long as you're rich and the police are cool with it".
01:12:45 -- Bruce Wayne's TV magically turns on to reveal a plot point. It wasn't even in the room in the wide shot.
01:16:11 -- Where did the Circus gang get a radio transmitter to open up the Batmobile's shields? Probably the same place they got the blueprints, but where the hell was that?
01:16:22 -- Okay, so Penguin has goaded Batman into coming to the relighting of the tree, with the plan to frame him for the Ice Princess' murder. But Batman only ends up at the same place as the Princess because he sees her tied up through a window in the building across from the one he's standing on. How did Penguin know Batman would choose to be on that building? Also, he spots her directly across from him, then grapples DOWN to land on TOP of the building she's in?
01:16:44 -- Good thing Penguin joined the only freak show that's not only filled with criminals, but also technical geniuses capable of rewiring the Batmobile!
01:18:27 -- Burton's Batman is probably the worst Batman in terms of actually accomplishing anything. Seriously, he just sorta stands and watches as the Ice Princess falls to her death. What, couldn't save her with a grappling line? He pretty much is responsible for her death, by inaction.
01:19:37 -- While it's not explicit, the subtext of this movie is indeed that Selina Kyle was revived by mystical alley cats and granted nine lives, of which she's now down to seven.
01:19:39 -- Batman claims he tried to save Catwoman when she fell, but he is the one who PUNCHED HER OFF A BUILDING.
01:20:25 -- Yes, Bruce, I'm sure flying around the site of the Ice Princess's death, which is also filled with bats released by the Penguin, is really gonna help with clearing your name.
01:21:18 -- Penguin actually gives Catwoman a wedding ring. Seriously, in some scenes this guy is emotionally stunted, doesn't understand social interaction, and is a horny degenerate -- in others, he's a criminal mastermind adept at playing to the City's sympathies and manipulating public opinion. Then again, they do keep comparing him to Nixon.
01:22:21 -- Let's take a brief moment to examine this version of Catwoman. A lowly secretary killed by her boss, reanimated by alley cats, takes on a new, more confident persona, but is unable to deal with the duality and her psyche slowly fractures. Here she is rejected by Penguin, and after falling and crashing into a greenhouse, screams (for some reason) so loud it shatters the windows. In short, trying to be anything better than what she was drives her crazy. I can't believe some people prefer THIS to Anne Hathaway's version in THE DARK KNIGHT RISES.
01:22:48 -- So if we've bought that Penguin has blueprints to the Batmobile and technology to control it and henchmen smart enough to reprogram it, I guess we can buy that he has a dummy Batmobile made to look like a kiddie ride that he can use to remote control the real one.
01:23:47 -- Why write a line like "my licence is expired" for Penguin when logically this Penguin would not have a driver's licence, and just saying that would accomplish the same meaning?
01:25:254 -- I present to you a street that runs right into two buildings, narrows into an alley for about two meters, then widens back out into a street again. Uh-huh.
01:26:27 -- Also, rather than stop or turn, Batman has a function built into the Batmobile to deal with just this emergency, where the Batmobile strips off all it's outer layers and becomes like some kinda Bat-Rocket-Car. Which was made into like a dozen toys when this came out, but according to Alfred's dialogue later, essentially ruins the car. Also we never see the Rocket-Car again. So what's the point of this?
01:26:35 -- I'm gonna stop here to point out that Batman never clears his name in this movie. So far as the public knows, he killed the Ice Princess, along with a bunch of cops and civillians who he ran over or crashed into with the sabotaged Batmobile. This movie ends with Batman as a wanted criminal.
01:28:08 -- The line where Bruce jabs Alfred for letting Vicki Vale into the Batcave was screenwriter Sam Hamm's jab at this oft-reviled moment in the first film, which was put into the script by Warren Skaaren's rewrite.
01:28:33 -- We where never shown the entrance to the Batcave from Wayne Manor in the first film. Here, it's an Iron Maiden with trap door. In its original appearance in the 1943 BATMAN serial, the Batcave was entered using a trick door built into a grandfather clock. The comics adopted this and added the detail that the clock is activated by changing the hands to 10:47, the time the Waynes were murdered. Oddly enough, no subsequent live action adaptation has used this method. The 1966 series famously used firepoles concealed behind a bookcase activated by a bust of Shakespeare, while Christopher Nolan's films also employed a bookcase that opened after the playing of three random keys on a piano.
01:30:15 -- I don't think this movie has any idea how CDs work.
01:31:42 -- Penguin jumps into the river at the same spot where his parents abandoned him (and presumably swam underwater all the way back to his lair?), and it seems like Burton is trying to make us feel sorry for Oswald, who has once again been rejected by society, except that Oswald is a bizarre, misogynistic, antisocial, violent creep who was actually accepted by everyone anyway until he pullled a machine gun on them in a homicidal rage.
01:32:37 -- Penguins aren't coldblooded, Ozzy. If they were, they wouldn't live in Antarctica, and if you were, you wouldn't want the AC cranked.
01:33:13 -- So Penguin's big master plan, which he's been enacting presumably this whole movie, is to kidnap all the firstborn sons of Gotham while their parents are out at Shreck's Annual Max-querade Ball (he invited every single parent in Gotham??) and then toss them into the sewer and drown them. The movie acts like he's only kidnapping and murdering defenseless babies but he never actually specifies an age limit. I must point out that this plan relies on a) Every parent in Gotham being out at the Ball, b) none of them hiring a babysitter, and c) no cops patrolling anywhere to notice the Penguin's Train of Death out stealing children.
01:34:48 -- For a guy who's department store was blown up, who's plot to replace the Mayor has failed spectacularly, and who thanks to said Mayor and Bruce Wayne won't get to build his evil Reverse Power Plant, Max seems surprisingly unfazed. But then, the script's forgotten what his motives were about an hour ago anyway.
01:36:06 -- Selina's dialogue implies this Ball is actually being held in the department store. Which was blown up two days earlier in the movie.
01:39:22 -- Notice the penguins with the remote control skullcaps and rockets on their back. They're part of a plot Penguin actually hasn't developed yet.
01:40:37 -- Penguin has had a giant, man-sized cage in his sewerquarium this whole time, all so that Max can be in it at the end of the movie here.
01:41:12 -- The implication is that the water is lethal toxic sewage water, but then how have the penguins been swimming around in it this whole time?
01:42:28 -- And just like that, Penguin's entire scheme, which he has been plotting this whole movie, is foiled off-camera by Batman's shadow.
01:42:09 -- So now, out of the blue, Penguin has a new, different plan. Added to the film in one of the final rewrites, this plot to destroy the entire city using remote controlled penguins armed with rockets was added after Warner execs expressed concern that Penguin did not seem to have a clear, coherent master plan. So instead we're left with a movie where he has three jumbled, incoherent ones. Somehow, Penguin has managed to get a hold of hundreds of destructive rockets and a RADIO MIND CONTROL APPARATUS for ordering the penguins around between cuts. He's also somehow managed to assemble the Penguins in the bleachers of the aquarium so he can deliver a Pattonesque speech to them (???). None of this was really planned or implied earlier in the movie, it appears to be something Oswald as cooked up in desperate frustration at the foiling of his last plan, yet it's infinitely more elaborate and expensive than his last plan.
01:44:02 -- The Batboat, here called the Batskiboat because that doesn't sound dumb at all. A version of the Batboat first appeared in Batman #4 (Winter 1941), where the Batplane could transform into a boat when it hit the water by jettisoning it's wings. A true Batboat made it's first appearance in Detective Comics #110 (April, 1946) by Don Cameron and Win Mortimer, where it is given to Batman and Robin by Scotland Yard so they may assist in their search for Professor Moriarty (comics, everybody!). It memorably appeared in the 1966 BATMAN movie and later appeared in the TV series tied in with said movie. Here it's got two sort've big support things that actually have it sitting above the water in the sewer and that extend out just as wide as the sewer conveniently enough, and really I have no clue how this thing is supposed to work.
01:44:19 -- So Alfred is tracking the penguins using radar (huh?) and this all implies that somehow Batman knows about Penguin's new rocket penguin plot and is working to stop it -- how did he find out about it? Also, I don't know how fast penguins walk, but I doubt they could get from the zoo to City Hall in the time shown here.
01:46:24 -- So then Alfred is able to hack into the mind control frequency and turn the penguins back around to the Zoo.
01:48:06 -- And while they were with him for kidnapping and murdering children, and with him for blowing up the entire city, here Penguin's goons abandon him because it seems like Batman may be coming. While this plays into Burton's themes of outsider angst and rejection, it never made any sense to me, even as a kid.
01:49:28 -- And Batman's got a remote control button for the rocket penguin's rockets that he got from... somewhere...
01:50:00 -- Batman just let Penguin swat the remote control out of his hand with an umbrella that he easily could've blocked or grabbed with his other hand. Or he could've just moved his hand. Anything. Dude is supposed to know martial arts.
01:50:15 -- Penguin launches the penguins' rockets on himself because he (or this movie) is stupid, and then a bunch of bats fly out of a compartment in the Batskiboat for no reason and attack him. Am I the only one noticing how this movie makes no sense?
01:51:00 -- How did Catwoman get here? How did she even know to come here?
01:52:17 -- Batman, the guy who murdered a dude with TNT earlier, says that the law is important and does in fact apply to him.
01:53:02 -- Remember the mascara that Batman wears to make the eyes blend with the mask?
01:53:10 -- MAGICALLY GONE! Done so that when he rips his mask off he doesn't have giant mascara circles under his eyes and look stupid, but it's still hilariously weird and only highlights what a weird choice the mascara thing is. I mean, the mask looks odd without it, but the fact that it magically disappears implies that it's not... actually there... in this movie's fictional world... or something?
01:54:58 -- Oh shit! It's the tazer she picked up off the clown an hour and a half ago! Where was she keeping it in that catsuit... ?
01:56:16 -- This film has a reputation for being a darker, mature, serious psychological take on the Batman mythos. Hence the hilarious burnt-to-a-crisp Christopher Walken corpse.
01:56:58 -- I'm not exactly sure what kills Penguin here. It wasn't the fall, because he's walking just fine. Dialogue suggests its either the heat because the AC is destroyed, despite the fact that he's not Mr. Freeze, or that it's the sometimes-toxic sometimes not water that's poisoned him somehow.
01:58:00 -- And then six Emperor Penguin pallbearers come out of nowhere and somehow drag Penguins body (with their flippers hardly touching him!) into the water in a bizarre funeral procession! Seriously! This happens! In a "dark and serious" Batman movie!
02:00:41 -- Originally, there was going to be a Catwoman spin-off from this movie, starring Michelle Pfeiffer. After all, this ending is pretty obviously setting her up for further appearances. That spin-off would remain in development hell for years, sifting through countless rewrites, at one point with Winona Ryder attached to star after Pfeiffer left, finally emerging in 2004 as the piece of shit, waste of space CATWOMAN film starring Halle Berry as a completely seperate character who has even less in common with the comics Selina Kyle than this one.
02:00:44 -- BATMAN RETURNS was considered a disapointment by Warner Bros. While it made a healthy amount of cash, it wasn't the success BATMAN was. It also generated a fair amount of controversy, with parents groups protesting the film's dark, macabre tone, violent nature, horrific scenes and general unsuitability for children. Nevermind that it was rated PG-13, same as the last Batman film, a primary piece of complaint was that the film was being marketed for children because it had a toy tie-in with Happy Meals at McDonald's. When told that children were leaving screenings mid-movie in tears, writer Daniel Waters and Burton reportedly replied that this meant they had achieved their goals in making the film. Whatever that means. I myself saw it for the first time when I was three years old, and the worst thing it did to my psyche was convince me it was a fantastic movie for the next twenty years. Seriously, it was my favourite Batfilm until THE DARK KNIGHT, and even then I didn't start noticing its terrible, terrible flaws. Viewed as a whole, BATMAN RETURNS comes across as a bizarre "blockbuster art film". Either way, Burton was removed from the next Batfilm, the plan for which featured Marlon Wayans as a garage mechanic who fixes the Batmobile named Robin, and replaced with Joel Schumacher, who was given the marching orders to produce a more family friendly, big blockbuster smash.
Director: Tim Burton
Producers: Denise Di Novi, Tim Burton
Batman: Michael Keaton
Time indexes refer to the 2005 Special Edition NTSC Region 1 DVD of the film.
00:00:11 -- Once again we get a special logo, as the sky behind the WB shield becomes dark and snowy.
00:00:17 -- Although the character first appeared as The Penguin in Detective Comics #58 (October, 1941) by Bill Finger and Bob Kane, it wasn't until a 1946 storyline in the Batman Sunday newspaper strip that Finger established his real name as Oswald Chesterfield Cobblepot. Further years of comicbook storytelling established the Cobblepots as an old money Gotham family of approximately equivalent age and standing as the Waynes, although with a much more shady reputation.
00:00:27 -- Penguin's Father, here portrayed in a cameo appearance by Pee-wee Herman himself, Paul Reubens. PEE-WEE'S BIG ADVENTURE, the character's big screen debut, was also the first feature film of Tim Burton.
00:00:57 -- Penguin's Mother is also a cameo role, Diane Salinger who played Simone in PEE-WEE'S BIG ADVENTURE.
00:05:27 -- Well, that was different. And bizarre. And kinda horrifying. An apt description for the rest of this movie. Burton has chosen to change the Penguin's origin dramatically. In the comics, the Penguin debuted initially without an origin and it was several years as one developed slowly. Set down most thoroughly in "The Killing Peck", a story by Alan Grant and Sam Keith in Secret Origins Special Vol. 2 #1 (1989), the origin of the Penguin in the comics is as as follows. Oswald is the son of the wealthy Cobblepots. The father dies of pneumonia after being out in a rain storm, causing the mother to insist on Oswald carrying an umbrella wherever he goes. Oswald is bullied as a child for his rotund body, beak-like nose and waddling walk. Having discovered that the father had in fact left the Cobblepot family in financial ruins, the mother kills herself and Oswald is sent to live with his Aunt Miranda, who ran a pet bird store. Oswald vows to restore his family's name and position and becomes a career criminal, taking on the nickname of The Penguin to reclaim it from those who used it to mock him. His original characterization by creators Finger and Kane was that of a Gentleman Criminal, who tried to bring respectability and good manners to the art of Crime. Burton, on the other hand, became drawn to the idea of Oswald as an outsider and wanted to portray him as a literal freak, with a circus backstory and a more exaggerated physical deformity. So in this film, Oswald's parents toss him in the sewer because apparently even as a baby he was malicious and evil and he ends up in the penguin tank of the closed/abandoned Gotham City Zoo because apparently the zoo's water lines and the sewer mains are directly connected (?) and comes to be raised by the freaks in the Red Triangle circus gang, a criminal outfit that fronts as a travelling circus, becoming their leader, but continuing to live in the sewers with the penguins for some reason. None of this is ever really said or explained, just shown or talked briefly about, leaving the audience to make their own connections. I know a lot of people who think, based on some visuals in the film, that baby Oswald was raised by penguins in the sewer. The movie doesn't really do much to say otherwise. I, for one, don't understand why the giant, art deco buildings and statues of the Zoo are left standing and decrepit if the place has been abandoned for over thirty years and why the animals were left to live there still. Who or what is feeding these penguins?
00:05:30 -- 33 Years Later. We're supposed to believe that 48 year old Danny DeVito's character is in his early thirties.
00:05:37 -- The mascot of Shreck's Department Store looks a lot like, but isn't, Felix the Cat, for reasons that could've been important if it had something to do with Catwoman, but it doesn't.
00:05:59 -- Anton Furst had envisioned Gotham City in a memorable "Dark Deco" style for BATMAN. Here, that vision is skewed towards expressionism and Romanticism, with these giant idealized human statues everywhere. Gotham seems less like a dark, alternate New York and more like a completely fictional fantasy city. While the look of BATMAN took inspiration from the roots of the character in pulp film noir, RETURNS reaches back farther to the seeds, and takes its inspiration largely from German Expressionist films like THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI.
00:05:28 -- Comic book Penguin's physical oddities are limited to a short statue, heavyset body and long, beaklike nose. For this film, Burton added bizarre flipper like hands where the last three digits have fused together, a balding head with long stringy hair, sharpened teeth, and a tendency to drool black bile. This version was used in the 1992 animated BATMAN series, although Oswald reverted to his comic book look for THE NEW BATMAN ADVENTURES in 1997. Portrayals since have alternated between the deformed and classic look, with cartoon THE BATMAN and the art of Tim Sale favouring the deformed version.
00:06:41 -- The Gotham Globe makes a reappearance from the previous film, but journalist Alexander Knox does not. Actor Robert Wuhl was disappointed he wasn't asked back for the sequels, but I've never run into any diehard Knox fans.
00:07:32 -- Maximillian Shreck, in many ways the main villain of the film, is a movie-original character portrayed by Christopher Walken. His name is a reference to German silent horror actor Max Shreck, who played the vampire in NOSFERATU. "Shreck" is the German word for fear. In Sam Hamm's original script, this character was Harvey Dent, as portrayed by Billy Dee Williams in BATMAN. Harvey is running for mayor of Gotham, and turns to darker and darker methods to win the election as he believes that he is the only one capable of cleaning up crime in Gotham. The explosion at the end of the finished film that kills Shreck (spoilers) would've been what scarred Harvey and transformed him into Two-Face, to serve as villain of the third film. However, Hamm was dropped from the project early on, and new writer Daniel Waters replaced Dent with Shreck. Waters, it should be noted now, had never read a Batman comic before working on RETURNS and instead took his story cues from Burton, who had hired Waters based on the success of his black comedy about high school angst, HEATHERS. In earlier drafts, Shreck was a corrupt industrialist, an evil mirror of Bruce Wayne who turns out to be the younger brother of the Penguin, the child his parents kept over him. In the final version, Shreck is a department store owner, but elements of the earlier versions remain -- his power plant plot to "steal power from Gotham City", his relationship with the Penguin, his political attempts to get Oswald elected, etc. Shreck is one of several great examples of how the many rewrites of this movie's script give it a fractured structure and storyline where characters have multiple and contradictory goals and personalities.
00:08:29 -- Michelle Pfeiffer plays Selina Kyle/Catwoman. The character debuted as master thief "The Cat" in Batman #1 (Spring 1940), having been created by Bill Finger and Bob Kane as a way to inject some sex appeal into the feature by providing a recurring character whom the Batman would be torn between his attraction to and the fact that she was a criminal. Despite being such an early character, Catwoman would not gain a civillian identity or backstory until Batman #62 (December, 1950), when Bill Finger named her as Selina Kyle. In that story, it was revealed that Kyle was an airline stewardess who had suffered brain trauma during a crash. The amnesia had wiped her memories and she became the Catwoman. After recovering her memories, she swears off a life of crime and opens a pet shop. This was done in an attempt to write the character out of the series, as there had been complaints that she made a life of crime seem too glamourous to young girls reading the comic. However, she was too popular and soon returned, revealing the amnesia story to be a lie designed to trick Batman into letting her escape her life of crime. After that, a few different origins were proposed for Selina. The first, from Brave and the Bold #197 (April, 1983) by Alan Brennert and Joe Staton, has Selina as a young woman in an abusive marriage who divorced her wealthy husband and was left with nothing. She decides to steal his jewels and money as revenge and decides she enjoys stealing from the wealthy and becomes the Catwoman. However, after DC rebooted its comics line in 1985, a new backstory was developed for Selina in Frank Miller and David Mazzuchelli's 1987 BATMAN: YEAR ONE storyline. In that version, Selina Kyle is a dominatrix prostitute in the poverty-stricken East End of Gotham, who is inspired by the Batman to become a costumed thief in order to buy her way out of her situation. This was the current and modern Catwoman at the time of the film's production. Daniel Waters used none of this. Rejecting the version of Catwoman in Sam Hamm's script, Waters chose to emphasize the "female empowerment" aspect of the character and felt the best way to do this was to show Selina Kyle as a mousy put-upon secretary before her transformation into the sexually powerful Catwoman. Burton, on the other hand, wanted to show Catwoman as a shattered psyche who comes unraveled to use as a mirror to Bruce Wayne/Batman, continuing his "Batman is just as crazy as the villains" theme from the first movie. This added an element of crazy to Selina, who in all other portrayals of the character is one of the few sane Batman villains. Coupled with picking a blonde actress to play the traditionally brunette character, an we're left with a Selina very, very different from any previous comics version. Michelle Pfeiffer was not the first choice to play Selina. Mirroring the situation of Sean Young and Kim Basinger on the first film, Annette Bening had been cast initially, but had to drop out due to an unexpected pregnancy. During the subsequent casting scramble, Sean Young broke into the Warners lot wearing a homemade Catwoman outfit and strutted into Burton's office, hoping to impress the filmmakers and win the role. It went to Pfeiffer.
00:08:53 -- Andrew Bryniarski doing a delightfully hammy Chris Walken impression in his role as Shreck's son, Chip.
00:12:53 -- Pat Hingle reprises his role as Commissioner Gordon, his role reduced dramatically in this film into essentially becoming what he was on the Adam West TV show: an ineffective public official who calls Batman and briefs him on the situation.
00:12:55 -- Wayne Manor, now a scale model, looking nothing like it did in the last movie.
00:13:20 -- As dramatic as this sequence is, what we have here is a Bruce Wayne who is depicted as sitting in the dark in his library, doing nothing but wait for the giant reflectors he's had built outside the building to reflect the Bat-Signal dramatically into the room so he can be Batman. For one thing, what happens if the Bat Signal is lit while he has company? How is his identity a secret? And two, this is a pretty dramatic visualization of how unimportant the character of Bruce Wayne is to these movies -- in Burton's interpretation, Bruce is simply something Batman is when he's not being Batman.
00:13:58 -- So apparently, the Penguin's Red Triangle Circus Gang (though we don't know that's who they are yet) are here to kidnap Max Shreck. But he runs away and escapes... into a bunch of members of the Gang who keep wreaking havoc and comepletely ignore him. Said havoc appears completely pointless, chaos for its own sake, unless its to cover the kidnapping of Shreck, which seems to be low on the priority list.
00:15:21 -- Batman takes the time to use a gadget on the Batmobile to light a man on fire.
00:15:50 -- The new Batsuit. Basically the same as the old one in design and material, it does have a few differences. It's thinner, lighter and sleeker, appearing all around more streamlined and better designed, less cheap and heavy. It's got pretty much all the same limitations as the old one, but all around just looks better. It's more stylized as well.
00:17:00 -- "Thanks for saving the day, Batman." From outright panic and chaos and the police can do nothing, to the day is saved, and Batman hardly even got out of his car. What was the point of it all?
00:17:26 -- Shreck falls down a drain trapdoor that somehow takes him from downtown Gotham to the underground penguin aquarium zoo ruins Penguin Lair in the outskirts of town. If that's all they needed to kidnap him, why the elaborate Circus Gang attack?
00:18:02 -- In case you haven't noticed yet, we're not watching a Batman movie directed by Tim Burton. We're watching a Tim Burton movie starring Batman.
00:18:22 -- The primary reason for the Penguin nickname in the original comics was that, in addition to Oswald's physical appearance, he commited crimes wearing a tuxedo and top hat as part of his Gentleman of Crime persona, which tuxedos long having been referred to as "penguin suits". Burton dropped this entire aspect of the character, with the character portrayed as mean-spirited and malicious, an amped up version of the Burgess Meredith version on the TV show, with the tuxedo replaced by a decidely late 19th century look with union suit, bow tie, heavy overcoat, etc. So instead we get the whole "raised by penguins" ridiculousness.
00:21:08 -- Penguin states a desire to become "respected", which mirrors the comic book versions desires to be perceived as respectable and to restore the Cobblepot name. However, this is one of like four different plans/goals/motivations that movie Penguin has. I'll try to sort through them as we go.
00:22:42 -- Penguin has gone to a lot of trouble to gather evidence to blackmail Max, so that Max will help him... ? He wants to rejoin society aboveground, but there's really no reason he can't at this point. He's the Penguin man of the sewers, sure, but he's also the Criminal Master of the Red Circus Triangle Gang, and with his implied but never seen or spoken of but apparently important to Burton circus freak background, he's obviously been aboveground before. He could find out who his parents are without Max too, so all he really gets from Max Shreck is an endorsement that may help him get "respect". But as we'll find out, all this parents/respect schlock may or may not be all just a cover for Penguin's real plan. It'd be a bit clearer if the script writer's knew what that plan was, but apparently that changed in almost every rewrite.
00:23:35 -- Selina takes care of stray cats, possibly the only thing she has in common with her comic book counterpart.
00:26:55 -- So here's Max's evil plan: his power plant is actually a giant capacitor that will stockpile power from Gotham rather than generate it. I don't really understand how that works, or why that would be beneficial to Max, but it doesn't matter because the power plant isn't the point. It's why Max wants the Mayor out of the way, which ends up motivating his plans with Penguin, but it never itself comes back in a major way.
00:33:45 -- Once again, that was bizarre. Selina is pushed out a window and falls like thirty stories to the ground, presumably dying. And this somehow attracts a shit ton of alley cats who sorta crawl around her and lick her and gnaw at her fingers and this... brings her back to life? Or something. And this snaps her psyche and causes her to go completely nuts and trash her apartment. Which is understandable. But then she decides to make herself a skintight black vinyl catsuit and adopt an entirely new Catwoman persona for no real reason other than "she's crazy now!" Given that insanity and the supernatural were never parts of the comics character, what we are seeing here is a Burton character, not a Batman one, complete with a dramatized rejection of American suburbia imagery in favour of fetishized Gothica.
00:33:47 -- Penguin has a giant rubber duckymobile that he's gotten from... somewheres? For the fact that he's rejected most of the comics story and imagery with his own, Burton still employs a lot of comic book logic in the sense of heroes and villains just having gadgets and lairs and vehicles and weaonry because.... they do, right? Also, why a rubber ducky?
00:38:06 -- Okay, so Penguin's been given access to the Hall of Records, ostensibly so he can find his parents, although I'm not exactly sure how looking through birth certificates would help in his case. Of course, the reason he's actually here is that he's looking up every firstborn son in Gotham for his later evil scheme. Why the firstborn children specifically is a little unclear, especially since the idea of Oswald having a younger brother who was preferred by his parents is no longer in the movie. Also, if the only thing Penguin really needed from the surface was these records, why the elaborate cover up? Why did he need Shreck? The Hall of Records, as dialogue said, is a public place, Penguin could've walked in at any time. Or hell, had one of his many goons walk in and do this for him. Also, he copied down the name of every firstborn son in Gotham by hand? That's like, millions of people, ain't it?
00:39:32 -- So here's the one scene that kind've explains who Penguin is and what he's doing with the Red Triangle, although how he got from a baby with the penguins at the Zoo to there is unknown. What is neat is that this is a scene that, like the offscreen discovering of the solution to Joker's poison in BATMAN, emphasizes Bruce as a detective. He's looking through old microfiche on the Red Triangle and discovers their link to Penguin. In addition to The Shadow, the other big influence on Batman's character was always Sherlock Holmes, and most Batman stories of the Golden and Silver Age had a mystery/detective element to them. After all, this was a character who debuted in Detective Comics. In the post-Frank Miller age, this aspect of Batman has occasionally been overlooked in favour of the violent vigilante aspect.
00:41:06 -- So ostensibly Penguin figures out who his parents are somehow through the Hall of Records. They're dead now, though and the scene of his gravesite visitation is an interesting parody of the standard Bruce Wayne at the Waynes gravesite scene, although Burton never in fact does a version of that scene, it still strengthens his themes of presenting Batman and his villains as mirrors of each other. Penguin is an orphan who was born into privilege, like Wayne, but was rejected by his parents and grew up twisted and evil. What's a little ambiguous is how much of Penguin's emotion here is genuine and how much is an act, given that the entire parents/respect motive is a cover for his real plan, a plan that is motivated seemingly by hatred of his parents and what they did.
00:43:11 -- Again, why does Penguin need to convince the public that he's a good person? Why does he need the respect? It's obviously not a genuine want, given his later goals, but it only makes sense in the context of his political run for Mayor, which wasn't his idea and hasn't been suggested to him by Max yet.
00:44:07 -- Catwoman and her appearance. Burton, like with Penguin, has gotten rid of the original rationale for the name Catwoman. In the comics, Selina is a cat burglar, and thus her name and persona are a play on that term. Makes sense. But Burton's Catwoman does no thievery whatsoever. Here she engages in some feminist vigilantism and thunder stealing from Batman, but for the majority of the movie she either wants to get back at Shreck or at Batman, her motives being unclear for the same reason everyone else's is. So instead the Catwoman name and persona come from... Selina's mystical connection with cats? I guess? The costume designed for her here soon became iconic -- skintight black vinyl with a ragdoll pattern of stitches that Burton meant to suggest that Selina had stitched her psyche back together with the Catwoman persona -- note how the costume comes unraveled along with her sanity as the movie progresses. Like he did with Batman and Penguin, Catwoman's appearance is a revision from her comic book look. In her first appearnance "the Cat" did not wear a costume, but in Batman #35 (June, 1946) Bob Kane finally designed a memorable costume, but a cowl like Batman's that freed her hair in the back, with a dress and cape, in purple and green (standard comics villain colours, see Joker, Riddler, Two-Face, Green Goblin, etc). That costume lasted in numerous variations (the skirt becoming pants, exactly how pointy the ears were, etc) until the 1966 BATMAN TV series, which featured Julie Newmar as Catwoman. This costume was a complete departure, a onepiece catsuit with a gold belt, domino mask and cat ears that sat on top of the head and was the first time Catwoman was dressed in black. By 1992, Catwoman had four additional comic book looks, and was currently dressed in a skintight grey catsuit with ears, whiskers and a tail. Burton's version was in black (of course) but otherwise a gothic fetishized version of the comic book look, without the whiskers and a bullwhip instead of the tail. The original comic's version used a "Cat o' nine tails", of course.
00:49:36 -- Of course Oswald likes raw fish! Because he's a penguin! Wait, I think we're getting the difference between a nickname and some kind've genetic hybrid confused. You guys know he's not literally a penguin man right?
00:50:03 -- How did Shreck get all this stuff down here without anybody upstairs hearing anything? If he did it while Oswald was away, how did he get upstairs without seeing it??
00:50:46 -- The entire plotline of the Penguin running for Mayor is from a second season episode of the Adam West Batman show, "Hizzoner the Penguin, Dizzoner the Penguin", where Penguin runs for Mayor in order to legalize all his illegal activities. Despite the fact that the Burton movies were praised for moving public perception of Batman away from that TV show, they were in large part more inspired by the show than the comics.
00:52:15 -- Why is this movie set at Christmas? It doesn't add to the plot or themes in any way, and in fact creates a plothole that has to be addressed and explained given that Penguin is running for office in December instead of November. I mean, I understand Burton wanting snow on the ground for his "black, white, blue, shot in an inkwell" colour palette but why Christmas?
00:52:39 -- Penguin's mayoral platform is freeze the planet? In earlier drafts, believe it or not, Penguin's plan was in fact to freeze Gotham City... for... some... reason...
00:55:29 -- The computer controlled batarang is stolen by a poodle. Batman makes no effort to get it back, for some reason.
00:57:35 -- Batman takes a ticking TNT time bomb from a goon and attaches it to a strong man goon and blows him up. That happened.
00:57:40 -- This sequence, where Catwoman puts some aerosol cans in a microwave and it blows up Shreck's department store, was cut from UK prints for fear that children would repeat the action at home. Which does leave it hilariously unexplained as to why the building explodes at the end of the scene.
01:00:06 -- This moment, where Catwoman complains about Batman hitting a woman and he falls for it, would be right at home in the Adam West show. This is a Batman who has no problem with stone cold blowing up a dude, but feels bad about hitting a woman.
01:00:40 -- This is perhaps the worst directed action sequence of all time, with an appaling misuse of eyelines, screen direction and axis that makes it headache inducing to try to understand where the characters are at any given time. Batman is hanging over the side of a building, Catwoman standing on top of the building holding him up. For some reason, he thinks throwing a glowing blue something at her arm is a good idea in his position. She falls off to the right, landing on the side of another building, scrambling to get up to the right. Batman falls directly downwards, landing on a ledge. He looks down and to the right, so somehow he's now above her and to her left despite falling down from her position. As she scrambles up and to the right a pair of hands reach down from the right and pull her up, and it's Batman on his ledge.
01:01:17 -- Batman punches Catwoman off a building, into an openbed truck of kitty litter (no shit!) and doesn't bother to go after her.
01:04:32 -- Okay, so Catwoman's gone to Penguin's to convince him to team up with her to destroy Batman. Except, how does she know he's against Batman? So far as anyone knows, Penguin is a respectable citizen (from the sewer and with sociopathic tendences and physical deformities) running to impeach the mayor because of... crime, or something. She doesn't know that Penguin controls the Red Triangle gang (well, she does now that she's in his apartment, which is above the campaign headquarters, because the gang is all there too -- which would make it really easy for anyone to figure out Oswald's a fraud). So if Oswald is anti-crime, why is he anti-Batman? Hell, ignoring the whole mayoral thing, why is Penguin against Batman at this point any way? He's already plotting his "discredit Batman" campaign, having already stolen his batarang, but why? How does discrediting Batman discredit the mayor? Also, Catwoman's motivation up til now (at least the one that made sense) was to get back at Shreck, the guy who is bankrolling (presumably) everything the Penguin's doing!
01:04:56 -- How did the Penguin get blueprints to the Batmobile? Seriously?
01:05:13 -- All right, so check this out. Catwoman is the one who suggests the plan to frame Batman to Penguin, claiming that turning him into a criminal would destroy him more than killing him. But Penguin has already set the plan to frame Batman into motion by stealing the batarang and plotting to sabotage the Batmobile? But his mentioning of the Batmobile plan is what causes Catwoman to suggest framing him! None of this makes sense!
01:11:14 -- And here we kinda get an explanation of where Vicki Vale went, since BATMAN decided to end with that relationship happy and strong and yet she's totally gone here. According to KeatonWayne's mumbled ramblings, Vicki left him because she had issues with his duality, despite seeming to be totally cool with him Batman at the end of the last movie. Oh well, that happens, what's more crazy is that this means there's a prize-winning photojournalist running around who KNOWS WHO BATMAN IS.
01:12:05 -- This movie's kinda trying to do a standard Tim Burton "it's okay to be weird" message, but it sorta comes across as "it's okay to be weird, so long as you're not a murdering psychopath", as well as "it's okay to be a murdering psychopath as long as you're rich and the police are cool with it".
01:12:45 -- Bruce Wayne's TV magically turns on to reveal a plot point. It wasn't even in the room in the wide shot.
01:16:11 -- Where did the Circus gang get a radio transmitter to open up the Batmobile's shields? Probably the same place they got the blueprints, but where the hell was that?
01:16:22 -- Okay, so Penguin has goaded Batman into coming to the relighting of the tree, with the plan to frame him for the Ice Princess' murder. But Batman only ends up at the same place as the Princess because he sees her tied up through a window in the building across from the one he's standing on. How did Penguin know Batman would choose to be on that building? Also, he spots her directly across from him, then grapples DOWN to land on TOP of the building she's in?
01:16:44 -- Good thing Penguin joined the only freak show that's not only filled with criminals, but also technical geniuses capable of rewiring the Batmobile!
01:18:27 -- Burton's Batman is probably the worst Batman in terms of actually accomplishing anything. Seriously, he just sorta stands and watches as the Ice Princess falls to her death. What, couldn't save her with a grappling line? He pretty much is responsible for her death, by inaction.
01:19:37 -- While it's not explicit, the subtext of this movie is indeed that Selina Kyle was revived by mystical alley cats and granted nine lives, of which she's now down to seven.
01:19:39 -- Batman claims he tried to save Catwoman when she fell, but he is the one who PUNCHED HER OFF A BUILDING.
01:20:25 -- Yes, Bruce, I'm sure flying around the site of the Ice Princess's death, which is also filled with bats released by the Penguin, is really gonna help with clearing your name.
01:21:18 -- Penguin actually gives Catwoman a wedding ring. Seriously, in some scenes this guy is emotionally stunted, doesn't understand social interaction, and is a horny degenerate -- in others, he's a criminal mastermind adept at playing to the City's sympathies and manipulating public opinion. Then again, they do keep comparing him to Nixon.
01:22:21 -- Let's take a brief moment to examine this version of Catwoman. A lowly secretary killed by her boss, reanimated by alley cats, takes on a new, more confident persona, but is unable to deal with the duality and her psyche slowly fractures. Here she is rejected by Penguin, and after falling and crashing into a greenhouse, screams (for some reason) so loud it shatters the windows. In short, trying to be anything better than what she was drives her crazy. I can't believe some people prefer THIS to Anne Hathaway's version in THE DARK KNIGHT RISES.
01:22:48 -- So if we've bought that Penguin has blueprints to the Batmobile and technology to control it and henchmen smart enough to reprogram it, I guess we can buy that he has a dummy Batmobile made to look like a kiddie ride that he can use to remote control the real one.
01:23:47 -- Why write a line like "my licence is expired" for Penguin when logically this Penguin would not have a driver's licence, and just saying that would accomplish the same meaning?
01:25:254 -- I present to you a street that runs right into two buildings, narrows into an alley for about two meters, then widens back out into a street again. Uh-huh.
01:26:27 -- Also, rather than stop or turn, Batman has a function built into the Batmobile to deal with just this emergency, where the Batmobile strips off all it's outer layers and becomes like some kinda Bat-Rocket-Car. Which was made into like a dozen toys when this came out, but according to Alfred's dialogue later, essentially ruins the car. Also we never see the Rocket-Car again. So what's the point of this?
01:26:35 -- I'm gonna stop here to point out that Batman never clears his name in this movie. So far as the public knows, he killed the Ice Princess, along with a bunch of cops and civillians who he ran over or crashed into with the sabotaged Batmobile. This movie ends with Batman as a wanted criminal.
01:28:08 -- The line where Bruce jabs Alfred for letting Vicki Vale into the Batcave was screenwriter Sam Hamm's jab at this oft-reviled moment in the first film, which was put into the script by Warren Skaaren's rewrite.
01:28:33 -- We where never shown the entrance to the Batcave from Wayne Manor in the first film. Here, it's an Iron Maiden with trap door. In its original appearance in the 1943 BATMAN serial, the Batcave was entered using a trick door built into a grandfather clock. The comics adopted this and added the detail that the clock is activated by changing the hands to 10:47, the time the Waynes were murdered. Oddly enough, no subsequent live action adaptation has used this method. The 1966 series famously used firepoles concealed behind a bookcase activated by a bust of Shakespeare, while Christopher Nolan's films also employed a bookcase that opened after the playing of three random keys on a piano.
01:30:15 -- I don't think this movie has any idea how CDs work.
01:31:42 -- Penguin jumps into the river at the same spot where his parents abandoned him (and presumably swam underwater all the way back to his lair?), and it seems like Burton is trying to make us feel sorry for Oswald, who has once again been rejected by society, except that Oswald is a bizarre, misogynistic, antisocial, violent creep who was actually accepted by everyone anyway until he pullled a machine gun on them in a homicidal rage.
01:32:37 -- Penguins aren't coldblooded, Ozzy. If they were, they wouldn't live in Antarctica, and if you were, you wouldn't want the AC cranked.
01:33:13 -- So Penguin's big master plan, which he's been enacting presumably this whole movie, is to kidnap all the firstborn sons of Gotham while their parents are out at Shreck's Annual Max-querade Ball (he invited every single parent in Gotham??) and then toss them into the sewer and drown them. The movie acts like he's only kidnapping and murdering defenseless babies but he never actually specifies an age limit. I must point out that this plan relies on a) Every parent in Gotham being out at the Ball, b) none of them hiring a babysitter, and c) no cops patrolling anywhere to notice the Penguin's Train of Death out stealing children.
01:34:48 -- For a guy who's department store was blown up, who's plot to replace the Mayor has failed spectacularly, and who thanks to said Mayor and Bruce Wayne won't get to build his evil Reverse Power Plant, Max seems surprisingly unfazed. But then, the script's forgotten what his motives were about an hour ago anyway.
01:36:06 -- Selina's dialogue implies this Ball is actually being held in the department store. Which was blown up two days earlier in the movie.
01:39:22 -- Notice the penguins with the remote control skullcaps and rockets on their back. They're part of a plot Penguin actually hasn't developed yet.
01:40:37 -- Penguin has had a giant, man-sized cage in his sewerquarium this whole time, all so that Max can be in it at the end of the movie here.
01:41:12 -- The implication is that the water is lethal toxic sewage water, but then how have the penguins been swimming around in it this whole time?
01:42:28 -- And just like that, Penguin's entire scheme, which he has been plotting this whole movie, is foiled off-camera by Batman's shadow.
01:42:09 -- So now, out of the blue, Penguin has a new, different plan. Added to the film in one of the final rewrites, this plot to destroy the entire city using remote controlled penguins armed with rockets was added after Warner execs expressed concern that Penguin did not seem to have a clear, coherent master plan. So instead we're left with a movie where he has three jumbled, incoherent ones. Somehow, Penguin has managed to get a hold of hundreds of destructive rockets and a RADIO MIND CONTROL APPARATUS for ordering the penguins around between cuts. He's also somehow managed to assemble the Penguins in the bleachers of the aquarium so he can deliver a Pattonesque speech to them (???). None of this was really planned or implied earlier in the movie, it appears to be something Oswald as cooked up in desperate frustration at the foiling of his last plan, yet it's infinitely more elaborate and expensive than his last plan.
01:44:02 -- The Batboat, here called the Batskiboat because that doesn't sound dumb at all. A version of the Batboat first appeared in Batman #4 (Winter 1941), where the Batplane could transform into a boat when it hit the water by jettisoning it's wings. A true Batboat made it's first appearance in Detective Comics #110 (April, 1946) by Don Cameron and Win Mortimer, where it is given to Batman and Robin by Scotland Yard so they may assist in their search for Professor Moriarty (comics, everybody!). It memorably appeared in the 1966 BATMAN movie and later appeared in the TV series tied in with said movie. Here it's got two sort've big support things that actually have it sitting above the water in the sewer and that extend out just as wide as the sewer conveniently enough, and really I have no clue how this thing is supposed to work.
01:44:19 -- So Alfred is tracking the penguins using radar (huh?) and this all implies that somehow Batman knows about Penguin's new rocket penguin plot and is working to stop it -- how did he find out about it? Also, I don't know how fast penguins walk, but I doubt they could get from the zoo to City Hall in the time shown here.
01:46:24 -- So then Alfred is able to hack into the mind control frequency and turn the penguins back around to the Zoo.
01:48:06 -- And while they were with him for kidnapping and murdering children, and with him for blowing up the entire city, here Penguin's goons abandon him because it seems like Batman may be coming. While this plays into Burton's themes of outsider angst and rejection, it never made any sense to me, even as a kid.
01:49:28 -- And Batman's got a remote control button for the rocket penguin's rockets that he got from... somewhere...
01:50:00 -- Batman just let Penguin swat the remote control out of his hand with an umbrella that he easily could've blocked or grabbed with his other hand. Or he could've just moved his hand. Anything. Dude is supposed to know martial arts.
01:50:15 -- Penguin launches the penguins' rockets on himself because he (or this movie) is stupid, and then a bunch of bats fly out of a compartment in the Batskiboat for no reason and attack him. Am I the only one noticing how this movie makes no sense?
01:51:00 -- How did Catwoman get here? How did she even know to come here?
01:52:17 -- Batman, the guy who murdered a dude with TNT earlier, says that the law is important and does in fact apply to him.
01:53:02 -- Remember the mascara that Batman wears to make the eyes blend with the mask?
01:53:10 -- MAGICALLY GONE! Done so that when he rips his mask off he doesn't have giant mascara circles under his eyes and look stupid, but it's still hilariously weird and only highlights what a weird choice the mascara thing is. I mean, the mask looks odd without it, but the fact that it magically disappears implies that it's not... actually there... in this movie's fictional world... or something?
01:54:58 -- Oh shit! It's the tazer she picked up off the clown an hour and a half ago! Where was she keeping it in that catsuit... ?
01:56:16 -- This film has a reputation for being a darker, mature, serious psychological take on the Batman mythos. Hence the hilarious burnt-to-a-crisp Christopher Walken corpse.
01:56:58 -- I'm not exactly sure what kills Penguin here. It wasn't the fall, because he's walking just fine. Dialogue suggests its either the heat because the AC is destroyed, despite the fact that he's not Mr. Freeze, or that it's the sometimes-toxic sometimes not water that's poisoned him somehow.
01:58:00 -- And then six Emperor Penguin pallbearers come out of nowhere and somehow drag Penguins body (with their flippers hardly touching him!) into the water in a bizarre funeral procession! Seriously! This happens! In a "dark and serious" Batman movie!
02:00:41 -- Originally, there was going to be a Catwoman spin-off from this movie, starring Michelle Pfeiffer. After all, this ending is pretty obviously setting her up for further appearances. That spin-off would remain in development hell for years, sifting through countless rewrites, at one point with Winona Ryder attached to star after Pfeiffer left, finally emerging in 2004 as the piece of shit, waste of space CATWOMAN film starring Halle Berry as a completely seperate character who has even less in common with the comics Selina Kyle than this one.
02:00:44 -- BATMAN RETURNS was considered a disapointment by Warner Bros. While it made a healthy amount of cash, it wasn't the success BATMAN was. It also generated a fair amount of controversy, with parents groups protesting the film's dark, macabre tone, violent nature, horrific scenes and general unsuitability for children. Nevermind that it was rated PG-13, same as the last Batman film, a primary piece of complaint was that the film was being marketed for children because it had a toy tie-in with Happy Meals at McDonald's. When told that children were leaving screenings mid-movie in tears, writer Daniel Waters and Burton reportedly replied that this meant they had achieved their goals in making the film. Whatever that means. I myself saw it for the first time when I was three years old, and the worst thing it did to my psyche was convince me it was a fantastic movie for the next twenty years. Seriously, it was my favourite Batfilm until THE DARK KNIGHT, and even then I didn't start noticing its terrible, terrible flaws. Viewed as a whole, BATMAN RETURNS comes across as a bizarre "blockbuster art film". Either way, Burton was removed from the next Batfilm, the plan for which featured Marlon Wayans as a garage mechanic who fixes the Batmobile named Robin, and replaced with Joel Schumacher, who was given the marching orders to produce a more family friendly, big blockbuster smash.
