Bane Comes to Gotham

DC ComicsOne of the two biggest comic publishing companies in the world (and, depending on what big events are going on, the number one company), DC Comics is the home of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and just about every big superhero introduced in the 1930s and 1940s. has had a few very famous storylines. No one is ever going to forget Crisis on Infinite Earths (especially with how many times they’ve adapted it over the years), and of course there’s the Death and Return of Superman (which has also seen its own two-part adaptation as well). But from around that same time there was another famous adaptation, giving BatmanOne of the longest running, consistently in-print superheroes ever (matched only by Superman and Wonder Woman), Batman has been a force in entertainment for nearly as long as there's been an entertainment industry. It only makes sense, then that he is also the most regularly adapted, and consistently successful, superhero to grace the Silver Screen. his own big, shocking storyline for fans to obsess over: Knightfall, the time that Bane broke the Batman’s back.

Knightfall was initially conceived as an answer to the over-the-top, ultra-violent superhero comics that had become de rigueur in the 1990s. Everything was grim-dark, all of the heroes were overly exaggerated, and there was so much violence, blood, and death. The editorial team for the Batman books at the time wanted to strike back, saying that these ultra-violent heroes were the wrong fit for comics and that Batman was the better model to follow. As such they plotted out the full Knightfall arc, which ran from April 1993 to August 1994 across the full span of Batman books, to illustrate their point.

That is why Azrael takes over as Batman, with his overly stylized features and ultra-violent methods. This was why Bane was introduced (with a tie-in one-shot, Batman: Vengeance of Bane, before the main arc commenced), so he could show the end result of this push for more violence, bigger foes, more muscles. Everything was played as a kind of dark parody, an underline of just how far comics had gone and, with the conclusion of the arc, why Batman (and heroes like him) were needed to realign comics back towards center.

Is any of this prevalent in the first part of the three-movie adaptation of Knightfall? Not in the slightest, and that’s one of many issues this movie has. This first part adapts the first arc of Batman: Knightfall (itself commonly titled “Knightfall”). In it, Batman (Anson Mount) is pushed to his limits after a mysterious explosion at Arkham Asylum releases all of the denizens of the nuthouse onto the streets of Gotham. For two days straight (with no sleep), Bruce takes to the city, searching for every villain with his sidekick, Robin III aka Tim Drake (Jack Griffo), in tow. He won’t stop until every villain is back in Arkham and the city can sleep safe, even if it drives himself to the point of exhaustion and madness.

Eventually Bruce splits off, continuing to take on the bad guys by himself after Tim steps in during a fight (that Bruce specifically told him to stay out of). His help was useful, but Bruce doesn’t want to see another Robin die. He sets Tim at the Batcave with orders to investigate the bombing. Tim takes this with a little liberty, grabbing Jean-Paul Valley aka Azrael (Pablo Schreiber) – someone Batman took in as a way to rehabilitate their troubled mind – as his backup as he heads out to Arkham directly to look into the bombing. He finds key evidence, but he also gets wrapped up with the mysterious villain, a man called Bane (Michael Mando), who seemingly wants to destroy Batman. And if Bruce isn’t careful, Bane just might succeed.

The thing about Knightfall, as a story arc, is that it really needs to build upon an already established world so you can get character development and context leading up to these events. Batman, at the time of this story, is still reeling from the loss of Jason Todd / Robin II. John-Paul Valley has slowly risen up as a vigilante in Gotham. The streets have been getting more violent. We get small hints of that in this first part of the story, but it doesn’t have the same impact as if we were seeing this from a Batman that we’ve been following for a while.

Bear in mind, the original Knightfall arc came seven years after Crisis on Infinite Earths. While Batman’s story had seen something of a readjustment over that time, due to the universe spanning reset, there was still decades of past history that more or less fed into the comic arc. Batman was a hero that had existed in comic readers’ minds for a long time, and they knew the lengths he would go to for his city. To see him pushed to the edge, and eventually to watch him be broken by Bane, was a shock to the system.

None of that comes across in Batman: Knightfall, Part 1, the movie, because there’s no history for this version of Batman. This is a one-off (or, really, three-off) movie event set in its own continuity, not tied to the DC Animated Movie UniverseWhile DC Comics was amping up production on this big "MCU-killer", the DC Extended Universe they were also quietly putting together another shared movie continuity, the DC Animated Movie Universe. This series was more closely related to the comics, directly adapting a number of famous storylines to, arguably, better effect than the live-action movies could. or the DC TomorrowverseA fresh start for DC's direct-to-video animated films, this is the successor universe to the DC Animated Movie Universe, promising bright new stories for DC's classic stable of heroes. or even the DC UniverseThe successor to WB's failed cinematic universe, the DCEU. Headed by James Gunn and Peter Safran, this new DC Universe carries over some continuity from the former film and TV series while crafting a new, rebooted universe for the future.. This is a new version of Batman we know nothing about, going through a major story without all the build up and development needed to lead into it. We can hardly care about these characters when it’s the first time we’re meeting this version of them.

Take, in contrast, that two-part adaptation of The Death and Return of Superman. That two-parter took place in the DCAMU and they came as the tenth and twelfth films in the series. They were based on a Superman we’d seen in many previous films, a version of the character we had grown somewhat attached to. When he died, we cared, and when he came back, we were happy for his return. There was history. There we stakes. All of that is missing from Batman: Knightfall, Part 1 because this film exists in an airless void without any continuity around it.

The film on its own is fine. It’s well drawn, the animation is solid, the writing is decent, and the actors are doing a fine job with their roles. On a basic production level this first part of the three-part film does what it needs to do. But that doesn’t make it interesting. While it is a little neat to see an adaptation of this story, and to see DC put it out as a long, three-part arc that really lets the story breathe, that doesn’t change the fact that we’re not really getting a story with all the context it needs.

We feel bad that Batman is driven to such extremes for his work, but we don’t really understand this Bruce at more than a surface level because that’s all the film can give us. We have no history for him so all we really have is our base level knowledge of Batman, in general, to guide us. Similarly we don’t really know Tim Drake, or Azrael, or Alfred beyond the base level story beats the film can provide. A fair bit of time is spent on Bane at the start of the film, fleshing him out as a villain, and that’s great, but we don’t get that same level of care for the Bat Family, largely because this film adapts a comic series that was already built on years (even decades) of history, so the story itself didn’t have to provide it.

The film is compromised because it comes now, without context, instead of DC waiting to do this adaptation as part of something larger. If, say, we’d gotten a version of this in the DCAMU, that could have worked. Or if Batman were introduced into the DCU and then, a few years later, we got a version of this story, that could have worked, too. But as it is all we have is this tale of a Batman taking on a Bane and (not really spoilers for a thirty-plus year old story) losing. It’s fine enough for what it is, but context would have made it much, much better.