'The Batman' Trailer Breakdown: It's Robert Pattinson Versus Gotham

Thanks to DC FanDome, we have our best look yet at Matt Reeves‘s “The Batman.” The latest trailer drop offers a little more insight into Robert Pattinson‘s Bruce Wayne and the rogue’s gallery of villains he must face — and while there are plenty of comic book experts who will spend the next few hours pouring over each individual frame, this breakdown is for those of us who prefer the big picture. Based on what we watched today, here’s the kind of movie we expect “The Batman” to be.

READ MORE: Read Our Coverage of DC FanDome’s Biggest Reveals

You can always learn a lot from the dialogue selections in a trailer, and Reeves hits us with a doozy in “The Batman.” “Fear is a tool,” Robert Pattinson’s Bruce Wayne growls, “and when that light hits the sky, it’s not just a call. It’s a warning.” For a generation of Batman fans used to hearing about the Bat-Signal as a literal and metaphorical beacon of light amidst the darkness, this inversion should set the stage for the kind of Batman we’re going to get.

If this trailer is any indication, Reeves — like so many writers before him — is absolutely drawn to a broken Batman, a man who is more rage than technique and who struggles to walk the line between light and dark. The trailer is filled with scenes of characters registering their horror, we assume towards a Batman who is not able to reign in his anger towards his victims. This concept is also reinforced in our first glimpses at the fight choreography; there’s a clever sequence halfway through where Batman fights his way through a subway tunnel, silhouetted only by muzzle flares from the guns of his opponents. Pattinson’s Batman does nothing to avoid bullets, preferring to charge forward and let them bounce harmlessly off his suit. The effect is almost Terminator-esque and speaks to a Wayne who is not overly concerned with surviving each fight.

And is so often the case in the comics, Bruce Wayne’s redemption will come in the form of Selina Kyle. We are treated to a few good shots of Zoë Kravitz‘s Catwoman in the trailer, and while her presence is more style than substance, she seems to be serving as a failsafe of sorts for Batman here too. In fact, between Kravitz and Andy Serkis‘s (still surprisingly swole) Alfred, Wayne seems to have precious few allies in his earliest years. We are not even sure where his relationship sits with Jeffrey Wright‘s Commissioner Gordon, though the presence of the Bat-Signal suggests the two have already been through a few battles together.

This trailer also lets us take a closer look at Paul Dano‘s Riddler. The trailer opens on his arrest at an Edward Hopper-esque diner, where Dano’s character etches a question mark in his coffee foam before being wrestled to the ground by a host of SWAT officers. In this trailer, Riddler is acknowledged as a serial killer — the “Serial Killer Streams” chyron on Gotham’s TV screens make that perfectly clear — and Dano, sounding more than a little bit like Jeffrey Dahmer, whispers his admiration for Batman in an unsettling voiceover. And while we are offered no further insight’s into Riddler’s leather BDSM costume, the overall tone of the character feels more in keeping with David Fincher‘s “Se7en” or James Wan‘s “Saw” than a traditional Batman movie. Fingers crossed for death traps.

Those worried that two villains might overshadow Reeves’s detective story need not fear — nothing in this trailer suggests that “The Batman” will have trouble weaving together the two narratives. If Reeves and company did indeed drawn inspiration from Geoff Johns‘s “Batman: Earth One” series, we can expect that Riddler will insert himself into the more traditional man-versus-mobsters conflict between Batman and The Penguin. After all, The Penguin has always been a charmingly traditional villain in the world of Batman; as psychopaths and supervillains come out of the woodwork to test their mettle again the Dark Knight, Cobblepot’s take on organized crime has always left him as something of an anachronism. Farrell seems to be relishing the opportunity to play an over-the-top mobster in a movie seemingly devoid of a little brevity. As Tay Money would say, Farrell understood the assignment.

Ultimately, this trailer for “The Batman” reinforces what we already thought we know: that Reeves is going to lean heavily into the dark noir elements of Gotham and that Pattinson’s Batman is a force of self-destruction. If the film delivers on the promise of the trailer, then “The Batman” might just offer the perfect synthesis of the best part of the previous Batman adaptations: Christopher Nolan‘s grounded storytelling, Zach Snyder‘s over-the-top violence, and Tim Burton‘s horror-fueled worldbuilding. Might Matt Reeves have created a Rosetta Stone for the Batman franchise? I guess we’ll find out in March.