Film Review: The Batman-Oreo Immersive Experience
This is not a parody. This is an actual thing that I actually went to.
Warning: this is absolutely not a spoiler-free review.
Last night I went to The Oreo x Batman Immersive Cinema Experience.
I’m not sure why that sentence exists. It makes about as much sense to me as it does to you, and I was there. A friend of mine once observed that American marketing can feel a bit algorithmic - strange recipes and designs churned out in bizarre combinations until something hits.
“The Caped Crusader returns in his darkest, grittiest outing yet? Pair it with a biscuit. Done. Next!”
The evening began with the cinema lit up by an Oreo bat-signal. Inside, actors dressed as Gotham City Police officers roamed the crowd, while others talked furiously into their phones about what a total disaster this was. Whether this was part of the immersive experience or people genuinely annoyed to have been booked for this job was not immediately obvious given that the theme of the evening was an Oreo-themed event going wrong, lending an unexpected level of nuance to the theatrical proceedings.
What any of it had to do with the Batman wasn’t quite clear. Why was the Gotham City Police Department patrolling a cinema in Dalston? Why were the Oreos stored in a vault? Who failed to tell the Americans that English people don’t do audience interaction? These questions and many more can be ignored with the aid of sufficient cocaine, although in this case you’d need a pile large enough to make even Scarface think twice.
The actors mixing with the attendees wore expressions of people wondering when their dreams of making it into the movies had morphed into standing by the side of a stage pretending to guard biscuits. Eventually, the immersive experience of queuing for snacks came to a conclusion, the audience took their seats, and the film bega-
Of course it didn’t. There’s an Oreo x Batman Immersive Experience to conclude here. A stern-faced officer informed the crowd that the limited edition Batman Oreo cookies had been stolen, and that the suspects were in this room!
This cued two people erupting from the audience and engaging in a mock fight on stage, complete with some quite neat front-flips. The villains - Batman fans who just wanted to feel like part of the film - were foiled, the biscuits were recovered, a special thank you on behalf of The Oreo Family was relayed to the audience, and the lights went out.
This piece of light and humorous frippery having set the mood, the film began with a jump-scare blunt object murder from a man who took an almost sexual satisfaction in wrapping his victim in duct tape. Within a few minutes, a police officer was telling us in grim tones that he’d removed a thumb from his victim while he was still alive.
The primary themes of the film were fear, violence, despair, the lessons people learn from the society around them, the innate corruptibility of man, and overcoming tragedy. Very little of this bore any perceivable relationship to cookies.
To understand The Batman (2022), it’s important to understand something of its genealogy. Since Adam West tangled with Cesar Romero’s Joker, each successive iteration has generally looked to push a little darker than the last. Tim Burton’s 1989 release was succeeded by 1992’s darker Batman Returns. Joel Schumacher’s experiment with a return to a campier version killed the series off until Christopher Nolan decided to take make things darker again, featuring a tortured protagonist desperately in need of a throat lozenge.
Through the Dark Knight series, Batman got steadily darker. Sure, there were gadgets and high society soirees, but there was also the Joker holding ‘try-outs’. The Batman (2022) takes this trend to its logical conclusion, arriving at a film so dark and gritty that there really isn’t much further to go, unless they decide to lock Batman in a grit silo at midnight and just film that for 3 hours.
Again, I am really not sure why this was felt to be the ideal marketing gimmick for a biscuit.
Our introduction to Batman at work - after the obligatory fight sequence - consists of his silently standing too close in people’s personal space at a crime scene, being generally socially awkward. The first reaction of a policeman spotting this muscular emo in his leather fur-suit is to ask “who let him in here”, roughly paralleling my reaction to learning Robert Pattinson had made his way into the franchise.
In the event though, Pattinson turned out to be a pretty good piece of casting. The man has a remarkably expressive chin, which is a good thing because for most of the film all we can see of his emotional range is the subtlest of alterations of its angle. It’s so distinctive that it’s genuinely surprising that more people don’t realise - spoiler alert - Batman is Bruce Wayne by recognising it.
Whereas Ben Affleck, to the best of my knowledge, attempted to pick up where Christian Bale left off - I will freely admit I’ve not watched the Batfleck films safe in the knowledge that no-one else did either - Pattinson adopts his own approach. Rather than heavyweight wrestler playboy Batman, this is emo-rock Batman complete with eyeshadow and functional voice box.
The cast generally is good. Zoe Kravitz is a much better Catwoman than Anne Hathaway, Andy Serkis is an excellent Alfred, Colin Farrell is genuinely unrecognisable as the loathsome Penguin, and Jeffrey Wright is excellent as Gary Oldman. This is in no way a criticism of his performance; more people should be Gary Oldman.
The script is less so. In some places it wants to be Saw. In others it wants to be Zodiac or Se7en. As a whole it wants to be an eighties detective film set in 2024. At various points it wants to provide gritty commentary on the dangers of lone radicals, on the ease with which society slips into corruption when no-one is vigilant, and on the dangers of group radicalisation.
The only thing it doesn’t particularly want to be is a Batman movie. The Batmobile is a modified car that stalls, the Batsuit is just body armour, the Penguin is a scarred mobster, Catwoman is a balaclava’d thief with some cats, the Riddler is a serial killer who taunts the police, and everyone calls Batman ‘Vengeance’. Dark and gritty; the perfect companion to an Oreo biscuit.
The primary antagonist - well, sort of - is Paul Dano’s Riddler, a young man who is fascinated by cryptography and asking annoying questions, wears a mask that looks like it would do a pretty good job of blocking out unwanted sensory experiences, responds to unexpected setbacks by screaming incoherently, and has a niche extremist social media account he uses to start a militia. Given Batman’s utter lack of social skills, this may mark the first superhero film to feature an autistic protagonist/antagonist duo.
The point of the film however - at least I think it was the point - was that the real villain of the piece is an uncaring Gotham City. The callous mobsters, crooked cops, corrupt DA’s, and a city that just taints everyone within it. Given that every iteration of the Batman franchise reaches this conclusion at some point or another, it’s not entirely clear why Christian Bale was so averse to just allowing Bane to sort it out with cleansing nuclear fire.
Correspondingly, Gotham is the real star of the piece. The interiors of locations work well, from Wayne Manor through industrial nightclubs, and the exteriors present a crumbling gothic city with a surprisingly British feel to it. At first this had me worried that the process of cultural assimilation had reached a point where I could no longer reliably tell Britain and America apart, but eventually I twigged that it was because Gotham is in some part an amalgamation of London, Liverpool, and Glasgow, among other places. 1
Returning to the script, the fact that the film wanted to be four different movies didn’t really hamper it at first; I enjoyed it right up until the first ending. I enjoyed the subsequent four endings, spaced out over another 45 minutes, substantially less. There isn’t enough in the film to sustain a three hour runtime, and even if there was I suspect at that point the relentless Dark-Grit would still wear down viewers. For the franchise at a whole, there isn’t much left in the grit mine left to be extracted. The first option would be to dump the Bruce Wayne identity entirely - something this one gets fairly close to doing - and just have Batman be a delusional homeless man MacGyver-ing gadgets together to beat up criminals. The second would be to decide that the world is bleak enough as it is, and that what people really want from superhero movies is some light escapism and a bit of suspension of disbelief, although a return to putting nipples on the Batsuit might be a little too far.
Despite these complaints, I really did quite enjoy the film. I’d be willing to watch a second, particularly if they were willing to cut the script down a little. On the whole, I think my review would be ‘pretty good’.
I’m just not sure what any of it had to do with Oreos.
The end effect of a gothic city filled with slightly old-fashioned clothing is pretty appealing, and not a bad advertisement for the sort of thing we could build if we would only abolish the Town and Country Planning Act.