The Dark Knight Returns’ flashes back to classic graphic novel
Animated film offers shadow of landmark comic book about aging, sadistic Batman.
- Courtesy of Warner Brothers
- “I’VE COME ALIVE AGAIN.” Batman: The Dark Knight Rises - Part 1
The opening of the animated film Batman: The Dark Knight Returns — Part 1 begins both exactly the same as, and completely different from, the original graphic novel of the same name. In 1986 author/illustrator Frank Miller and inker Klaus Janson crafted a strikingly gritty, antiheroic take on the Caped Crusader. Like Gotham City’s own high-wattage bat signal, The Dark Knight Returns drew mainstream attention to the creative boom of comics in the 1980s while shining a path for the brooding big-screen Batmen of Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan.
The new direct-to-DVD film, the 15th in the DC Animated Universe series, goes on-sale today and hurls the audience into the same sequence as the book. We find a 55 year-old Bruce Wayne (voiced by Robocop’s Peter Weller), having hung up the cowl a decade earlier, recklessly competing in an Formula One-style automobile race. In the comic book, Miller and Janson confine the competition to a single page, rendered almost entirely in tight close-ups of Bruce behind the wheel. The reader requires at least one reading to follow the rapid editing and skewed perspective on the action, which suggests the comic book equivalent of a contemporary Bourne movie.
The film, directed by Jay Olivia, offers all the conventional race images that you’d expect, with long shots and bird’s eye views of the road that emphasize bland visual clarity at the expense of the book’s off-kilter emotional intimacy. Even more strikingly, the film dispenses with Miller’s hard-boiled interior monologues, eliminating many of book’s most memorable lines and the uncomfortable implications about Bruce’s sadistic psyche. When the race ends with a fiery crash, on paper Bruce thinks, “This would be a good death... but not good enough.” The script confines itself almost entirely to the book’s spoken dialogue.