ander5151

I didn't know about the nearly three-hour runtime going in, but it's surprisingly well paced, feeling more like an epic saga than the protracted dress-up stunt show it could've been. Colin Farrell is unrecognisable as an unstylized, very human-looking Penguin. Robert Pattinson would've been more convincingly tough-looking in his bat-suitless scenes if he'd bothered to put on some weight and work out a bit more. (Maybe he's a _vampire_ Batman who, being immortal, doesn't need to be as muscular to whack people around? LOL) The bit with the seawall seemed gratuitous, like they worried the film's scale wouldn't seem big enough (after all that romping around a huge city, though?). But hey, you're practically getting a movie and a half here, so it's hard to complain. IMHO, _The Batman_ is solid, darkly wacky entertainment with an excellent balance of angst, brooding, fighting, urban blight, car-chasing, and people flapping around in black garb with tiny hidden cameras... You know what a winning combination that always is. If you're like me, you'll also come out of it grateful to live in a place where it's not ALWAYS dark and rainy, day and night, and where there don't seem to be more criminals and wackos roaming the streets than normal people. Bonus!

There are some signs this film didn't have quite all the talent it needed to completely work. Some of the dialog and acting are a bit stiff, and the cinematography is amateurish in places. (You can tell that trickier shots, such as dialog in vehicles, posed some logistical challenges for them.) But it's a film with a lot of heart, with likable leads and some positive messages. And let's face it, making movies of any kind is a huge undertaking, where everyone does the best they can. So if you can cut this film a bit of slack and go with the story, I think you'll enjoy it.

I never thought I'd dislike something so much as to give it a one-star rating, but in this case I had no choice. This "documentary" is little more than a string of stock-footage and public-domain shots of rotating radio telescopes, NASA control rooms, TV-news animation backgrounds and home-brew CGI, with a droning voice-over that could've been---and probably was---compiled by lurking around a few of the cheesiest alien-conspiracy websites. The production values are so bad, and the lack of substantial content so profound, it baffles me how anyone was persuaded to have anything to do with it. But what's REALLY incredible is that I saw this on Netflix. Netflix! They were actually showing it! Why? Well, I suppose it couldn't have cost much to license. It's awful, though. Really.