All Right on the Knight

Seen it all before? Maybe! Light then dark then light - like the Bonds? I suppose so. But you didn't realise that angry Batfleck (of the Snyderverse, no less) was the light version until what came afterwards. (Ditto Brosnan! Everyone thought he was a "serious" Bond until Craig came along.)

Batman as Zorro? Bit odd! Thomas Wayne as villain? Ditto! But at least there's a sense here that Hollywood is now coming down from its (anti-Trump) woke high of a couple of years ago. (How exactly you make feminist fantasies like Aliens and T2 even more woke-feminist was never clear - and it wasn't a good idea.)

Gordon's been race-swapped, which makes him feel at worst like the black Felix Leiter from the Craig Bond films and in practice no worse than Danny Glover in the Lethals. And so the handsome rich English public school boy World's Greatest Detective gets to whitesplain batsplain things to the poor black gumshoe. If this is woke, I suspect they didn't think it through. 

And Catwoman is now black too, again! But then no one minded Eartha Kitt back in the '60s, and this one more than exorcises the memory of Halle Berry. (And obviously one minded Harvey Dent being black in the Tim Burton Batman, but then that was probably because he was played by Billy Dee Williams - proof that back in those days race-swapping could actually make you cooler.)

All-in-all, it's good to see the Caped Crusader back on form. Most of the boxes get ticked, the grunge-emo look works well (and the sound!), and the moral complexity of Joker has survived into a "mainstream" series. Yes, there are disappointments. (No Justice League! No Wayne Manor! No Robin - duh! And de facto no Alfred either!) And the chances are that after all the Schubert and the Fauré (not to mention Vengeance's own "Fasolt and Fafner"-type leitmotif), as well as the beautiful night-time visuals, you'll be nodding during the last half-hour (when - spoilers! - Bats singularly fails to stop the villain's dastardly plan to flood Gotham City and turn it into a literal crime-infested swamp).

But it could have been sooooo much worse.