Why is Joel Schumacher still to blame?

I've heard people say his films are style over substance.

http://imthecautionarywhale.blogspot.com/2014/07/hit-me-with-your-best -shot-batman-robin.html

Before we get to that, though, let's take a look at what went wrong with this film. As I stated above, this film was made by the same base creative team that made Batman Forever: director Joel Schumacher, writer Akiva Goldsman, and director of photography Stephen Goldblatt (who was Oscar-nominated for his work on that film). A key difference, though, is Goldsman: while he paired with Lee Batchler and Janet Scott Batchler for Batman Forever, here he's working alone, which means he doubles up on the groan-inducing one-liners and goofy, over-the-top action sequences. This doesn't come as a surprise, as Goldsman is a master at perfunctory scripts with high potential for awfulness. After all, his most recent film involves Colin Farrell playing an immortal man on a flying horse who kills the love of his life by having sex with her. Goldsman surely ranks among the worst screenwriters to ever win an Oscar (and for a Best Picture winner, no less).

But Goldsman really tops himself here. The plot involves Mr. Freeze (Arnold Schwarzenegger) stealing diamonds to power his refrigeration suit, all while looking for a cure for his wife's rare illness (he's had her cryogenically frozen). Meanwhile, Dr. Pamela Isley (Uma Thurman) is transformed in a laboratory accident into Poison Ivy, the plant-loving seductress with the venomous kiss. She teams up with Bane (Jeep Swenson), a super-soldier secretly created by a mad genius, to take on Gotham City and push for the rights of plants (yes, really). With these new threats in town, Batman (George Clooney) and Robin (Chris O'Donnell) must learn to trust one another to defeat them, all the while discovering that faithful butler Alfred (Michael Gough) is dying and handling the arrival of Alfred's niece, Barbara Wilson (Alicia Silverstone). It's remarkable that the film has this much going on, yet Goldsman's script never gives any of these elements any weight, so none of it really seems to matter. There are "stakes," but the film never bothers to make us care about them.

Most of the blame for the failure of Batman & Robin, though, has fallen on the shoulders of Schumacher, and though that's not entirely fair, it's not entirely unfair either. Schumacher's career is littered with enjoyably trashy films; he seems drawn to pulpy nonsense that could make for a fun time at the movies (The Phantom of the Opera, which clearly had Oscar hopes, is an inherently silly premise that Schumacher at the very least made an opulent visual treat). It shouldn't come as a surprise, then, that Schumacher's Batman films would be the campiest this side of the Adam West series from the 1960s. Yet in Batman & Robin, Schumacher seems to be pushing it to the limits, particularly amping up the innuendo. Within the very first minute of the film, we see Batman and Robin suiting up, and Schumacher treats us to ass…

…the infamous nipples…

…and codpieces.

Actually, there is a ton of phallic imagery in this film. It seems as if Schumacher was slyly nodding to the implied sexual attraction between Batman and Robin, but this being a "family-friendly" blockbuster in the mid-1990s, this couldn't be too explicit. So instead we get erections such as Mr. Freeze's rocket:

As well as the observatory telescope that becomes a major plot point later in the film.

Yet the film doesn't have the courage to go any further than that, leaving it feeling awfully, well, blue-balled on the subject.

Finally, the failure of this film can be blamed on the horrible casting and performances. Clooney, on paper, seems like a fine fit for the role, yet his Bruce Wayne is essentially a slight variation of "George Clooney, movie star," the only difference being that Wayne puts on a rubber suit to fight crime. O'Donnell is just bland, as is Silverstone. Thurman should have made for a fun Poison Ivy, yet her "seductive" performance is almost embarrassing to watch, and she's saddled with a character with ridiculous motivations who's basically an afterthought in the film, just hanging around the edges to drive a wedge between Batman and Robin and not much else.

The worst, though, belongs to the film's top-billed star (yes, really), Arnold Schwarzenegger. Schwarzenegger's career has been one of the most fascinating in Hollywood, going from Austrian bodybuilder to action hero to governor of California. But Schwarzenegger isn't an inherently terrible actor, he just needs the right role that utilizes his strengths. James Cameron recognized this casting him as the killer robot from the future in The Terminator; his blank affect and stiff line-readings gave the character chilling menace and the film wry humor, respectively. Similarly, playing a commando hellbent on survival gave him an action-hero presence in Predator (which he also cleverly lampooned in The Last Action Hero). He's a star, but his acting is very limited.

So, with that in mind, he shouldn't be anyone's first choice to play a brokenhearted scientist trying to save his wife who also becomes a mutated super-villain with a predilection for terrible "cold" puns. Yet here he is, in blue body paint, trying to make us feel something but only coming off as uncomfortably bad. He's clearly supposed to be the heart of the film, yet Schwarzenegger should be the last actor on your list when you need "heart." All that's left is empty-headed brawn.

How, you're no doubt asking, could something so terrible possibly be one of the most influential and, yes, important superhero movies ever made? The answer is that Batman & Robin marked a turning point in how superhero movies are made, representing the end of one era while paving the way for a new one to begin.

Before 2000, the superhero movie was marked by an adherence to comic-book stylization. These films ostensibly took place in the world we know in reality, but with a heightened sense of the fantastic and impossible. This is true of all superhero movies, of course, but the difference is that pre-2000 superhero movies presented their worlds with a certain degree of winking camp. Superman could fly and change into his costume in a phone booth, and Lex Luthor - his main adversary - was an over-the-top madman with any number of cockamamy schemes up his sleeve. Tim Burton's Batman films were certainly darker than any of Superman's films, but they still maintained some of the loopy silliness of the comics and previous Batman serials. Superhero movies were playful entertainments, pleasing to both kids and kids-at-heart (generally considered the audience for these films).

This heightened reality is present all throughout Batman & Robin, especially in the design of Gotham City. From the outset, Gotham looks like any anonymous metropolis, with skyscrapers towering above the streets and presumably-awful traffic. Yet there are little details that make it a city unlike anything we know in the real world. Buildings such as the abandoned ice cream shop that Mr. Freeze hides in…

…or the neon-splattered Turkish bath that becomes Poison Ivy's lair...

…are visually unique and very distinctively Gotham. There's a cartoonish vibe to these designs, amplifying the camp factor and assuring the audience that Gotham is very much a comic-book world.

The same is true of the enormous statues that tower over parts of the city, like Gotham's own versions of the Colossus of Rhodes. These towering figures give Gotham's skyline a mythical feel, as if it exists at the intersection of ancient Olympus and modern New York. Truly, these statues are god-like images of guardians of the city, and they firmly establish the world of Batman & Robin as a world of fantasy. Gotham is not real; it is ripped from the pages of a comic book, and the film is not going to ignore that fact.

*Best Shot*

After Batman & Robin failed spectacularly at the box office, superheroes disappeared from the big screen for a few years. Instead of men in capes (always men, you note) performing heroic feats, Hollywood gave us multiple asteroids colliding with Earth and return trips to galaxies far, far away. For a few years, at least, Batman & Robin had effectively killed the superhero movie.

And it did, at least in the form we knew. In July 2000, X-Men was released, bringing the ragtag team of mutants to the big screen. But there was something different about X-Men that separated it from previous superheroes. It was unquestionably taking place in a world that was meant to be understood as our own. Wolverine's bright yellow costume was gone; so was everyone else's, replaced by cool, black leather. The X-Men weren't just superheroes saving the day anymore, either; they were perceived threats to the general population, not heroes to be celebrated. Moreover, they had become metaphors for the Other, providing social commentary in addition to selling action figures. The world of X-Men was certainly still one of science-fiction/fantasy, but it looked uncannily like our own. We weren't watching a comic book come to life anymore.

Other films followed suit. Spider-Man, which premiered in the summer of 2002, fittingly held on to the whiz-bang sense of awe that accompanied it's teenage protagonist, but there's no mistaking Spidey's New York for anything but the genuine article. As a result, the film became a gargantuan blockbuster, becoming the highest-grossing superhero movie at the time and helping a city (and nation) heal after enduring the deadliest terrorist attack in the nation's history (I have a theory that the events of 9/11 were a crucial influence on audience's desire for superhero movies, but that's for another time). X2: X-Men United and Spider-Man 2 doubled down on their connection to our reality, reinforcing the idea that superhero movies needed to be "darker" and "grittier" to succeed.

(Case in point: Ang Lee presented Hulk with comic-panel edits, and the film tanked. Catwoman took the campy route and bombed spectacularly. Audiences were fully rejecting superhero movies that weren't rooted in "realism.")

Then came Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan's reboot of the franchise that has become the most celebrated superhero movies ever. Everyone involved with the project stated that the film's dark tone and clear reality were reactions to the disaster of Batman & Robin, and that the film was going to distance itself from the latter film as much as possible. Indeed, to look at Nolan's trilogy in comparison to the Burton/Schumacher films is to see a marked difference in the way they present their visions of Gotham. Nolan's films ditched kitschy characters like Poison Ivy, Mr. Freeze, the Penguin, and the Riddler, while turning other villains such as the Joker, Bane, and Scarecrow into terrifying figures that wouldn't be impossible in the real world. In Nolan's hands, Gotham became a stand-in for America, and through this lens he examined post-9/11 ills in our society. His films don't look like comic books, and consciously so. It's no wonder that his films are celebrated as among the best the genre ever produced, while their predecessors are treated as a distant, quaint memory.

For better or worse, Batman & Robin changed the way that superhero movies were made. Even today, the offerings from Marvel and DC - both in theaters and on television - are rooted firmly in the real world, just with superheroes and cool technology (exception: Marvel's Thor franchise, which, it should be noted, is the lowest-grossing film property of Marvel Studios). Thanks to Batman & Robin, superhero movies ditched the campy, comic-based fantasy realm they once inhabited. Superheroes now occupy a world that's not too different from our own. We've seen this "dark and gritty" influence permeate most Hollywood blockbusters, regardless of whether they're about superheroes or fairy tales. I'm not going to say that all of them are great, or that every superhero film needs the same super-serious approach. But it has resulted in some truly inspired and incredible films, including The Dark Knight.

To paraphrase that latter film, Batman & Robin wasn't the superhero movie that we deserved. But it was the one the genre needed to enter a new, exciting, and crowded future.

8. 8MM (1999) - Another of Schumacher's "dark" movies (see also: Falling Down and The Number 23) is perhaps his most egregious because it's very, very obvious that he has no connection to the material. He is chasing the trend established by David Fincher with Seven -- the gritty, dark, nihilistic crime drama. In his defense, Schumacher is at least working from a script by Seven screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker, but that just highlights his "words-but-not-the-music" approach to the material. Another top-notch cast (Nicolas Cage overacts, but there's also Joaquin Phoenix, Catherine Keener and James Gandolfini) is wasted on melodramatic sleaze. Here's a movie that wants to look at the dark side of human nature made by a guy who is incapable of actually being dark. It's a fake.

"I was always crazy about Mr. Freeze from the television series and Arnold Schwarzenegger was my only choice from the beginning. He's a great action star, of course, but he also has a great sense of humor, which is crucial to the Batman movies. They are called 'comic' books, not 'tragic' books, and I think we always need to remember that this is a big pop-culture opera, not Medea." -1997 promotional interview

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http://forum.earwolf.com/topic/7812-episode-42-%e2%80%94-batman-amp-ro bin/page__view__findpost__p__37274

The Burton/Schumaker series couldn't go any further than this movie. Joel took the material of this batman, with its toy commercial emphasis ordered from the producers, and he distilled it into a work of art, high camp, an 8 year old boy psychosexual epic. "I want a car" does indeed set the tone for this movie. Boys, toys, girls, cooties, highly sexual and yet no sex. This movie is puberty. Even the scale of Gotham city reminds me of playing with toys at the time the movie came out. When Batman's intro is a clear Fred Flintstone reference, its not some accident, the movie is telling you this is a big cartoon. And when a movie is constructed this way, you lose things like realistic character psychology. They're just cartoonish metaphors. This is high camp, and no inch of this movies frames is not overly designed by the confluence of Hollywood artisans under the direction of the now art house director, Joel Schumaker.

Would it had mattered if he did Year One? not sure it would've worked since Returns already did Catwoman and the first film was already like his first year as Batman.

Reason why he's still to blame because he keeps his mouth shut, lets his employers tell him what to do and lets the actors play the roles as they would or how they want.

Reason why fanboys had a grudge against because he comes off as an embarrassment and uses a poor choice of words like "we're not gonna put a real disease in a comic book", " we it's a cartoon".