Looking forward to Fox’s Batprequel Gotham? An official synopsis has been released. Not looking forward to Fox’s Batprequel Gotham? The synopsis has been released anyway. You cannot escape.
The synopsis, available in full at /Film, starts with two paragraphs describing what we already know—it’s an origin story of sorts for James Gordon and various Batvillains, including Catwoman and the Penguin. The Riddler, Two-Face, and the Joker are also name-checked, though those roles have yet to be cast.
Then we get into the not-so-boring stuff:
Growing up in Gotham City’s surrounding suburbs, James Gordon (Ben McKenzie, “Southland,” “The O.C.”) romanticized the city as a glamorous and exciting metropolis where his late father once served as a successful district attorney. Now, two weeks into his new job as a Gotham City detective and engaged to his beloved fiancée, Barbara Kean (Erin Richards, Open Grave, “Breaking In”), Gordon is living his dream – even as he hopes to restore the city back to the pure version he remembers it was as a kid.
Good so far. Wanting to restore the city to the way it was under a beloved father. Batparallels.
Brave, honest and ready to prove himself, the newly-minted detective is partnered with the brash, but shrewd police legend Harvey Bullock (Donal Logue, “Sons of Anarchy,” “Terriers,” “Vikings,” “Copper”), as the two stumble upon the city’s highest-profile case ever: the murder of local billionaires Thomas and Martha Wayne. At the scene of the crime, Gordon meets the sole survivor: the Waynes’ hauntingly intense 12-year-old son, Bruce (David Mazouz, “Touch”), toward whom the young detective feels an inexplicable kinship. Moved by the boy’s profound loss, Gordon vows to catch the killer.
Emphasis mine. First mini-Bruce Wayne has “tragic gravitas,” now he’s “hauntingly intense.” Gotham, you keep presenting ickle Bruce Wayne as the emo-est of baby superheroes and it’ll make it really hard for me to take you seriously. So by all means, continue. What’s next: He’s a 12-year-old with “sorrowful dignity”? One of those hairflap-obscuring-the-eye haircuts? Does he attempt to glare his teachers into not assigning homework because “what’s the point, it’s all meaningless anyway?”
As he navigates the often-underhanded politics of Gotham’s criminal justice system, Gordon will confront imposing gang boss Fish Mooney (Jada Pinkett Smith, The Matrix films, “HawthoRNe,” Collateral), and many of the characters who will become some of fiction’s most renowned, enduring villains, including a teenaged Selina Kyle/the future Catwoman (acting newcomer Camren Bicondova) and Oswald Cobblepot/The Penguin (Robin Lord Taylor, “The Walking Dead,” Another Earth).
I have nothing of substance to say here. I just want to have a little excited dance party about Gotham casting Jada Pinkett Smith as a mob boss named Fish Mooney.
Although the crime drama will follow Gordon’s turbulent and singular rise through the Gotham City police department, led by Police Captain Sarah Essen (Zabryna Guevara, “Burn Notice”), it also will focus on the unlikely friendship Gordon forms with the young heir to the Wayne fortune, who is being raised by his unflappable butler, Alfred (Sean Pertwee, “Camelot,” “Elementary”). It is a friendship that will last them all of their lives, playing a crucial role in helping the young boy eventually become the crusader he’s destined to be.
A crusader who will only get more hauntingly intense and tragic gravitas-y as the decades go on.
(via: /Film)
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