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The Batman’s Zodiac-Inspired Riddler Is Exactly What I Want From a Batman Movie

The Riddler's coffee mug on a table in the Batman

The Batman, for me, is like finally coming home—meaning that I feel like I am finally getting a story about Bruce Wayne that is the Bruce/Batman I know and love. The World’s Greatest Detective has rarely had his time as such at the movies, something that The Batman director and co-writer Matt Reeves knew extremely well. And he’s talked time and time again about bringing that aspect of Batman into the fold with his film.

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Now, talking with MovieMaker, the cast of The Batman and Reeves broke down what makes The Batman a fresh take on this character we’ve seen over and over again in live-action and what makes this Gotham so different from all the others before it.

“I wanted to do a story in which the corruption of Gotham was one of the most important aspects of the story, because Gotham is a sick place. Bruce is desperate to try and make a change,” says Reeves. “He’s still stuck, to be honest, emotionally stunted at being 10 years old, because that’s a trauma you don’t get past—witnessing your parents murder in this place. He’s looking to create meaning, right? This is the only meaning he can find. …I think he imagines that if he can do this, somehow he can reverse what’s happened, which will never be reversed. This is a very human impulse, right? To try and relive something and remake it.”

The thing that has fascinated me about this take on the character thus far has been how Reeves seems to be balancing the darker aspects of The Dark Knight with the outlandish villains that he comes to face. What ties that all together? The detective aspect of the story that I’ve been longing to see for Batman.

World’s Greatest Detective finally lives

Batman is called the World’s Greatest Detective, and yet, every live-action Batman has someone else really focusing on the detective aspect of it so that he can be the muscle. Even in the current DC movie universe, Ben Affleck’s Bruce still pushes a lot of the detective work onto Alfred when his muscle should just be Diana Prince and Clark Kent. So, I have incredibly high hopes for The Batman because this on-the-ground detective world is all I ever wanted Bruce to exist in.

Reeves said, “This idea of a place that is corrupt, and you try to swim against the tide in order to fight against it and make a difference, is quintessential Batman. And at the center of those noir stories is almost always the detective, right? And that’s why he is the world’s greatest detective. And so this story is, in addition to being almost a horror movie, and a thriller, and an action movie, at its core, it’s also very much a detective story. It’s very narrative.”

Apparently, Jeffrey Wright and Robert Pattinson (James Gordon and Bruce Wayne, respectively) were also surprised by it. Wright said that “Matt built an architecture within his script that was extremely well-considered,” while Pattinson was shocked that it wasn’t just lip-service—that the detective aspect is clear in the film.

“In the first meeting, he was saying, we want to lean into the ‘world’s greatest detective aspect,’ and be a detective noir movie,” Pattinson said. “And, you know, normally when directors say that, they just do like a mood board, and it’s just about the imagery. But I read the script, and it is! It’s a detective movie. It happens all the time in the graphic novels, but it’s always kind of on the backburner in the movies.”

Zodiac meets the Riddler

There were plenty of movies that inspired Reeves, notably Chinatown and All the President’s Men, but for me, it was Reeves talking about the Riddler’s connection to the Zodiac Killer that really clicked. Reeves explained,

The premise of the movie is that the Riddler is kind of molded in an almost Zodiac Killer sort of mode, and is killing very prominent figures in Gotham, and they are the pillars of society. These are supposedly legitimate figures. It begins with the mayor, and then it escalates from there. And in the wake of the murders, he reveals the ways in which these people were not everything they said they were, and you start to realize there’s some kind of association. And so just like Woodward and Bernstein, you’ve got Gordon and Batman trying to follow the clues to try and make sense of this thing in a classic kind-of-detective story way. I wanted bits of those names because I wanted the conspiracy to come with that forcefulness of history and believability for me.

The Zodiac Killer famously sent coded messages to newspapers, detailing his crimes—so, in a way, a riddle. In live action, we’ve had some takes on the Riddler that focus on the jokey nature of the villain, but if any of Batman’s Rogues’ Gallery were going to be a horrifying serial killer, it’d be the Riddler that I’d fear the most. The Joker loves chaos, but the Riddler loves diabolical mind games.

Focus that on the Zodiac Killer’s same sort of approach, mixed with the detective aspects of Batman’s comic history, and The Batman just continues to excite the Batman fan inside me.

(image: Warner Bros.)

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Author
Rachel Leishman
Rachel Leishman (She/Her) is an Assistant Editor at the Mary Sue. She's been a writer professionally since 2016 but was always obsessed with movies and television and writing about them growing up. A lover of Spider-Man and Wanda Maximoff's biggest defender, she has interests in all things nerdy and a cat named Benjamin Wyatt the cat. If you want to talk classic rock music or all things Harrison Ford, she's your girl but her interests span far and wide. Yes, she knows she looks like Florence Pugh.

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