Yes, David Cronenberg, who thought anyone who said “The Dark Knight Rises” was “supreme cinema art” didn’t know “what the f**k they’re talking about,” has watched “The Batman.” Last June, he sat down for an interview with The New Yorker, in the lead-up to his most recent nauseating effort, “Crimes of the Future,” which saw him return to body horror. (It’s not a bad entry in the Cronenberg canon, even if it doesn’t represent any significant evolution in his style.)
The Canadian filmmaker revealed he had screened Matt Reeves’s noirish take on the Caped Crusader simply due to his affection for Robert Pattinson. And it seems the star of “The Batman” got about as good an appraisal as he could expect from Cronenberg, who felt Pattinson was “an honorable Batman.” He added:
“I don’t want to say anything more than that, because I’ve already made my position on superhero movies clear and been attacked for it […] It’s basically an adolescent power fantasy, and that’s its essence. You can’t get away from that, and it limits it in terms of emotion and power and intellect.”
Cronenberg almost managed to stay positive there, but quickly righted himself to heap some more scorn on the genre that so effortlessly offends him. Oh well, for now, Pattinson can rest easy knowing he at least has the distinction of making David Cronenberg sit through a film with “a stupid cape.”