After a year-long absence of Hollywood superhero movies in the Chinese market, the 3-hour-long blockbuster "The Batman" finally landed on Friday. The film is a fresh approach to the beloved caped crusader franchise with its original, noir, and detective essence.

A few Batman movies were introduced to China before. The most outstanding ones were Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight Rises" in 2012, which grossed 338 million yuan back then, and the DC Cinematic Universe installment "Superman v. Batman" by Zack Snyder made 618 million yuan in 2016. 

"The Batman" is directed by Matt Reeves and stars Robert Pattinson in the dual role of Gotham City's vigilante detective and his alter ego, reclusive billionaire Bruce Wayne. The crime thriller is darker and more prolonged than its predecessors, including "The Dark Knight." However, instead of making it another flick where the superhero fights villains with high-tech equipment and excellent vehicles in action scenes full of visual effects, the new film focuses on the hero's struggles. As a result, it seems more like a Gothic noir film being entirely realistic, somber, and haunting.

Director Reeves told the packed theater at the Chinese premiere via video link on March 16 that what makes his film different is positioning Batman along an arc of becoming. It takes place just two years into Wayne becoming Batman, and he is still figuring out what it means to be Batman. He's vulnerable, still learning, making mistakes, enduring a lot, and acting in a mode of vengeance.

Pattinson agreed there are a lot of differences in his version of Batman. He added that the director made some radical departures from the old versions, making him more like a detective. "There's a sensitivity rather than just running straight into an action scene. Sometimes, he decides to take a different route. When I read the script, I just thought he seemed very unusual, he had a very unusual moral code, and didn't really see himself as a true clean hero. He didn't know exactly who he was yet."

In "The Batman," Bruce Wayne has only a few trusted allies — Alfred (Andy Serkis), Lt. James Gordon (Jeffrey Wright) — amongst the city's corrupt network of officials and high-profile figures. So when The Riddler (Paul Dano) targets Gotham's elite with a series of sadistic machinations, a trail of cryptic clues sends the Batman on an investigation into the underworld, where he encounters such characters as Selina Kyle (Zoë Kravitz), Oz, a.k.a. the Penguin (Colin Farrell), and Carmine Falcone (John Turturro). 

Paul Dano played the biggest foe of Batman in the film, the Riddler, a psychopathic villain. He said he defined his role in the movie with his first conversation with the director about heroes and villains and the two sides of trauma because Batman himself is born of trauma. "That was kind of the core emotional seed for the character from which everything else grew."

Having worked with Reeves for many years, Producer Dylan Clark was well aware of the emotional storytelling the director is capable of. "We haven't experienced Batman emotionally as Batman. We hadn't seen Batman, the detective, and now we're with Batman in every scene, putting the pieces together alongside him."

Reeves equates this type of point-of-view approach to films like "Chinatown," where the audience and protagonist perspectives fall very much in step. "The thing we tried to do as much as possible was to put you in the characters' shoes to experience this."

Pattinson trained for months for the fight choreography stunts and grew as much muscle as possible in a short time. He also had to wear the heavy bat suit on set, which was difficult due to the rain in the movie. Meanwhile, the Penguin, played by Colin Farrell, had 12 dedicated make-up artists who worked on his make-up for 6 hours every day during filming. 

But what impressed Farrell most was the first time he saw Pattinson in the bat suit on a roof in London. "With the 2 a.m. night sky behind him, and his cloak blowing in the wind, he was the dark knight. It was a surreal but genuinely magical experience."

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