Spiritual quest

The title and the content might not feel connected to some, so I will try to explain as best I can while we go through this.

I am taking what I have dubbed as a spiritual quest. Most of you will have heard of the four Batman movies done around the 1990's: Batman (1989), Batman Returns (1992), Batman Forever (1995) and Batman and Robin (1997). Atleast some of you will have experienced a sort of a nausea with the last movie uttered.

These movies.

While Batman and Batman Returns hold titles as the movies that skyrocketed director Tim Burton into the top tiers of Hollywood, Batman and Robin holds the title of one of the worst movies ever, with a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 12% and and imdb score of 3,6. It is often titled to be, by the opinion of the majority of my generation, the worst movie of the 90's.

I have chosen to watch these four movies for a few reasons. One, I think the nostalgia surrounding these movies is warping my generation's view on reality. Nostalgia isn't always bad, but it causes bad stuff too, like every Tarantino movie being lauded as good when, honestly, they're often just glorified, post-glam gore without much of a backdrop. Before the rain of offal that this kind of a statement will cause hits the fan, hear me out. I'm not saying Tarantino is a bad movie director, but I am saying he's kind of done the same kill-all flick about ten times now. And most of those movies, when we get down to it, aren't that brilliant.

Now, reason two for watching these is to see if they're actually worth all the rose-tinted glasses looks we've been giving them the last twenty-ish years. As some will probably know, I spend a lot of my time on the internet, what with being a nerd (I'll get around to talking about this word sometime). Some of the stuff said there sticks, and Bob "MovieBob" Chipman made some points about these movies a while ago that I felt I should check into personally. Because point in case, see reason one: nostalgia can be bad.

Reason three, and some might do the Dracula-hiss on this one, is that I actually want to see Batman and Robin again, mostly to see if it is as bad as everyone says. When you mention the movie, you usually get an almost immediate reaction of "That movie was so shit, uggh." without any real reasons as to why it sucked. I don't remember it as being astoundingly bad when it came out. I remember it being definitely not good, but that's not the same thing. And as far as I can tell, none of these movies are actually that good.

Which brings me to reason four: are we just lauding these movies because they're Batman movies and everyone loves Batman? These movies launched the superhero movie genre and Tim Burton's career, yeah, but are they actually that good? They made a lot of money, but so did the new Spiderman movie, and the Twilight series.

My spiritual journey into the heart of these questions will begin and take place over the following weekend. Stay tuned for enlightenment, or perhaps a nervous breakdown. Same Bat-time, on the same Bat-channel! (The Adam West series rocked my summers when I was a kid. Yea, it might have been goofy, but so was MacGyver, and he was awesome too!)