So I finally watched Batman : The Long Halloween part 1 and part 2, since part two finally came out this week I decided not to review them individually but review them as a singular film.
Honestly, I really enjoyed it, you know this movie is based upon a pretty dope and bestselling comic book of all time. It’s well renowned for the storyline, the pacing, the intrigue that is throughout because this is very much like a detective drama.
Batman : The Long Halloween story involves Jim Gordon, Batman, and Harvey Dent trying to figure out how to bring down Gotham’s mob boss, the carmine Falcone empire, and on top of that this serial killer called Holiday Killer starts killing members of Falcone’s crime organization each time on a different holiday.
The killing spree drags on for a full year, starts on Halloween, and ends in Halloween and that’s why it’s called what a lot of people call The Long Halloween.
It’s a really fun ride as our heroes try to figure out who this killer is, what his aim and how all these killing tests our heroes. Batman : The Long Halloween kind of pushes and blurs the line of the morality of the justice system.
I thought they did a really good job at keeping the tone, keeping the pace. It didn’t feel like they needed to interject action everywhere in it, this is a very slow burn. It’s more of a detective story with some action sprinkled in it.
I really like the new art direction as well, It’s very retro-futuristic, obviously, batman’s got a lot of techs, he’s got his batmobile. But it still keeps that like old-timey 50s 40s 30s feel that Gotham city always kind of had, even in the batman animated series. Old-timey cars that the cops have, the look of the buildings, the gothic architecture but then you still have the computers, the science stuff, and all that stuff Batman uses is extremely high tech, I really like that blend.
The fight sequence in Batman : The Long Halloween is also very interesting. What I liked about the fight scenes is that they were very technical. You could see every
action, every reaction to a strike, an attack you could see batman countering being.
I believe that they must have studied some like martial arts, hand-to-hand combat for reference in this because fight seems very much real. Of course, there’s some stylization and some uplifting to it, obviously, batman can get thrown around a lot harder than you could throw a normal human, so there is that elevated real reality to some of the fights. It’s very creative and it’s really energetic and I really enjoyed it.
I think the action scenes are a little few and far between and that’s not a problem because it’s more about the story, It’s more about the investigation, the characters,
the consequences of everything that’s going on.
This is clearly a batman that hasn’t been doing this too long because he’s not really the greatest detective that exists out there. He’s much more the brute, the fighter. He’s still not even got the art of like interrogation yet.
Overall I would recommend it to everyone, this won’t be the last adaptation of the long Halloween. Matt Reeves’s The Batman is also heavily inspired by this very story, obviously the completely different focus, that’s going for a more down-to-earth, gritty zodiac killer kind of thing.