Thread by @AlexandraErin

So in Batman & Robin, there's a dinosaur statue in the museum.

Okay, but it's in the antiquities wing.

Of what is specifically an art museum.

So it's not there because it's a dinosaur, but because it's a statue.

An ancient Mesopotamian dinosaur statue, I guess.

I know dunking on this movie is old and boring, but everybody dunks on the "ice age killed the dinosaurs" line and I've never heard anyone question the dinosaur's presence, I guess because museum. I had never thought about it.

Having recently watched both Batman Returns and Batman & Robin, I think among the reasons the Tim Burton movies are more fondly remembered than the Schumacher ones is that we the target audience were younger, more trusting, and less too cool for school when Burton had his run.

Because none of the Batman movies -- like most superhero movies, and indeed most movies, and in particular basically every 20th century superhero movie -- works at all if you don't accept it on its terms, meet it halfway and fully embrace everything it's doing.

Schumacher is glam, Burton is goth, but they're both doing high camp. Burton is working more on comic book logic, Schumacher on 60s Batman TV energy. They're doing different things but they both know what they're doing.

One thing that really stood out about Christopher Walken is how he's playing a cartoon supervillain named obliquely after the first movie vampire and modeled after Donald Trump, and yet he has so much more human warmth and likability than Donald Trump.

https://twitter.com/lamguin/status/1352446483434504196

His evil scheme was to build a phony power plant that will let him siphon off the city's power grid and then re-sell the electricity without having to produce anything, and it's still fundamentally a better business plan than Trump's casino empire had.

His son was willing to risk his life to protect him and then he offered himself as a sacrifice to die in the place of his son, to an enemy who had displayed no inclination to harm him personally.

Can't imagine that happening with the Trumps.

If a man that Donald Trump screwed over came back for revenge and said "I'm taking Donald Junior," Donald would think, "What a loser. What a sucker. How does that affect me?" and just let him go.

Yeah, @moofable suggested it was because it was from a period before we rendered dinosaurs with feathers.

https://twitter.com/datban/status/1352446388236210177

Just to jump back to this tweet: the Burton Batman movies are full of great actors who took the bad movie very seriously and are better for it. The Schumacher ones are more self-aware, which creates a different effect.

https://twitter.com/lamguin/status/1352446483434504196

And again I don't think that the Schumacher ones are actually that much worse compared to the Burton ones. I just think they hit the wrong age for nostalgia for a lot of the now-adult audience.

I had just turned 9 when Burton's Batman came out. It was the darkest, most "adult" film I had seen at that point. Honestly might have been the first PG-13 movie I saw in a theater.

I was 17 when Batman & Robin came out. Much less easily impressed.