“I’m in quiet revolt”: The awful 2023 movie that made Tim Burton despair for cinema
In 1989, Tim Burton was handed the unenviable task of directing the first major Batman movie in over 20 years.
With Michael Keaton in the batsuit, Jack Nicholson as the Joker, and Prince on soundtrack duties, the film defied all doubters and, for a while, was the sixth-highest grossing movie of all time that relaunched the ‘Caped Crusader’ into public imagination.
Following this, Burton helmed a sequel, Batman Returns, three years later, before handing over the reins to Joel Schumacher for Batman Forever, and you know how that went. He might have had his fill of Batman, but the master of macabre certainly wasn’t done with DC superheroes and was soon attached to direct a movie called Superman Lives, which had its origins in a script written by Kevin Smith.
The ‘Man of Steel’ had lain dormant since 1987’s disastrous The Quest for Peace, and given that he already had experience resurrecting superhero franchises, Burton was seen as the perfect man for the job. However, for a long and complicated list of reasons, the film never got off the ground.
A number of famous faces were considered to play Clark Kent, but the one who got the closest was Nicolas Cage. A huge fan of the character to the point where he named one of his children Kal-El, Cage was an obvious pick to slip into the famous blue and red tights. Alas, when Superman Lives was kaiboshed, the actor’s dream faded away. However, many years later, he was finally given the chance to live out his fantasy…sort of.
Towards the end of the 2023 film The Flash, which was part of the DC Extended Universe debacle, Ezra Miller’s title character enters a multiverse where he sees glimpses of various versions of DC’s pantheon. Alongside Adam West’s Batman and Helen Slater’s Supergirl, we spot a version of Superman fighting a giant spider. The hero turns to the camera to reveal a horribly CGI-ed Nic Cage, a nod to the movie we could have seen all those years ago.
This scene and the use of CGI-ed actors in general caused controversy among viewers. In an interview with the British Film Institute, Burton denounced the cameo. He claimed that it was too close to AI (even though Cage was directly involved in filming the scene) and used it as a stick with which to beat the Hollywood machine.
“This is why I think I’m over it with the studio,” he stated, “They can take what you did, Batman or whatever, and culturally misappropriate it, or whatever you want to call it. Even though you’re a slave of Disney or Warner Brothers, they can do whatever they want. So in my latter years of life, I’m in quiet revolt against all this.”
The use of CGI to recreate younger versions of actors, especially those who have since passed on, remains incredibly divisive. It’s great to hear prominent voices like Burton standing up against the prevailing use of technology in the industry. It also probably helped that The Flash was a complete dog turd.
